The Story of the Emerging Earth Residency 2025

Galactic archives Akashic division / Planet: Gaia /chapter: the emerging earth.

The Light Forest Emerging Earth Residency brought together 12 changemakers for a 3-day residency and workshop for inner transformation, creative emergence, and systems co-design for Planetary Health.

Planetary health is an emerging field at the nexus of health and ecology, examining relationships between self, community, and planet. The practice focuses on systems change to regenerate communities and ecosystems worldwide.

In addressing the challenge of climate crisis, this residency experimented with spiritual-based policymaking. The methodology of this retreat combined spiritual attention to our bodies and minds, and environment (inner work) with facilitated dialogue on planetary challenges and co-creation (outer work), creating space for inner connection, cohort connection, and ecological connection. The intention for this approach is to bring in wisdom on contemporary challenges around climate and health, and raise awareness among the cohort.

The residency was organized at Nomad Turtle/Kad Sala co-living space in San Pa Tong, Chiang Mai by Light Forest, featuring podcast guests, Geordan Shannon and Ora-orn as facilitators, along with other and cosmolocal Chiang Mai and Planet.Health movement collaborators to co-create this journey. The workshop was funded through a small grant from The Policy and Governance Innovation for Multi-Crises, School of Public Policy, CMU Research Funding; Cosmo-Local Chiang Mai/digi-cnx, the School of Public Policy (SPP) at CMU, and participation fees. This report is co-authored by Dev Lewis & Geordan Shannon.

What follows is documentation of what emerged, woven into speculative narrative.
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Galactic archives Akashic division / Planet: Gaia /chapter: the emerging earth

For a few hundred years, human beings forgot their origins.

They became afflicted by extreme individualism—cultures of competition, ambition, and grandiosity fueled by fragmentation and fear, setting their civilization on a course of natural disasters and violence.

During this time their intellect grew powerful. They developed science and technology that treated the planet’s resources as infinite to satisfy infinite desires. Abstract money became their primary energy source,overlooking true sources. They invented artificial intelligence exponentially more powerful than their own, out of both awe and fear. Considering themselves the most advanced civilization, they could not recognize intelligence beyond their own ways.

In feeding the intellect, they severed other sources of knowing—care, love, intuition—that could not be measured by their instruments. They forgot. Cultures that still remembered these relationships, stories, practices, and rituals were marginalized. They called themselves human beings but behaved as human-doers.

The health of their planet declined. Ecological disasters grew in frequency—what their scientists termed “climate change.” Humans themselves grew sicker, biodiversity of both food and species declined. Relying purely on intellect, their imagination was limited, from logic and fear rather than love. Lost and confused, their efforts to fix problems created new ones.They set Sustainable Development Goals, temperature targets, and spent trillions of their money attempting solutions yet they rarely met them and new problems arose. One professional after decades working within Gaia’s global governing body observed that “99% of human energy on climate change was misplaced, with almost zero energy directed toward the ultimate solution: remembering true nature”.

Some humans deep within these systems began to recognize this. They saw they needed a fundamentally different approach. Their minds had brought them this far, but they needed to open to a deeper energy within themselves. They recognized a new Light making its way to the planet. They began to gather differently than they were accustomed to, slowly dropping the impulse to solve and fix, and setting the intention to remember.

What follows is reconstructed from recovered fragments, participant accounts, and recorded audio preserved in the Light Forest archives. Certain details remain uncertain.

Emerging Earth: chapter 1 Chiang mai

For many decades, public health systems failed to account for the health of the Earth. Doctors and health practitioners forgot the holistic approaches to health, to see people as part of rather than apart from the environment.

Members of the Planetary Health movement, which arose in response among people who practise medicine and public health and global health,attended the Emerging Earth gathering, alongside peace educators, healers, policy innovators, systempreneurs, tech builders, and energy experts.

