moonpath
Erica Lenore Rhinehart
I was properly positioned to receive my original instructions through the name I was given at birth.
Erica - Wild Heathen Flower; Eternal Leader
Lenore (Mother Line) - Beacon of Light
Rhinehart (Father Line) - Brave Counselor with a Flowing Heart
I am un-educator and a guide. I practice unschooling people from their conventional educations, particularly from their societal programing and conventional schooling within the modern Westernized frameworks of education and social training. I help people unravel capitalistic, colonized, reductionist ways of thinking that create separation within the self, within human relationships, and within the web of ecosystems. Simultaneously, I guide people into their natural abilities to read the world, to be in intimate relationship with their environment, and to learn from their direct experience and participation with the natural world. It is through direct connection and participation with the natural world and its cycles that a person is able to grasp their wholeness, true place, unique gifts, and particular function within the web of life.
I help people learn how to follow their innate curiosity and intuition as I guide them to reconnect with a wide variety of ways of knowing that don't neglect, yet reach far beyond, our overly emphasized cognitive, rational thinking. I nurture ways of knowing that include somatic intelligence, attunement to the senses, emotional intelligence, imagination, heart-centered connection, cross-species communication, mythic perception, ancestral wisdom, participatory consciousness, and the subtle perceptions of energy, multi-dimensionality, and non-physical or spiritual perception. Through these ways of knowing, my students gain access to their innate artistry and unique gifts that cannot be defined by a job, social position, or societal role.
As a certified, licensed educator, I have found conventional education, and the environments that facilitate that education, to be intolerable to my body and detrimental to my true gifts. My experiences within the conventional education system have frequently caused my body and soul go into contraction, resistance, and revolt. This is a trauma response—conventional education is traumatic to the soul, especially for those who diverge significantly, either in ability or disability, from what has been considered the “norm” within education and society. It has taken a lot of humility, courage, loss, failure, and heartbreak to let go of the false safety of conventional systems and uncover a path that has been hidden from my lineage for many centuries. It has also required me to learn to tolerate being profoundly lost for long periods of time. Yet, through losing my bearings again and again and disintegrating through multiple existential crises, I have found my way back to the animate, living world that my ancestors once knew. I am leading my ancestral lineages home as I continue to find ways to express the gifted abilities that have been encoded in and passed down through my bloodlines.
I have spent the past two decades learning directly from the master teachers of the natural world through sustained kilo, or fully attuned observation and conversation. These masters include the moon, the waters, the earth, the womb, stars, owls, whales, dolphins, spiders, plants, flowers, ecosystems and elements. I have also received direct instruction and guidance from my ancestors through dreams, which I have followed deep into the unknown. Unfortunately in today’s modern world, there are few ways of recognizing the depth of wisdom that can be gained from immersing in direct conversations with the living world and the dreamtime. The true testimony of my expertise is to be experienced through the genuine, heart and soul-centered expressions that are offered through my voice, my empathic guidance, and the spaces that I cultivate through my embodied presence and complex perceptions.
In addition to learning directly from the natural world, I have become a skilled underworld and soul initiation guide through an intimate 15-year initiation and apprenticeship with Bill Plotkin and the guides of Animas Valley Institute, which includes working as a guide for Animas Valley Institute beginning in 2019. I have been immersed in Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects since 2010. I have learned from and facilitated plant-medicine ceremonies since 2010. I have learned from practitioners of Hawaiian Esoteric Wisdom, as well as traditional Hawaiian Moon Wisdom. These teachers include Hi’ilani Shibata, Ke’oni Hanalei, and Kumu Ehulani Stephany. I have become a "Pillar of Light" and opened my abilities as a channel of higher, non-dual sources of consciousness with the support of healer and channel Asil Toksal. I have access to and channel the wisdom of a group of Thirteen Grandmothers who are the wisdom keepers of an ancient, moon-centric civilization and who have ties and origins in the ancient civilization of Mū. I have immersed in over two decades of self-directed and conventional study of poetry, including the Early-Romantics (Blake and Wordsworth), Transcendentalists, Beats, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Butler Yeats, William Stafford, Adrianne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Mary Oliver. Poetry, music, and mythology have been instrumental in my own unlearning process.
From a more conventional standpoint, I received my undergraduate degree from CU-Boulder in English Literature and Creative Writing. I have my Colorado Secondary English Teacher’s Certification and License from Metropolitan State University of Denver, and have a Natural Chef Certification from the Nutrition Therapy Institute of Denver.
Yet there is no degree, certification, or particular title for what I do.
I am first and foremost a poet and daughter of the earth. I base my life upon the rhythms and cycles of my womb, the moon, and the earth. I am also a dream worker, planetary grief-tender, weeper, ceremonialist, wilderness rites and soul initiation guide, spiritual councilor, moon prophetess, channel, singer, abortion doula, teacher, and medicinal foods chef.
