Interstellar Peace Building Alliance
A 6 month Ambassador training in communication across difference
Learn how to communicate with extraterrestrials—
and anyone, or anything else, you don’t completely understand.
THE PROGRAM
PHASE 01
Preparation-
THE QUEST
PHASE 02
Contact-
THE JOURNEY
PHASE 03
Application and Analysis-
IMPLEMENTATION
PHASE 04
Adaptation-
EVOLUTION
COURSE DESCRIPTION.
Encountering difference can be stressful for the nervous system. To prepare for these expansive encounters, we can increase our window of tolerance and strengthen our capacity to self-regulate in the presence of the unknown.
Science-fiction films will be placed in conversation with creation stories, shamanic narratives, anthropological primary texts, somatic psychology, and the Xochitlzihuatl Institute for Peace’s Empathy Operating System©. Together, these materials offer imaginative and practical technologies for meeting unfamiliar forms of consciousness with curiosity, discernment, humility, intimacy, and care.
Through guided reflection, embodied practice, partner exercises, communication laboratories, and narrative analysis, participants will learn to recognize and regulate their existing operating systems before those systems become fixed interpretations of another being.
As the capacity to remain present with uncertainty develops, new possibilities become available for listening, meaning-making, adaptation, and peaceful relationship.
Participants will complete a Personal First-Contact Protocol, receive a certificate of training completion, and become eligible to apply for certification as a Regional Ambassador of the Interstellar Peace Building Alliance. Graduates will have access to our emerging global community and opportunities to practice these tools in relationship across time and space.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN.
This program focuses on how nervous-system activation, cultural conditioning, language, memory, narrative, and assumptions about intelligence shape our responses to difference. The program is built around The Xochitlzihuatl Institute for Peace’s EMPATHY OPERATING SYSTEM ©, an original 8 part protocol for building connection across difference. The protocol, like the IPBA program is built upon principles of indigenous wisdom and sci-fi narratives.
Practices emphasize sincere presence, self-regulation and co-regulation, interruption of habitual patterns, attunement to unfamiliar signals, perceptual and linguistic relativity, intimacy across difference, multidimensional communication, empathy, narrative consciousness, co-creation, adaptation, beauty, and nonviolence.
Participants will practice distinguishing curiosity from projection, contact from control, empathy from identification, and adaptation from assimilation. The course will support an expanded capacity to communicate when language, morphology, culture, time, memory, or reality itself may not be shared.
Participants will learn to bridge the space between unfamiliarity and relationship—preparing them not only for possible extraterrestrial contact, but for the everyday work of communicating peacefully with beings they do not yet fully understand.
Program Overview
Part I: Preparation — The Quest
Preparing the Body for First Contact
Interrupting Inherited Patterns and Creating Possibility
Developmental Transformation and the Unknown
Recognizing and Regulating Your Existing Operating System
Part II: Connection — The Journey
Attunement to Signal
Patience, Humility, and Surrender
Intimacy Across Difference
Establishing Communication Without a Shared Language or Reality
Part III: Application and Analysis — Implementation
Language, Perception, and the Construction of Reality
Multidimensional Relationship
Memory and Narrative Consciousness
Technology, Consciousness, and Communication
Part IV: Adaptation — Evolution
Empathy Without Erasing Difference
Mirroring, Co-Creation, and Adaptation
Choosing Beauty and Authoring the Future
Nonviolence and the Personal First-Contact Protocol
Pedagogy and Methods.
The Interstellar Peace Building Alliance brings Indigenous stories and woman-centered science fiction into conversation with somatics, mindfulness, art, and relational practice.
Participants will explore how difference, uncertainty, and communication are experienced through the body and in relationship.
Through story, embodied practice, creative work, and reflection, participants will begin imagining a Personal First-Contact Protocol for meeting difference with curiosity, discernment, empathy, and nonviolence.
Frequently Asked Questions.
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The program starts with an opening prayer which will be recorded and sent out via email on November 11th, 2026. For those who are able to attend this meeting live it will be at 12pm PST.
