Once, so the oral history keepers from all over this earth tell us, humans and all life on this planet were in deep relationship with each other.
The practices of shared are offered as a way of deeply remaking that relationship as a co- creative act of making new bonds that weave a new earth. Something I believe that we currently can’t imagine, deep as we are in the loss and the chaos of destruction around us.
This work is a response to the dying of the life brought about by the way the majority of us humans live.
The systems that we all live within are big and slow to change. Changing them is like turning a big ship that’s moving at speed in a particular direction. You can’t just turn the helm and change direction. The ship needs to lose momentum and then slowly turn. It may be that it’s too late for this approach. And that this way amounts to attempting to fix the problem with the same thinking that got us into the difficulty in the first place. But I believe there’s something else that we can do that has more potency.
We can instead turn ourselves back towards the original circle of fellowship. We can reacquaint ourselves with the wildness at the heart of the world. A return to remembering our sensing animal bodies, reawakening our feeling of kinship. Remembering that we share blood, bone and flesh with the animals. That sap moves in the plants just like blood moves in us. That we share breath with every form of life on the earth. And this remembering and returning to kinship is an act of love. We literally fall in love with all this life.
This work is offered as a method for doing that and it is underpinned by current understandings of our bodies as receivers and carriers of knowing, and of the neurology and physiology of connection, communication and understanding. The practices taught are simple and easy to integrate into our lives and potent in their ability to move us away from our rationalising, breaking into parts, linear thinking and into a whole understanding and sensing of ourselves and others, and what moves in the relationship between us. Our minds can’t generally hold such a body of knowing. So we go instead to our bodies. To a deep reacquaintance with our capacity to sense as creatures of this earth. Then we come into a fuller understanding of wholeness, of who we are in the context of all life. We literally can’t get our heads around that. But we can from that place of deepest understanding, use our minds to lead actions both small and large, to create a new way both for ourselves individually and for our circles of community.
In lightness and safety, we begin to ease and release the patterns of holding and tension in our bodies, that have their origins in fear and loneliness. We explore the applications of PolyVagal Theory and how to come to a place of relaxed awareness and openness to connection in the Meeting Place with another. In this place of connection, we play with how to be, so that life can flow more freely, become more abundant in our lives and in the Circle of Belonging.
The constellation of these practices includes remembering our ability to sense with the electro-magnetic field of the heart. In doing so we find ourselves with newly awakened compassion, with a feeling of connection and belonging. Our ability to respond to the other opens and deepens. It is the way of the heart to meet another with compassion and deep kindness. To meet ourselves in this way too. Bringing a healing of the deep separation that is the original wound, the first loss that made us begin to forget our knowing of ourselves as ‘one of the myriad wild things of this world’.
The horses are our co-creative partners in this. Bringing us the wisdom of living as a herd, immersed amongst those ‘myriad kinds of being’.
There is I sense, something else that happens when we come back into kinship in this way. There’s a potency that gets awakened in this kind of relationship. A depth of potency that brought all of the life on this earth into being, including us humans. And a reawakened falling in live with the beauty all around us, a deep love that we sense as belonging, curiosity, connection, compassion. And this potency is the very same that brought of all of creation into being and can bring new life, beyond our current knowing, into being.
