What is the potential significance of community in a prolonged dieta (10‐day restricted diet with regular ritual consumption of ayahuasca and other medicinal plants) in a remote jungle location in the Amazon basin of Peru? Pre‐dieta experiences including how participants join the community, cleansing routines prior to departure to Peru, sharing with the shaman one's personal intentions and health history, and prior experience with medicinal and entheogenic plants are introduced. Dieta rituals such as tambo housing, meals, hygiene and maintenance, music, ceremony preparations, ceremonial and everyday dieta etiquette, and post‐ceremony ritual and day of rest are considered. Bonding with the local support community and those who harvested and crafted the medicinal plant mixtures are evaluated in the context of both dieta and traditional indigenous goals of creating a spiritual practice community of love and trust that embraces people, plants, and all of earth and beyond.

Plato spoke of geometry as an extremely rare natural gift of consciousness, but also as a mode of perception accessible to anyone initiated into the tradition by a master. Such teachers were the shamans of his day, and it was these individuals who convened the mystery schools and sponsored initiations into the esoteric philosophies of geomancy that have grown from their vision. Though the history of women in ancient mystery traditions is largely lost to us, Greek mythology holds that our human capacity for geometric vision is a gift of the divine feminine—energetic sources of wisdom conceptualized as a lineage of goddesses. Born from primal Chaos is Gaia, from whose name comes "geometry"—geo (earth) + metr (measure, mother). She gives birth to Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory, from whose name comes "mnemonic." The daughters of Mnemosyne are the Muses—the arts and sciences. Memory is the legacy of the sacred Earth, and the arts enable humans to actively remember. The essence of this divine feminine lineage is sustainability of sacred place (Chora) through enduring values of order, proportion, a universal aesthetic, and connectivity. In this essay, I explore the ways in which I learned to embrace myself as a physical and spiritual geomantic consciousness and how I have used geometric vision as an interdisciplinary teaching and learning process.

Interbeing is a foundational teaching of Thiền Sư (Zen master) Thích Nhất Hạnh, beloved Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist who has worked closely with Chân Không, an expatriate Vietnamese Buddhist nun. Together they founded Plum Village retreat center in the Dordogne region of France. This volume of invited essays – taken as a whole – reveals the inspirational power of the word interbeing as a focus for creating common ground within scholarship for voices not so often heard. Metaphorically, this phenomenology is what Nhất Hạnh might call a “hugging meditation.”

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