Planetary Health arose out of a need to illustrate the relationality of health between people, community, and the earth. Chiang Mai, ravaged by forest fires and air pollution for many years, but still holding deep ties to indigenous knowledge, proved a fertile ground for this movement. The movement helped humans understand climate outcomes as feedback loops: human impact on the planet creates conditions that impact human health and well-being.

For example, the annual PM 2.5 crisis is commonly attributed to farmers burning fields to prepare soil. This analysis overlooks complexity and deeper roots. Farmers’ choices were shaped by modern food systems and agricultural economies that degraded soil and left farmers unable to farm regeneratively. The smog represents a feedback loop for the broken systems and human behaviour. True solutions lie deeper than policy alone can address. These humans brought into visibility care – a core energy that sustains all life– but was invisibilised by mainstream systems. Without that mesh work, no one can be healthy in isolation.

To begin the gathering, the group was welcomed and grounded by a local young elder, someone wise beyond their years and connected to their community. They wandered their space to explore and find around them objects that represent their relationships to self, community, and planet. This, they reported, would encourage everyone to reflect on how they understood relationality to the self, place and planet.

In sharing their stories, many linkages and patterns emerged:

Humility Through Scale: The vastness outside (geological time, infinite space, microscopic worlds) mirrors and creates humility inside. The planetary relationship teaches the self about its scale—simultaneously tiny and containing infinity.

The impulse to control: Removing weeds, seeing lizards as pests to be rid off, mirrors the human impulse to control the planet. The inner work of recognizing “my ambition” as potentially violent to living in relationship with the earth and reflecting on the desire to control.

Cleaning and reducing: The broom as a tool that represents cleaning. Cleaning our physical spaces as an act of care for ourselves and for the people around us. Inner cleaning (sweeping unhelpful stories about who are are) allows us to radiate more light for the community and the planet.

Planetary Health as musical harmony: We each vibrate at our own frequency (self), find resonance with others (community), and participate in planetary symphony. Recognizing we’re part of larger orchestration,changing our own vibration and frequency is the starting point.

Relationship with the planet involves asking permission. The practice of asking permission externally (from the land, from other species) trains internal awareness of this relationship we share with the non-human world. Asking permission requires us to slow down, walk consciously, questioning the reflex to remove and change and fulfil our own ambitions.

The self is formed through early relationship with a more-than-human world. These weren’t abstract nature—they were companions (moon), and flower seeds.

Things/beings can be broken and still beautiful, useful, worthy. Accepting brokenness as part of wholeness, like the yin-yang symbol with darkness in light and light in darkness.

A Circle of Light Emerges

A circle of Light opened up in the center of this group and spoke to them. The Light invited them to hand over unwanted thought patterns, emotions, and fears. To shed the weight on their shoulders they had carried for so long, even if just for the few days of the residency.

One by one they opened to the circle, sharing core wounds and vulnerabilities. They discovered the fears, emotions, and pain they all carried.

The doing-being Paradox, the compulsion to produce and achieve, coupled with anxiety when not doing. The productivity trap where the brain seeks satisfaction through doing but can’t stop creating fatigue from non-stop doing. Fear of Failure from facilitating this gathering. Desire of Control & fear of Uncertainty of not being able to manage outcomes, and living in transition.

There were energies of chronic sadness & hopelessness. Anger from past rejections, towards global inequality, and non-genuine intentions and ego-driven participation in social change work. Physical ailments such as tiredness and fatigue, poor sleep, high blood sugar, physical symptoms of stress, sickness in the body. The weight of desire to hold on to good feelings, and PTSD triggers.

Slowly they brought these to light and released them in the Light.

Setting Powerful Intentions

After dutifully taking in all the baggage and harmonising them the circle spoke to the group again and this time it asked:

What is it that you want to feel and experience on this journey? What is your deepest desire? State your intentions clearly.

So they paused and reflected. They took the time to ask their deepest parts.

Governance protocols for the group:

In honor of these intentions the group collectively decided on a protocol that they felt aligned with the intentions they made.

