About Buried Wisdom
Buried Wisdom is the inspiration and life-work of educator and community organizer John Klingler. It aspires to hold space for people exploring a greater connection with their inner wisdom and guidance, for the sake of both personal and collective liberation, healing, and growth.
Our deepest sources of wisdom, creativity, and capacity for change are located within us. Though we’ve all benefitted from the teachings of family, teachers, mentors, friends, neighbors, and many others, we only truly internalize such external guidance if it strikes a chord, or resonates (literally: rings back, re-sounds), within our own being. The problem has never been that we lack the knowledge and insight to become the most whole version of ourselves, but that throughout our lives, this wisdom becomes buried beneath a thick layer of confused clutter. Our modern, industrialized society and fast-paced consumer culture does not place value on human wholeness and genuine contentment, for the simple reason that whole humans aren’t good for business when the primary aim is to make money selling products to discontented ones. Therefore, the wisdom that we are all intuitively seeking, whether consciously or unconsciously, is not easily accessible in mainstream Western (or, increasingly, any industrialized) culture.
Starting at a young age this wisdom, this access to the natural flow of love and life, becomes increasingly blocked. On the individual level, this blockage looks like insecurity, low self-esteem, and becoming small in order to “fit in.” We attempt to fill the resulting hole with habits that don’t align with our inner-most values and intentions, from viciously clawing our way up socially-constructed hierarchies, to numbing our senses and emotions by overindulging in food, substances, and material possessions. On the collective level, these blockages turn into the sicknesses that threaten humanity’s continued existence on the planet: patriarchy, white-supremacy, imperialism, war, and an unfettered capitalism that views the Earth as an object from which to extract material wealth instead of a life-sustaining mother with whom we are in mutual relationship.
“While our deepest wisdom can be concealed and distorted, it can never be alienated from us.”
To those of us who yearn for something deeper than what the primary institutions of our society offer, it often feels we are swimming upstream. We find ourselves in a state of extreme isolation: from ourselves, others in our community, and the natural world that sustains us. However, the good news is that while our deepest wisdom can be concealed and distorted, it can never be alienated from us. Through both individual and collective practices, we can move through these blockages, recover our own intuitive wisdom, and cultivate the healing and wholeness that we seek. Buried Wisdom aims, in a small and humble but meaningful way, to provide these kinds of spaces, where people can become more emotionally and spiritually connected, and thereby contribute to the creation of a more relational, loving, and just world. As stated by an important teacher of mine, Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams, “Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”
There are countless pathways that lead toward this destination. Buried Wisdom is informed by and draws from many lineages, including dream work, somatics and embodiment, parts work, decolonization and anti-Racism, Christian mysticism, and the Enneagram. Compassion is always central, as it must be to any lasting work of this kind. Just as an acorn cannot be coerced into growing into the oak tree that is its innate potential, human beings will not be forced to transform into more whole versions of themselves. Buried Wisdom seeks to guide people back to themselves, not through force, but through compassionate nurturance.