ABOUT THE MENDING CIRCLE

I’m Justine Epstein (she/they)

Living as a guest in the ancestral territories of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples, I show up in these troubled times as an organizer, facilitator, rites of passage guide, mentor, ritualist, naturalist, writer, and lover of birds and wild things. I have over seven years of experience holding transformative spaces for people to engage deeply with questions of legacy, land, identity, money, power and belonging.

I’m descended from early Puritan settlers to Turtle Island and many consequent waves of immigrants from lands known as Ireland, England, Germany, Switzerland, as well as Ashkenazi Jews from Lithuania and Russia.

I live a deep commitment to transmute legacies of colonial and racial harm and trauma in my lineages and in the world in ways that embody complexity, truth, curiosity and love. I created The Mending Circle as a space to explore what that looks like in culture and community.

The Mending Circle offers curated and adaptable support for people with inherited wealth, land and/or legacies of ancestral harm to meaningfully engage with the crises of our times and the histories that led to them. This can take place through one-on-one mentoring, group facilitation, or consultation.

The Future We Envision…

The Mending Circle is committed to a creating a world where wealthy people have reckoned with their unjust inheritances and been transformed through the process of offering reparations for the harms of our ancestors. Through this process we have found a deeper sense of community, culture and belonging, transmuting the trauma we have inherited into medicine for the earth, our fellow human beings, and future generations. Through truth-telling, grieving, returning money and land, and leveraging our power in solidarity with movements for justice, we have co-created a world where the systems of harm our ancestors built have been put to rest. We understand our shared stake in a world of mutual flourishing. The lessons of these centuries of harm are instilled in our children’s bones not as guilt or shame but as deep teachings for how we care for ourselves, each other, and the living earth. 

ARE YOU SOMEONE WHO…

  • Has inherited wealth or land that was acquired through past or present forms of theft, violence and extraction? 

  • Has ancestors who were early settlers, enslavers, or beneficiaries of colonization, white supremacy,
    or capitalism?

  • Is tired of relating to money or land through a paradigm of scarcity and individualism, and wants to leave a different legacy behind?

  • Feels called to address these histories and the crises of our times from a spiritually and ecologically grounded place?

  • Is ready to move from guilt, shame and stuckness towards grief, integrity and action?

Let’s build this world together.

What ANCHORS & informs my OFFERINGS: 

  • Deep Listening 

  • Connection to Nature

  • Honoring the full spectrum of emotion

  • Embodiment and Somatics

  • Anti-Racist Genealogy

  • Storytelling

  • Ancestral Ways & Ritual

  • Grief-Tending

  • Social Justice Philanthropy

  • Spiritual Practice

“If slavers, invaders, committers of genocide, inquisitors can beget abolitionists, resistance fighters, healers, community builders, then anyone can transform an inheritance of privilege or of victimization into something more fertile than either.” 

- Aurora Levins Morales, Embracing Rootedness and Radical Genealogy

PARTNERSHIPS

The Mending Circle is part of an ecosystem of many trusted friends, comrades, mentors and change-makers and is proud to be in community with these collaborators.

Comrades 

ACCOUNTABILITY 

Elders