Stillness & Nature Connection

The next day, a Full Moon Night, the end of Phansa, a 3-month long retreat period for Thai Buddhist monks, the group ventured to a nearby temple Wat Nam Bo Luang and Vipassana Center – a practise passed on from ancients of this planet to help humans can remember their true nature.

Unlike traditional gatherings designed to feed their minds with more ideas they did the opposite. Without an agenda requiring them to engage in deep dialogue.

They were welcomed by the energy of stillness at this temple originally setup by a father and his sons over 300 years ago. With guidance from monks and nuns, they sat with their minds and slowed down.

Walking through the community forest with the abbot, the togetherness in silence.

They felt all the elements including the heat that grew in the afternoon, and the rain that greeted them, bringing relief. Without retreat into airconditioned spaces or their phones, they had the rare moment to be and face all that was coming up for them.

Invisible shifts began to take place creating the conditions for emergence.

Emergence

Nature Wisdom Council

People everywhere are searching, asking: what is the new mythology to be, the mythology of the unified earth as one harmonious being — Joseph Campbell

The next morning this group woke to find themselves transformed into non-human beings. Outside their door they found an invitation to the Nature Wisdom Council.

Archivists note: This practice originated as an innovation by a Thai professor present at this gathering—a wisdom portal between policymakers and non-human beings.

The Nature Wisdom Council requested them to attend and provide wisdom and share ideas for the Light Forest Emerging Earth residency project.

The date records of this gathering are unclear. According to some archives, it may have taken place in the mid-twentieth century or in 2025. Temporal scholars suggest both may be correct.

The following is a brief record of the council proceedings, which opened with each being invited to share their perspective on planetary health and human society.

Unbeknownst to the council there was a human amidst listening to them all. This human stumbled into this room by accident and was so startled that he felt the urge to say something.

“I‘m in shock. I didn’t know that you all could speak. I didn’t know that I could listen. I thought that only happened in Disney movies…

I hear all of you, and what’s so bizarre is that I feel the same. I feel sad and angry, disconnected, and unheard.

I feel like I’m looking for attention everywhere, but I don’t get it. And I’m sick too. I’m so sick, no one even knows what’s wrong with me. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I see now that perhaps your sickness and my sickness is not so different”

The Council chair, Fire, called on the Council members to give some words of encouragement to the humans on this earth, to share short words of wisdom that our human friends could take away with.

The Wisdom Offered

Hearing this outpouring of support and gratitude the human felt different. More awake and alive than ever before. Sadness and joy in equal parts. This human for the first time felt whole and complete. Reunited with family after a lifetime as an orphan, searching for belonging, for connection, and never truly finding it.

A miracle had taken place. The human realised that he had been searching in the wrong place the whole time.

All my brothers and sisters must know this, he thought. But human also knew his kind very well. Who would believe him if he relayed this story. If he went to the government’s environmental agencies he would be laughed away. If he went to economists to talk about the need to redesign the economic systems to value the invisible care of a tree or a snail he would fall on deaf ears. Even if some people believed him, he knew what might happen. He would be made into a mascot. The poster child for speaking to non-humans. Who knows that that power would do to him.

He paused.

Something in him felt a deep knowing and clarity about this experience that was beyond anything he had felt before.

This is what everyone needs to experience for themselves. Everyone on earth had to awaken to this relationship and feel the richness, the wholeness.

He paused, again.

Allowing the emotions and thoughts that were swirling around him to slowly fade. Then he opened his eyes and made his request to the Nature Wisdom Council:

“I know you all do so much, but I have one more request to each and every one of you.

“Can you speak so loudly that humans have no other choice but to hear you? Whether you’re a dog or the air or the water, the fire or the lizard—speak and speak louder.

“It doesn’t matter if my kind thinks that you’re being violent. It doesn’t matter if my kind thinks that you’re actually harmful or that you’re actually out of control.

“I think that’s the only way, because we’ve forgotten how to listen.

“So speak and speak, and I will do my best to tell other humans that the only thing we need to do is listen to what you’re saying.

“If you can do that one thing for us in whatever way you can think, one day there will be a generation of my kind who will appreciate and understand and listen.”

