Research, Writing, Art, + Remembering

queer (adj.)

  1. bent, crooked, oblique

  2. peculiar, odd, strange

I’m Riordan Regan (they/them; formerly known as Holly). I’m a spiritual seeker, ceremonialist, artist, and apprentice of the healing arts. In this culture, I’m queer in every sense; strange, not-straight, and “neurodivergent.” In a culture with unbroken Earth-based spiritual traditions, I’d be a healer or a Bard: a wandering poet, oral historian, and walker-between-worlds. Helping people reclaim such lineage and reframe their story is my mission.

Through more than a decade of independent research and PhD study through the Transart Institute for Creative Research, I explore the ways people connect, transcend, and heal through community, ceremony, and non-ordinary conscious states.

Through events, workshops, 1:1 sessions, art, journey work, and preparation/integration, I engage in lived practice-research that traces ways to re-ensoul the world for those who have forgotten. In so doing, I draw from ancestral, intuitive, Indigenous knowings, cosmologies, and embodied practices that offer maps, from the altar to the zodiac, for finding our way through a culture disconnected from intuition, multiplicity, and seasonality.

No Separation

For the ancients, there was no separation between areas of life: spirituality, ritual, ancestral communication, ecological relationship, nourishment of bodymind and soul, creative expression and literal sustenance and knowledge and teaching and cultural transmission were all one, inextricably embedded in a web of relational interbeing. This is how I understand, move through, and interact in the world, but it is hard to convey this in a reductionist, materialist, individually focused world. I hope that by building resilient networks of interdependence we can better sustain and resource ourselves and our communities, and that starts with sharing our messages so we can find each other.

My missive and approach is defined by what astrological scholar Demetra George and biologist Rupert Sheldrake call the "ensouled" cosmos : one that expresses the same universal energy through our lives, psyches, planetary archetypes, and amongst the Earth's creatures. She brings in the asteroids and defines mythic archetypes in an embodied, highly personal manner. Mythopoetic author and astrologer Richard Tarnas extends this concept to a depth-psychological framework and connecting it to Jung's lens of synchronicity—reflecting a universe imbued with meaning and purpose, a revolutionary perspective in a consumer capitalist world that would flatten everything to monotony and conformist routine.

Life = practice

Mythopoetic psychologist Carl Jung said that the artist, mystic, and alcoholic are all the same archetype. While I might resist some of the language, in this incarnation, I’ve played all of these roles. It’s just evidence of what my personal and professional practices, philosophies, and research has shown me: that we all contain multitudes, capable of embodying any archetype, given the right conditions. The key is to meet what arrives, inside and out, with compassion—what our world needs more of now.

I have learned so much through ceremonial and spiritual practices as well as ancestral, archetypal astrology and timekeeping systems. The work now is to share what I’m learning with others while continuing to heal, grow, and navigate my path.

I call this Cosmic Wayfinding: connecting more deeply with ourselves, each other, the Earth, and what’s beyond by plugging back into planetary and cosmic cycles. I offer readings, events, and workshops that lead people on journeys of rememberance using astrological charts and timekeeping methods.

With a background in anthropology, my education also includes ancestral astrology, cosmology, and timekeeping systems (Maya, Hellenistic, and pagan/esoteric) as well as modern and archetypal astrology and depth psychology. I am training in Internal Family Systems and Compassionate Inquiry frameworks—and melding it all with learned, researched, and direct experience in psychedelic, plant medicine, and shamanic/pagan spaces. Yet these approaches are simply invitations to rememberance: they help us rediscover the abilities to connect, transcend, and heal ourselves and our communities, within and without.

Areas of Focus

  • Nature, ecology, and myth

  • Jungian, archetypal, and depth psychology

  • Mystic and contemplative traditions

  • Archetypal, ancestral, and ancient timekeeping systems

  • Herbalism, holistic healing, and traditional medicines

  • Psychedelics and plant medicine

  • Internal Family Systems + Compassionate Inquiry

  • Ecstatic Dance and somatic healing

  • Direct experience, ritual, ceremony, and altered states

  • Earth-based, Indigenous, and nondual cosmologies

Portfolio: https://thequeerbard.com/work

IG @thequeerbard

Let’s Talk About Death

many of our urban capitalist cultures deny death, consider it taboo or scary, it's a thing pushed below the surface, but it is an essential part of life, life does not exist without it. I believe we do ourselves a violence as a culture when we deny any part of this experience.

I want to help individuals and communities normalize and talk about death in any way it shows up in their lives, spaces, and places. Between myself and my communities, friends, and even mentors, I have dealt with suicidal attempts, impulses, and successes, with deaths and resurrections literal and otherwise. I have advisors on both sides of the realms and am still learning how to work with them.

I believe I am here to help facilitate conversation and communication and connection between all these spaces, places, energies, and entities. I receive messages and only sometimes know where they're from, but it is always clear when and where I am meant to communicate them, and through what medium. Sometimes it's chart readings, others it's ceremonies, maybe it's just a voice note to a friend, but I have learned to trust these voices and messages, and I want to help you connect with your own guides, archetypes, energies, communities, and forces in all planes of existence that feel good to you.

Re-Ensoul Your World

Astrologer Demetra George and biologist Rupert Sheldrake speak poetically of a concept that I have always felt, ever since I was a child, and something that is a core component of many animist, ancient, and Indigenous spiritual and philosophical traditions: that everything has a soul, and is sentient and alive, from animals, plants, and trees to mountains, rivers, and even the wind.

