The Emerald Tent

The Origin Story

Emerald Tent was born of my own desperate grief.

Two days before Thanksgiving (2025), on a quiet morning, I said to my husband that I thought we might have only one year left with our beloved canine soulmate, Brody. I had to cut his walk down by half that morning and sensed his age coming on more rapidly by his heavy breathing and dropping energy levels. By 10pm that same night, Brody fell into full-body spasms. By 3am, we learned he had a 17-centimeter tumor on his spleen. By 4am, we were helping him pass over.

We did not have one year – we had less than 24 hours.

What followed was an avalanche of grief—sudden, disorienting, and total. I was in shock and in love all at once. The turbulence of these extreme yet integrated set of emotions took me by surprise. With no place to go for help to my grief through my body, I endured it alone – but barely. Emerald Tent emerged from this experience. Brody called it in.

I know now that grief is not meant to be contained, analyzed, or experienced alone. It is meant to be met, witnessed, and gently moved—so it does not harden or collapse inward. This expands out to include the myriad of micro-griefs we experience in everyday life too. Life is meant to be experienced, together.

Inside the Tent

The Emerald Tent is a monthly online gathering where story, symbol, nature, and embodied practice come together to create a quiet threshold into the inner life. From our own home hermitages, we gather as scattered yet connected souls, stepping for a time beyond productivity and performance into the slower rhythms of imagination, feeling, and presence.

Each gathering begins with a guided forest immersion. Through breath, imagery, and sensory awareness, we leave the noise of the day and enter a more ancient landscape—the place where the psyche speaks in metaphor and the body begins to soften into itself.

From there, an archetypal story is shared.

Rather than explaining the story, we allow it to work upon us. Like dreams, myths ask to be experienced before they are understood. Each gathering offers a single contemplative question, inviting us to notice where the story is quietly unfolding within our own lives.

Participants then enter small circles of witnessing. There is no fixing, advising, debating, or interpreting. We simply practice one of the oldest forms of human care: listening with presence. Silence is welcome. Reflection is welcome. Every voice belongs.

The evening returns to the body through simple somatic practices—breath, movement, sound, humming, or gentle toning—allowing insight to become something lived rather than merely understood.

Afterward, those who wish are invited to linger in an unhurried afterglow. Tea, conversation, quiet companionship, or simply sharing the ordinary beauty of being together.

The Emerald Tent is inspired by Jungian psychology, myth, ecology, and the growing understanding that healing is not only an individual achievement, but a relational experience. We become more fully ourselves not by standing apart from one another, but by gathering around stories that remind us who we have always been.

This is not therapy or treatment, nor is it a place of instruction or performance.

It is a monthly ritual of return.

A place to wander into mystery.

A place to remember the wisdom of story.

A place to practice being deeply, quietly human.

Join the Emerald Tent here . . .

EMERALD TENT

My work and passions are rooted in decades guiding humans through transition, loss, identity rupture, and emergence. I bring a poetic depth and practical sensibility that orients to the body’s intelligence, a respect for inner rhythm, and a commitment to compassionate and courageous expression.

Lori Wallace