How Coherence Lab Found Us
Something kept happening.
In community meetings, water collaborations, and forest summits, whenever a certain quality of attention and presence was held, people opened. Insight emerged. Tensions softened. Something that ordinary conversation could not reach began to come forward.
It began on Kauaʻi in 2012. Children were getting sick. Companies were spraying restricted-use pesticides near schools. A Rights of Nature effort did not reach a public vote. Before building anything, we went to the community. We listened. And the pattern appeared again.
What we were meeting was not new. It is a way of knowing long held within Indigenous knowledge systems and contemplative traditions. What was new was recognizing it as a capacity that could be named, cultivated, and brought into the places where it was most needed.
We built Coherence Lab to understand it. That was 2015. Three years later, we helped secure the first Rights of Nature conservation easement in the state of Hawaiʻi.
When the Lineages Met
In 2016, Coherence Lab convened the Women's Wisdom Keeper Summit on Kauaʻi. Casey Camp-Horinek, Shannon Biggs, Osprey Orielle Lake, Kumu Hula Puna Kalama Dawson, Kumu Sabra Kauka, and other luminaries gathered. Ceremony as the ground the work stands on. Women's leadership as its natural expression.
A year later, Ilarion Merculieff received a call from spirit. Coherence Lab convened a gathering of 13 Indigenous Wisdom Weavers in our home and at sacred sites across Kauaʻi, with Aunty Puna guiding the circle. Ilarion invited Mamo Lorenzo Izquierdo Arroyo of the Arhuaco people and Pacha K'anchay of the Yanakuna nation. The relationships formed in those days carried the work forward across years and continents. From that gathering, Wisdom Weavers of the World was born.
In 2019, Coherence Lab co-convened a Forest Conference with Aunty Puna, Ilarion, and Patricia Ellsberg. Forest defenders and conservation leaders sat in circle with Elders for days. Tree-planting organizations left having reprioritized their work around Primary Forest protection.
Kaiāulu
In June 2020, Kaiāulu Council began. Every week, frontline community leaders, scientists, Indigenous Elders, and advocates gathered in ceremony and inquiry. From that field, people carried what they received into institutions and decision-making spaces they had previously entered without it.
Then in 2022, Mamo Lorenzo and Pacha returned to Kauaʻi carrying something extraordinary. The Council of Indigenous Sages of Colombia, all 115 tribal nations gathered for the first time since 1964, had issued a call to synchronize ceremony across the world.
Aunty Puna responded.
In January 2023, Kaiāulu held the first monthly New Moon ceremony. It has continued every month since, without a single break. More than three years of continuous ceremony. A community spanning more than 40 countries, held together by practice, teaching, and sustained relationship with Indigenous Elders.
We didn't found Kaiāulu. It founded us.
How the Work Moves
Over a decade, a pattern has become visible.
People encounter the work. They tell us, again and again: the way they see changes. The way they hold a conversation changes. The way they make decisions changes. They carry this back into the systems they are part of, and the ripple moves outward.
A multi-generational conflict softens through presence, and pathways for communication open that were not there before. A conservation strategy shifts from opposition to shared vision. Aloha is carried into rooms where love has never been given permission to enter.
The effects are often indirect. They are consistent enough that we have built the next phase of our work around them.
We once brought this way of working into a scientific institute within the space industry. A senior colleague who sat on the board told us that talk of love does not belong in a scientific institution. We were asked to step back. In the same room, a young scientist stood and shared how time in ceremony with Elders had changed his understanding of reality itself. Both things happened.
The resistance to relational ways of knowing is structural, and it is part of what we are here to address.
Where the Work Lives
More than 4,000 people from over 40 countries have journeyed with us through the New Moon ceremonies alone. Thousands more have gathered at Sunrise ceremonies on the land here on Kauaʻi, season after season, year after year. They come back. They bring others. Something takes root.
This is a community, held together by practice and by what that practice makes possible.
Monthly ceremony continues, following the lunar cycle. The Ancestral Wisdom Collective carries the teachings deeper through a full cycle of learning with Elders. The Resonant Research Council brings scientists and Indigenous Knowledge Holders into shared inquiry into what becomes knowable through relationship. The Center for Applied Coherence develops the frameworks and practices that support leaders and communities in navigating this time of rupture and realizing an ecological civilization.
All of it is Elder-guided. All of it is grounded in continuity. And all of it exists because people showed up and stayed.
This work begins with relationship.
Coherence Lab is based on Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi. Women-led. Elder-guided.
You are welcome here.
If something here resonates, reach out.