The Council noted this request and that it would be honoured. All beings of this earth would do what they can to make themselves heard. Some beings warned that the human may one day regret this request but they would comply.

To close the meeting with a metta meditation of love and kindness.

May all beings be safe.
May we be happy.
May we be healthy.
May we feel peace.
May our hearts be filled with love and kindness

Messages from Earth & Ancestors/2075

“What we cannot imagine, cannot come into being”- Bell Hooks

Following the Nature Wisdom Council they returned back in their human bodies yet they still remembered the experience and what they witnessed.

A meditative Hyperstition time-portal was opened. They were guided on an imagination journey fifty years forward, to 2075, to receive messages from ancestors, loved ones, and future beings important for planetary health.

Archivists note: The date of this journey is recorded as both 2075 and 2025. Temporal scholars remain divided on whether this represents measurement error or early human awareness of time’s non-linearity.

What they witnessed

Circular economies where nothing was wasted. “We didn’t need to create anything new—we reused everything we had,” one vision showed. “Everything was powered by renewable energy. Clean air and lush gardens. No more PM 2.5 choking Chiang Mai each spring

Societies with heightened awareness. “People knew about each other but had little physical contact because they had such deep inner contact. There was so much awareness. Almost everyone was an ancestor—we were all related and no one was related.”

Messages from their ancestors

The Imagi-verse: A Meta discussion on Imagination

Everything is Imagined

“Everything on this planet, every system, is man made. It came from imagination. Therefore we have the ability to imagine something different. Even “nature” as separate category. All imagined first. Then made real through collective agreement.

Present vs Future

In Buddhism, there’s only the present. No future, no past. It’s just the present, because it’s always the present”

“[The imagined future] could be your compass, but you never get there, it is already here.” “Whatever we imagine today—the circular economy, more protecting biodiversity—it’s absolutely possible and it will only happen now.” The work isn’t reaching some distant goal. The work is choosing, moment by moment, which reality to actualize through where we place attention.

An epistemological perspective

Our schooling system trained us to use logic as the primary way of knowing—but thats incomplete rationality. The whole human has other ways of knowing: senses, emotion, intuition, memory, faith. Imagination can be seen as another way of knowing that also creates reality.

To imagine differently, we must show up differently—Bring yourself, your true self, your whole self, your real self, your unfragmented self—mind, heart and action aligned—to that process of imagining. I

Imagination in the digital age

“A lot of us are programmed to think about the future in a negative way. In this world, an age where the media is leading our imagination and is more pessimistic and negative than positive.

Journalism today largely follows ‘war journalism’ conventions. Social media amplifies this. It’s because we are driven by our psychology of fear, which served our species well for survival.

But now, with our prefrontal cortex, it’s our responsibility to reimagine information-sharing: connecting rather than dividing, reducing violence and disharmony, fostering hope.” In this age where media is leading our imagination, we have to choose moment by moment: Where do we place attention? What information do we let in? Which futures do we feed with our focus?

The Wisdom of the Body

In Chinese, imagination (想象) emphasizes thinking about images—visual, cognitive. One way to overcome our mental limitations is to tune into the body which knows what the mind cannot yet articulate.

A Cherokee wisdom was shared: listen to your body when, if you don’t listen, when your body whispers, you will hear it scream.”\

Final Insight

Yes, we’re talking about the emerging Earth. But the most important thing is the emerging self. When you emerge, you notice everything else emerging.”

The work is consciousness, not more doing.
We have material abundance;
We need spiritual and imaginative abundance.

End Note

We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For (Hopi Elders)

On the final morning, they gathered one last time.

Just like the human at the Nature Wisdom Council hoped, they too heard. They felt different. There was no manifesto or concrete policy recommendations or solutions to fix the world.

There was a remembrance that they all felt collectively together. This group of doers felt lighter, like beings, they saw everything with more Light. This happened not through a solo journey but through collective emergence. Slowing down and opening up to themselves and each other.

A poem We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” from Hopi Elders