The rest of the beginning level meetings will be as follows. Each meeting is from 10am-12pm PST.2026
NOVEMBER 11th (opening prayer, sent by email), live meetings 12th, 19th
DECEMBER 3rd, 10th (Practice Lab), 17th2027
JANUARY 14th, 28th
FEBRUARY 11th, 18th (Practice Lab), 25th
MARCH 11th, 18th and 25th
APRIL 8th (Practice Lab), 15th and 22nd
MAY
20th (presentation, graduation and closing ritual)
16 classes total (13 facilitated and 3 group + 1 group opening prayer and homework between sessions + graduation event)
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The program costs $888 for the beginner level. Payment plans are available.
Those who pay in full by November 1st will receive an $80 discount.
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The process to become a certified Regional Ambassador for the Interstellar Peace Building Alliance includes:
Level I — Foundational Ambassador Training (what this course is)Participants complete the foundational course, develop a Personal First-Contact Protocol, and receive a certificate of completion. This program stands alone; continuing is optional.
Level II-Jaguar Medicine
A year long program in cultivating purpose, relationship to spirit and connection to the earth elementals.Level III — Interstellar Peacemaker Community-Building Practicum
Approximately one year, rolling admission beginning in summer 2027Through individual mentorship, advanced somatic skill-building, and six months of twice-monthly group laboratories, participants refine their protocols and learn to apply them to complex relational and collective situations.
Level IV — Regional Application and Supervision
Approximately 12–18 monthsParticipants undertake supervised regional practice and applied peacebuilding work supported by documentation, reflection, and demonstration of competency. Completion leads to certification as an Interstellar Peacemaker and eligibility to serve as an IPBA Regional Ambassador.
Level I: Certificate of Completion
Level II: Interstellar Peacemaker Candidacy
Level III: Interstellar Peacemaker Certification and Regional Ambassador eligibility
Guest Teachers
Fredy Gualinga
Fredy (Sani Kichwa) comes from a lineage of traditional plant healers and environmental activists. Both of his parents are descendent from families of shaman (a practice that takes decades of perfection) and his father started Ecuador’s first indigenous-led eco-lodge which continues to bring economic and environmental sustainability to the Sani community.
Fredy played a central role in creating the Mandari Panga Eco-Lodge in the upper Amazon of Ecuador. The project is a global role model for indigenous led sustainable economy structures.
He is one of the world’s most sought-after guides and has worked for major universities (including Stanford University, and Columbia University) as well as the world’s best environmental journalists (National Geographic and BBC). He also leads community and environmental initiatives with the international NGO, Mossy Earth.
Learn more about Fredy.
Kichwa, Ecuador
Matt / Kaliwahe Ireland
Matt is a member of the Wolf Clan in the Oneida Nation. The founding member of the 5 Nations of Peace, Matt has lived most of his life along the Thames (rhymes with Dems) River in Southern Ontario in Canada.
From 2002 to 2022, Matt served as Hereditary Chief of the Wolf Clan, and now uses that direction as a guide in his work as an Educator and Traditional Counselor of the "EAGLE" Crisis Team at the Youth Treatment Center he is currently contracted with.
Wolf Clan, Oneida Nation
Oaxaca, MexicoRita Valencia
Rita Valencia is an activist scholar born and raised in the Mesoamerican highlands of Mexico City. Moving across disciplines (literature, agroecology, anthropology, and political organizing), she sits uncomfortably in the existing boundaries that divide ways of learning, knowing and feeling.
She is a post-doctoral researcher at Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico. With a transdisciplinary background she worked on Native Bees and Decolonial Ecology in her PhD and is currently researching and developing methodologies around ways of knowing and caring for the Soil Food Web.
Prepare for Contact
Ixchel Tonāntzin Xōchitlzihuatl is an Uto-Aztecan woman, daughter of Rosemary, granddaughter of Flora and great granddaughter of Josefina.
She is a Certified Somatica® Sex and Relationship Coach (CSC), artist, educator, and Indigenous somatic practitioner.
She holds a Master of Education from Harvard University and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, with additional training in mindfulness, Indigenous psychology through Braided Wisdom, and somatic regulation with Linda Thai.
Ixchel is a Soros Land, Art and Memory Fellow (2023) and former guest faculty of Art at the College of New Jersey.
She is the Reverend and Spiritual Director of a woman-, queer-, and Indigenous-led church in Hawai‘i and has studied indigenous practices of shamanism for more than 15 years.
Her teaching weaves somatics, mindfulness, art, story, Indigenous consciousness, and speculative imagination to develop new practices for communication across difference.
Meet your guide.
Get in Touch
Want to learn more? Drop us a line and we would love to connect further.
