Dear Friends,

I have exciting news:

Join us live on ZOOM at The Stoa on Monday, June 9 at 12pm EDT for a 90-minute experience/process/practice as we work with the incredible AI films of Ari Kuschnir and the facilitation and embodiment prowess of Peter and Schuyler to create a container for the collective transmutation of culture.

Here’s a brief description of the event:

Join us at The Stoa for AI Embodiment, an experimental session weaving the digital and the somatic. We'll begin by watching one of Ari Kuschnir's (creator of the viral videos: “Trump Ayahuasca,” “Love Force One” and “We Can Talk!) AI-generated videos—a surreal, boundary-blurring meditation on technology and imagination—followed by an embodiment session led by Schuyler Brown, designed to help us metabolize the experience not just intellectually, but through the body. What insights emerge when we engage AI not just with our minds, but through our full embodied presence? Come curious, and explore new ways of sensing, feeling, and understanding.

You can see all upcoming Stoa events here or simply register for our AI Embodiment event by following the link here:

Register here

Let’s do this, people. Let’s engage with this technology and use it to create worlds of wisdom, to steal the culture, to connect more deeply with the world our hearts’ desire. Let’s unite to hold space for ALL THE FEELINGS. Let’s create a container of unconditional love and open-hearted curiosity and deep self-reflection and honesty as we grapple with this new tool and all it can do.

Ari Kuschnir and The Transmutation Series

Ari’s movies, if you haven’t seen them, are mini AI-generated worlds rich for exploration. You can view the series here on his IG page or here on X.

I’ve watched him or helped him make many of these (not as a technologist, but in the role of alchemist, feminine wisdom keeper, and writer). So, I’ve had a front row seat to his pioneering work in this new medium. What I’ve witnessed is the emergence of an artist made for these times. Ari has been a film editor and tech early adopter for 20 years. He built and ran a successful production company called M ss ng P eces. He’s also a painter and visionary artist. All of these skills came together in the earliest days of AI as he applied himself without fear or hesitation to the task of getting to know what it made possible. His open-mindedness, coupled with his practical skills, applied with spiritual discernment and wisdom led him eventually to create The Transmutation Series.

It all started with an inspiration he received to use AI to answer the question many were holding: What would happen if Trump did ayahuasca? This is what happened:

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A post shared by @alexander_beiner

The transformation of Trump was so—frankly—delightful and so inspiring to so many people he felt called to work on other bad actors: Elon Musk, Nicolás Maduro, Sam Altman, Netanyahu…I watched with glee as Ari, with some help from our dear friend and collaborator, David Sauvage, made art pieces to heal and transmute of some of the most powerful and unhealed men on the planet.

(For another time, let’s talk about the critical role good and decent men have right now in actively stopping and transmuting the worst parts of toxic masculinity and patriarchy.)

After that, the floodgates opened. Ari has been inspired to create weekly resulting in a mini buddy film where Trump and Biden take a road trip across America; a farewell to Biden as the Amazon jungle devours him into oneness; epic atmospheric depictions of different spiritual inflection points in the culture like Esalen in the 1970s and Gurdjieff’s commune in the 1920s. He also saw that the immediacy of the AI medium made it possible to counterbalance disturbing news and current events. He started reinterpreting fraught moments in the culture—the fight in the oval office between Trump and Zelenskyy; Trump’s strange request to be considered for Pope; and my favorite recent trip: LOVE FORCE ONE—the real use of the Saudi gift of a luxury airliner to Trump. If you haven’t seen this one…

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A post shared by @arikuschnir

There are others that involve alien abductions, meetings with mysterious shamans in McDonalds at midnight, the real Santa Claus mourning commercial culture, an alien taking the stage at TED…The joy and imagination Ari brings to this process masks how courageous it is. At a time when fear-mongering, domination, obfuscation and threats are commonly used by our government and those in positions of power, these films remind us that we always have creative freedom. We get to imagine a better world. They restore our collective capacity to dream—to BELIEVE healing is possible, we do have help, LOVE will win the day. As so many viewers have pointed out in the comments these little movies receive, they seem to depict or even activate an actual alternate timeline or possible future; giving a lot of people hope. Something we could all use more of right now.

These little movies have now been seen by millions of people around the world. His recent video, “We Can Talk!”, which was released on May 20, showcased the new voice feature on Google’s VEO. It came out the day the technology was released and rapidly went viral around the world, including being featured on the BBC. People couldn’t believe it was made with AI…and in just a few hours.

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A post shared by @arikuschnir

This one in particular hit a nerve in the culture. Unlike the others, which have mainly been received with thanks and grace, this one touched fear—the “Oh, fuck, we’re already at this point???” trigger; the “Oh shit, we’re all going to be out of jobs!!” trigger; the “Holy shit, how will we ever know what’s real??” trigger…Maybe most poignantly, it hit the fear and uncertainty in the collective question that AI keeps pointing us to: If the technology can do all of this now, what are WE HUMANS for?

What’s kept Ari going has been the way these videos have confirmed for him—and for me, too—that there is a critical mass of people out there who are ready to heal, evolve, and imagine a better future. And AI can be a useful tool for doing that.

There’s a critical mass of people who have done enough of their own healing to recognize that the people in power are suffering, too. They may be wounded, they may be possessed, or both. What if—instead of hating and condemning them, ignoring them or ridiculing them—we held them with unconditional love and gave them what they need? What if we acted like the adults in the room and recognized the hurt children they are? What if we created a net of loving possibility for them to surrender into—allowing them to just STOP and RELEASE their grips on the reigns of power? If you read the comments on these videos you will feel a renewed faith in humanity. You will see more love and support and hope pouring through the internet than you likely have in a while.

