“It is not where we breathe, but where we love, that we live.”

Søren Kierkegaard

Hi! My name is DeeAnn Dean. I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend. I am also a writer, poet, dreamer, agrarian, and a curious student of this journey we call life. As I’ve stepped into the second half of my life, I’ve been more willing to release the ego’s definition of success and trust Wisdom’s process. Along this journey, I’ve experienced an ever-deepening awareness of my connection with Creation, Creatures, and the Life that flows through all living things.

This awareness hit a growth spurt in 2014, when I experienced an awakening that completely disrupted my understanding of health. During that time, the "voices" I had trusted with my body were stripped away, leaving the conventional wisdom I had long clung to exposed as rational thinking disconnected from Love, Truth, and Beauty. What began as a season of pain, confusion, divorce, despair, and a dark night of the soul eventually brought me to a place of rest. There, I began to remember how to Breathe, Listen, Ask, Look, and Touch© my ordinary yet sacred life.

Sensing how desperate I was for healing, I quit my job and devoted myself fully to the undoing and reconciliation that was already taking place within me. It was clear that this work demanded all of me—my time, energy, and willingness to release deeply ingrained beliefs, habits, and even relationships. This season of Via Negativa (letting go) also needed kindness, gentleness, playfulness, companions, and mentors to walk (sometimes skip) with me away from the 'formula' that had dominated and determined who I was and what I did. (This result-based formula demanded a result based mentality-a contradictory set of beliefs, techniques, and behaviors I had learned to survive, which were not aligned with my true self.) Unknowingly, it was a formula I had fully participated in as it sabotaged my health, hid my sacredness, and demanded I pursue health in a disconnected, fragmented and isolated way.

As I nurtured the pieces left behind by this pursuit, I realized health wasn't about blood tests, body types, or fitness fads but something deeper, broader, and more mysterious. Though dimly, I began to see health, wholeness, holiness, and healing are not separate outcomes or results but the natural design of an interconnecting relationship between Creation, creatures, and humans. As I worked through my health experience with my higher power, I observed every living thing was interdependent and this interdependence supported the natural design of health, wholeness, and healing of all things, including me. For the first time, I understood the question wasn’t “Am I healthy?” but “How am I affecting the health of every living thing by not taking good care of myself and my neighbors?”

Thinking about health in this way began to change everything I believed, thought, felt, sought, did and did not do.

Over the last decade, my consciousness has grown as I've sought truth and practiced loving myself and others. Along the way, I have discovered my ongoing need for a posture of humility, a balanced position, a non-judgmental perspective, and a purpose of service. By trying my best to fully participate in the present moments of my life, I have had been given innumerable opportunities to Rest, Remember, and Practice the Basics in various settings with diverse creatures and people.

One thing that has come out of this unique but most ordinary process is clarity around two questions:

What is health?

Where does health begin?

Before the pandemic, I thought I had these answers. I believed health was an individual pursuit—something achievable through knowledge, encouragement, and personal effort. I subscribed to the popular notion “If you know better, you do better.” Believing I could help people know better, I did my best to tell the truth, encourage others to do better and be a positive example of health. But all that stopped when I was forced to sit in the pandemic and watch what happened when our backs are against the wall and what we think about health is called into question, open for discussion, and needed to survive a virus.

Though the pandemic was a scary and strange time, it created a space for me to ask my two health questions from a different perspective and ponder why our individual and collective health was entirely disconnected from beauty, common sense, hope, goodness, joy, the earth, others, and the nourishment we desperately need to thrive. In April 2023, I emerged from the fog of the pandemic and out of a four-year journey into solitude with clarity and one clear message about health... and it's this:

It's not your fault.

You didn’t have a chance.

Now, together, we do!

In other words, there is no doubt we have been set up, manipulated, isolated, and brainwashed to believe health/wholeness/holiness/healing are results that an individual can achieve on their own with just the right amount of information, time, energy, money, sweat, tinkering, books, technology, and prescriptions.

However, I just don’t believe it anymore.

Let me say this loud and clear, I absolutely do not believe health is a result to be achieved nor can it be achieved by an individual. Furthermore, I don’t believe health can be taught, managed, manipulated, or guaranteed by a formula, guru, expert, or gadget. Allow me to explain why.

What we are now clearly experiencing and seeing are the results of an individual health philosophy/theory that has helped produce epidemics of chronic disease and sickness in the mass majority of men, women, and children. The reduction of “health” to an individual mode of operation has failed because

1) We are not “individuals.”

2) We do not function like machines.

3) The individual formula does not take into account that we are feeling, thinking, believing, sensing, and intuitive human beings.

4) Our “individual health” is actually determined by everyone and everything around and moving through us.

Human beings do not live in sterile and isolated bubbles, no matter how far off the grid one lives or how much bleach, vinegar, Clorox wipes, sage, or cleansing mantras we use to rid ourselves of germs, viruses, and bacteria. Our whole being is a living ecosystem—living with an ecosystem, living within an ecosystem, living within an ecosystem…I think you get the point.

We are not on our own, and we are not even our own. We are determined by and reflective of who, where, when, and how we live with all Creation and all Creatures (human and non-human). Yes, including the bugs living on your skin, in our guts, and in the soil, seas, and air.

If we can accept the truth that “health” is not an individual result but a "we" living reality that is constantly ebbing and flowing, moving and shaking, and evolving, we will have a chance to understand and accept the wisdom of our neighbor Wendell Berry.

I should not have been surprised it was Wendell Berry’s experience, strength, and hope that answered my two long-sought-after questions with the one foundational truth—"Connection is health." And it was living in Dellrose with this foundational truth, I was shown how our individual health begins and is formed by an interdependency, interconnectedness, and interrelatedness with all Life that is nourished and sustained as we live, work, worship, eat, learn, and play.

“Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive,...This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.” Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

While my purpose in creating Vive Alchemy is to help you remember these truths and how you are naturally designed to be a healthy, whole, and sacred human being, my life's calling is to participate in cultivating a Living Loving Community where we can simply live these truths together, and experience help, hope, and healing, and being of service to others.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” Albert Einstein

We must do more than think differently about health. We must live differently. Health, wholeness, and sacredness are not a result of individual choices. Nor is life a condition that needs a teacher, coach, doctor, preacher, or self-help guru to diagnose and deliver with a prescription of pills, procedures, formulas, information, books, or technology. Instead, our healthy, whole, and sacred lives are an organic, dynamic and mysterious connection. We are alive and beautifully supported, nurtured, and entangled in a web of relationships where we are known and accepted, grow and develop, fail and succeed, learn and mature. Our living connection thrives when we participate in a Living Loving Community where we can receive and give honor and be strengthened through practices, principles, personal relationships, real-life experiences, and wise mentors.

Remember: “Connection is health.”

Today, we are asking you to look at your own experience and see if the individual model of health has weighed you in the balance and left you lonely, exhausted, languishing, and sick. Even more, has it left you wanting something more than another diet, workout, hack, tip, podcast, prescription or temporary result?

Perhaps, deep down we all know the only answer to what ails us is not another individual pull yourself up by your bootstraps to-do-list, workout, diet, or program but a Living Loving Community where we can take our boots off, ground ourselves in Mother Earth, lie down and rest, and simply Breathe, Listen, Ask, Look, Touch© our sacred life, strengthen our health and nourish our wholeness.

You are invited to join us in cultivating a safe space where together we:

• Form and grow personal relationships by walking with experienced and wise mentors.

• Participate in an authentic and supportive community that nurtures the health of all its members.

• Practice the Basics

• Learn and abide by principles that nourish connection

• Take the steps to discover our true selves

• Experience and Enjoy Life