This is a concept bred out of us by capitalism, which relies upon us finding what feels like meaning in material things, jobs, educations, and adopted personas. When we lose touch with the ensouled world, the cosmos becomes dead and purposeless, things only having meaning if we make them that way. This contributes to depression, anxiety, suicidality, disembodiment, dissociation, trauma, and estrangement from our own bodies and true identities.

Reconnecting with the cycles of earth, heavens, and body helps realign us with the actual experience of being a being, an experience inherently imbued with meaning, where universal energies resonate through heavens and earth through living things as conduits. This is what ancient, nondual, Indigenous, and esoteric cosmovisions have always held, and I want to help people remember.

Gender Doulaship + Queer Embodiment

My journey has been anything but “typical.” If you’re here, maybe yours has been, too.

I have been on my own journey of queer and trans estrangement, alienation, fear, isolation, reconnection, reunion, re-ensoulment, re-embodiment, enlightenment, and increasing self-love and homecoming that has been without a doubt the most painful and challenging experience in a life marked by many. Yet this opposition has been my single greatest opportunity. I am passionately committed to helping other queer and trans people explore this journey of physical, spiritual, emotional, psychological, and astral growth. It is one that trans-scends lifetimes and timelines, and I have seen that we are here to carry the legacies of our queer and trans ancestors, from Sappho to Marsha P Johnson and countless two-spirit and Indigenous individuals of all cultures, and help trans-mute the karmas we carry from culture, family, and interpersonal relationships to bring humanity into the age of aquarius, where bodies and beings and relations between creatures, species, realms, conscious states, physical matter, and modes of experiencing will be different than anything humanity has experienced before.

Trans-ition Support

I remembered I was trans while temporarily paralyzed in a catastrophic injury that has left my body permanently changed, but my spirit awakened in ways I never thought possible. For me, the pain was a portal to my own deep inner knowing, as well as to other realms of life and spirit. But navigating all this with no support in a culture where such things are stigmatizing was an extremely challenging and often destabilizing experience. My training in meditation, spaceholding, ceremony, and medicine work as well as my personal experience has helped me develop a framework I can share with others for support through all manner of life transitions, informed by the unique experience of gender transition and queer coming-out, and coming-home.

There are many approaches and modalities we can work with for this, and I tailor each approach to the individual or group. We’ll explore and find the frameworks and approaches that most resonate with you.

Let’s Remember Together

I want to help remind people of what our brains may have forgotten, but our bones and souls remember:

  • Your body, mind, and heart know how to heal themselves.

  • It starts with reconnection to self, each other, the natural world, and the divine.

  • Intuitive, ancestral, Indigenous, somatic ways of knowing, doing, and being—grounded in the cycles of nature and ecological principles—help us remember.

  • Our pain can not only be reframed, it is an essential part of our healing.

  • Those labeled disordered, weird, or queer would be shamxn, healers, and teachers in a different cultural context. The disorder is our world.

I believe what most ancient cosmologies teach: that life is interwoven, symbiotic, and mycelial. Consciousness is relational. Healing is systemic. Love is the fabric of an emergent universe that needs each of us, exactly as we are.

Relational Manifesto

I believe, practice, and strive to embody a queer, relational, ecological, liberation-focused approach to life, death, spirituality, community, healing, and being-in-the-world.

The core tenets of my approach, belief, and practices include:

  • normalize the paranormal, establishing and maintaining reciprocal relationships with beings in different realms and states of experiencing. This includes direct connection with the dead as well as archetypal and energetic forces of nature and the cosmos.

  • destigmatize death as part of life, compost for the cycle, and invitation to regeneration—both literal and metaphorical, as part of our healing journey.

  • reclaim our personal mythology, understand our herox journey, and tell a truer story.

  • work with pain as a portal to awakening, embodiment, and connection to higher realms—whether chronic or temporary.

  • transition support for changing bodily and mental abilities and experiences, from illness and injury to neuro-expansiveness, mental-health diagnoses, and aging.

  • reclaim agency over our consciousness—including the right to self-experimentation. This includes the freedom to explore different conscious states for pleasure, joy, nervous system and emotional regulation, pain management, and establishing a baseline of safety.

  • work with plant, tree, fungal, and animal teachers to rediscover and/or connect with our own indigenaeity.

  • develop loving relationships with self and others for awakened care and inner and outer resourcing.

  • self-exploration and -inquiry for deep and lasting therapeutic healing, including meditation and daily mindfulness practices such as journaling.

  • reconnection to ritual, ceremony, and seasonal cycles, with invitations for individual and group exploration.

  • re-ensoul your world, rediscover magic, and reanimate the cosmos, restoring direct experience of a correspondent, ever-loving cosmos imbued with meaning and pulsing with purpose.

  • celebrate divergence, make the invisible visible. and bring the hidden into the light.In another culture, those of us called "divergent," "disordered," or "different" are shamxn, seers, priestxs, healers, teachers, and apprentices of the magical and healing arts. I reclaim this legacy for myself and seek to share it with others.

  • commit to anti-racism, equality and inclusion; pursuing self-liberation, connection with beings and energies in all the realms, and healing relentlessly; and devoting myself to helping all beings everywhere experience liberation and healing .