It’s this outpouring of support and engagement this event is designed to hold and nurture.

What Do We Mean By “AI Embodiment”?

Back in the dark ages of 2022, an online community/gathering space/school called The Stoa was in full swing. Peter Limberg, it’s founder and steward, was one the earliest supporters of my work around embodiment. I did several sessions on embodiment in the early days of The Stoa and sometimes functioned as a kind of embodiment witch-in-residence there, leading aspects of special rituals and contributing my body wisdom to different events.

In case the term is new to you, I can simply say today that embodiment (for me) is mainly about three things:

1. Healing the artificial mind/body split by bringing LOVE and intuition (heart) back to the center of human relating because it’s been supplanted for too long by mentation and reason (HEAD)

2. Reactivating the full body capacity for sensing and perceiving of our environment and each other—seen and unseen cues, subtle sensing—that modernity stole

3. Cultivating the capacity for simultaneous inner and outer awareness so we can fully participate in and inform our relationships and culture consciously (we are already doing it anyway unconsciously). So that, we can integrate and evolve through the wisdom/teachings of the relational field.

If you want to read more of my writing on embodiment, there is a nice oldie but goodie of an essay here.

In March of 2022, Peter and I came up with the idea to host a regular event called Embodiment Hour. Once a week, we hosted an online gathering to process a piece of news or popular culture. I curated the content (along with Ari, actually). The idea was to see if we could better process and digest the challenges of modern culture if we approached it communally and in an embodied way; that is, by including more than just the mind and the process of mentation/debate/understanding, but calling in the EMOTIONS. It was, in part, a response to the sensemaking frenzy that had gripped our community—a modality that skewed highly masculine and mental.

Embodiment Hour (which later became known as Cultural Embodiment) was a hit. We had a super cast of regular participants who, together, got really, really good at holding charged, difficult, and polarizing content. This final post about the series (in September of 2022) summarizes some of the learnings from that experiment. Many people who attended confessed that they’d numbed out or actively turned away from all news prior to Embodiment Hour. They were happy to be re-engaged, but needed the support of a community of sensitized folks to do that. We all agreed that the scale and intensity of the news is such today that it’s overwhelming for one nervous system in isolation to handle. We need each other to field it.

I’ve missed Embodiment Hour. Maybe I knew it would return one day. The timing seems right and the content here seems ripe. I was brought out of retirement (so to speak) by Ari’s videos and all of the hoopla around AI. What I see in these videos and in the whole medium is an opportunity for collective visioning and healing. I see a chance for us all to rapidly align around a shared vision of the future. To do that, we need to not only envision and imagine the better world, we also need to hold and process the world we’re ready to shed, grieve, leave behind. We have to be able to transmute the lower into the higher. This is a sensitive and dynamic alchemical process, and one I am capable of leading. I’ve been facilitating deep group process around trauma healing and collective intelligence for a long, long time now. DECADES. I feel confident that we can create—together—a field in which we can alchemize the culture. AI can help us do this.

I hate to say it. I do. If you’re out there and the phrase “AI Embodiment” makes you feel nauseated or disgusted, I get it. It did me, too. There’s a vocal part of me that thinks this is impossible, crazy, or maybe even detrimental. BUT, the larger part, the higher self, knows it has to happen. We have to try. We have to turn towards this strange technological child we have spawned/birthed. And we have to parent, take responsibility and shape it.

A year ago, I was sitting—against my will—in a cold theater in Chelsea watching the AI shorts at the Tribeca Film Festival. Ari dragged me there. I knew I had to go, but I really didn’t want to. I am super sensitive to movies and media and I’m very choosy about what I let into my media diet. I figured this would be a barrage of the usual violence, garbage, noise, offensiveness. And honestly, it was (with a few shining moments of beauty and humor). The technology was so new and looking back, the pieces were so crude. But, something happened in that theater that sent me reeling. It was a moment I’ll never forget. On screen, the AI-generated visual showed a weird botanical organism suddenly opening like a gaping mouth or wound. The accompanying sound was like a “rip” and in that moment, the fabric of reality ripped for me. Suddenly, I was out of my body, looking down on the scene from above. I was a soul, not yet incarnate. I was being shown this moment by angels or guides (?) and they seemed to be saying quite plainly, “Go deal with this shit.” The moment passed almost instantly. It hit me all at once and left me gasping for breath and on the verge of vomiting. My heart raced and I was sweating. The dread I’d felt then before incarnating and the dread I felt in that moment nearly swallowed me. I came here for many reasons, but this—AI—is one of them. It’s not an assignment I feel I “want” but many of our most important assignments aren’t.

Since then, with Ari’s help, I’ve come to acceptance around this being part of my soul’s mission—to steward AI towards the good. I’ve always been on TEAM CULTURE. I’ve always known the culture is a lever in our salvation and I’ve done my best to leverage my expertise and power in this regard—towards evolution, towards the light, TOWARDS THE SACRED. This is just the next step.

I’ve seen the flood of comments, the outpouring of gratitude and RELIEF, that Ari’s beautiful videos have generated. It’s HUGE. Sadly—right now, it sits in text form as a long thread of individual comments on a social media platform. I LOVE the idea of offering a sacred place to land, a sacred fire around which to gather. Let’s ACTUALLY get together, show our faces, listen and tend to the feelings that are coming up for us. Let’s laugh together, cry together, get angry and outraged and softened together. Let’s open our hearts to the possibility that this tool could help us COME TOGETHER to gain power over the power structure that’s currently in place. We have to be QUICK and we have to be CLEVER and we have to learn to trust ourselves and each other. This takes practice.

Together, unified, we are an ARMY of LOVE. Let’s move.

Join us on June 9 at NOON EDT. Be there!

Register here