Yesterday, I had the honor of spending a day with Susannah and Ya’Acov Darling Khan, directors of the school of movement medicine, an organization which teaches dance as healing all over the world. They told me about their work with the Pachamama Alliance, an group that has “ roots deep in the Amazon rainforest, with programs to integrate indigenous wisdom with modern knowledge to support personal, and collective, transformation that is the catalyst to bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet.” Umm.. Susannah and Ya’Acov told me that the amazon peoples have realized that to survive in this world of huge change, that ancient patriarchal ceremony does not work now. To literally save their lives, women need to be involved to move the world to a possible future. They understand that this  requires cultural change for the Amazon tribes and for western people in the alliance working with them. At the last dance, Edmund told me that a sundance chief changed the sun dance to include women. He said, it’s impossible to do it with men now in the world, we need change this ceremony to save the earth. I woke in the night with a shock. I had the powerful realization the time is now to change ceremony to include women and to share knowledge across indigenous and western cultures as equals without racism and fear. Each culture needs to learn from the other and produce ceremony that is new for our difficult time for us and for our medicine to survive. The profound work in the Amazon has taught is that this cannot be done without women and without learning from each other and that this has to be done right now or we will not survive.