The 9 Ways Around the Well: A Practice Toward Wholeness

wellworkrituals
Mar 17
4 min read

This winter has been a quietly productive season for me.

I would like to share a little of what has been growing in the deeper soil of these months, and how the practices of the Well continue to nourish my daily life. From the Field

A few days ago I returned from NASC, where I was invited to offer an introduction to WellWork: Rituals on the Wheel of Life. It was a joy to share this work with a group of experienced constellation practitioners. I only wished we had more time together to explore and play.

These kinds of immersions strengthen our connection to the knowing field and to the larger community that holds and evolves this work together.

Through my involvement with ACT and the Global Alchemy community, I have been part of the international Seeing With Your Heart network, a field that has been deeply supportive and expanding for me. I am honored to now join the SWYH faculty as a Heart Tender.

If you feel curious about this movement of alchemy toward love and the global community that is forming around it, I warmly invite you to reach out and explore it with me.

The upcoming Alchemical Constellations Training & Facilitator Certification (ACT) now welcomes participants from around the world, offering the option to join online, in person, or through a hybrid format.

Together we explore psychic perception, oral transmission, collective healing, and energetic skills that help transform the imprints of war, trauma, displacement, and the inherited patterns that keep us from our natural generosity, joy, love, and peace.

In WellWork Rituals we gather around the Wheel of the Four Directions, which forms the center of the Well. This wheel carries multidimensional teachings and reminds us to tend equally to the four aspects of our being: the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies. When these dimensions are honored together, we move closer to a life lived in wholeness.

Over the winter I have been preparing to share this work more fully. I am happy to say that I am now ready to begin offering the next step:

The 9 Ways Around the Well: A Practice Toward Wholeness

In the Nine Ways Around the Well we explore nine simple yet profound pathways that help us return to our inner source of wisdom.

We begin with Intention, Meditation, and Invocation, arriving in stillness and listening for the quiet guidance of the heart. From there we enter the living intelligence of the Body, our miracle temple, and through Movement we allow the energy and information held within us to begin flowing again.Through the rhythm of Breath we reconnect to the greater whole, and through Sound and Song we remember that we are vibrational beings whose voices carry truth. We then explore Story, speaking and writing our lives as living myth, and Expression through art, dream, and vision as the Well reveals its symbols. Ritual helps integrate these experiences into the body and soul. Finally we arrive at Living in Ceremony, Walking in Beauty, where daily life itself becomes a sacred practice.

As we walk these ways, we remember in our own way:

Each of us is an Oracle.

If something in you is curious about walking these ways, I would love to hear what is calling you.

Ways to Explore the Nine Ways

In the coming months I will be offering several ways to engage with this work.

The Nine Ways can be explored as:

• A nine-week circle • A weekend immersion • One-to-one guidance • Small group practice

A commitment to the journey allows the practice to deepen and unfold toward wholeness.

I am also preparing an online teaching version that will live on the WellWork website. This will include a series called How I Use the Well: My Dialogue with the Universe.

In time the work may also be offered as a nine-day retreat, a seasonal journey, or a personal daily practice.

The Origins of the Nine Ways

My love for circles, dragons, and the mysterious intelligence of the number nine began early in my life. I like to believe it was awakened by a teacher named Monsieur Dubois, who first opened this symbolic world to me.

The number nine has accompanied me ever since. It is my birth number, a quiet signature of arrival and becoming. The deeper embodied understanding of nine came later.

In 1995, I was introduced to the teachings of Rosalyn Bruyere. Through her guidance many of us encountered teachers of the Tibetan Bon tradition, one of the most ancient spiritual lineages of the Himalayas. Their cosmology includes the Nine Ways of Bon, a profound map of perception, practice, and relationship with life.

When I encountered these teachings something in me remembered. The tradition felt deeply familiar, as if a thread had been picked up again.

The structure of nine revealed itself as a circle, a complete form moving around a center. Within this circle we can shift perspective. We can turn and look again. Each movement reveals another way of perceiving the world.

I sometimes imagine this as circling the Dragon. Each pass around the circle reveals something new and restores imagination and balance.

For me, creativity is the ability to discover solutions. Life itself tends toward solutions when we remain curious, open, and responsive.

Over many years these teachings wove themselves naturally into my work, my art, and the way I live. They appeared in workshops, conversations, and circles of practice.

Eventually they took the form I now call The 9 Ways Around the Well, a contemplative practice toward wholeness.

It is a simple and living format. A way of returning again and again to the center of our own inner Well.

When these practices enter daily life, something beautiful happens.

Creativity awakens. Life force strengthens. Our love for life deepens.

This is the path I have been walking. And it is a joy to share it.

The Nine Ways Around the Well will form the inner curriculum of the Creative Warriors Collective, while the outer work of the collective helps bring these practices into the world.