What Speaks in You? A Gestalt Inquiry into Shadow and Sacred Practice

What if the harshest voice inside you was never entirely yours to begin with? Where does inherited judgement live in the body? Once shadow material surfaces, how do we metabolize it, so that the work becomes transformation rather than only exposure?
​Most of us know the inner voice that second-guesses, criticizes, and holds us back from fully inhabiting ourselves. That voice has a somatic signature: patterns of tension, contraction, and self-protection that live in the body, not only in thought. It also has an origin. Much of what we carry as self-judgment was swallowed whole from somewhere else: a parent, a person, an institution, a culture that colonized the mind, a wound passed down a lineage, traumatic events. The voice that says "not good enough," "not one of us," "broken by definition" often belongs to someone, or something, we never chose.
​This participatory, multi-modal evening moves in two arcs. First we surface. Through grounding movement, conscious breath, and paired gestalt practice, including empty-chair work that can give voice to whatever speaks in you (a part of yourself, a person in your life, a system that shaped you, or an ancestor), we cultivate contact with what is alive in the body and awareness of where our conditioning speaks. Then we metabolize. Surfacing shadow material without a way to digest it leaves us merely opened, so we close by drawing on the world's contemplative traditions--contemplative sitting, mantra and devotional practice, ancestral offering--so each participant leaves with a living practice to carry the work forward.
​This is the path of the wounded healer: not the deletion of the wound, but its transmutation. The work is held with care, consent, and the option to step back at any point.
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Facilitated by Lars Kallman and Nelson González, founder of The Crossings Collective.

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​About The Crossings Collective
​The Crossings Collective is a not-for-profit committed to creating islands of coherent belonging, translating the ancient wisdom of world spiritual traditions into practices that are accessible, relevant, and trauma-informed for communities on the margins.
​We focus on:

• ​Supporting Wounded Healers: practitioners metabolizing their own suffering into the capacity to serve others, through sustained engagement with wisdom lineage practices
• ​Developing "Healing Journey Cartographers": senior practitioners able to sequence, titrate, and integrate contemplative practices in a trauma-informed way
• ​Curating Initiatory Experiences: land-based ceremonies with Two Spirit and Indigenous elders, held with rigor and respect

​Current offerings include:

• ​Bi-weekly workshops on specific spiritual practices (Heart Lab, San Francisco, every other Wednesday)
• ​A four-month community of care for those developing a personal vow or rule of life as a wounded healer path
• ​Initiation experiences: medicine wheel sweat lodges, supervised solo wilderness vision quests, and guided integration (Carmel Valley and Olema, Fall 2026)
• ​Sacred land pilgrimages to Tassajara, Green Gulch, Olema, Big Sur, Point Reyes, New Mexico, and Colombia