G R O U N D I N G M Y T H O S
A journey with the seasons and cycles and four directions
to activate your unfolding mythos and its remembrance and offering to the living earth
Next Cycle… TBC
Grounding Mythos is a journey of embodied practices to anchor oneself in relation to the wider ecological-spiritual web of life.
The teachings will cultivate encounter with more-than-human lifeworlds, to listen for the deeper story of your life and the unique way your soul roots to earth, multi-species and ancestral kinship. These material and immaterial relations form a bedrock from which we can begin to hear and follow the pathways towards stewardship and contribution to human and more-than-human collectives.
To imagine different futures at a threshold of huge societal change, requires finding different ways and orientations of listening. This course provides tools to navigate and ground the intuition and mystery that once were way-finders for our social and cultural wellbeing.
This four-part workshop series will follow the seasons and houses of the four directions - a cycle that has formed the architecture of wisdom traditions the world over.
Cultivating the container of the hearth, we come together in circle to spend time with each direction as a doorway to aspects of our ecological soulcentric self. The teachings will guide through deep imagination, dreamwork, embodiment practices, shadow work, an expanded toolkit of creative dialogue with the living world, and ceremony. Participants will be supported in crafting their artistic practices and weaving their unfolding mythos back into the collective and earth itself.
THE JOURNEY
Participants will come together for six online sessions each cycle. They will be given materials to explore beyond this in their own time and places, weaving personal enquiry into the collective space to harvest, track and integrate the ongoing journey.
House of Dawn
Welcoming in the East, we come to the new light of dawn. Place of thresholds between endings and beginnings, we bring the story of our life so far, placing it on the surface altar and offering it up to make space for another way of belonging to the world. Fire is our element, lighting up the ancient time of Beltane/Bealtaine on Celtic lands, and the bright yellow flame of the rising sun. Here we embark on re-entering the innocence of ourselves in relation the world. We revisit our embryological memory, as well as our more-than-human ancestral memory, stitching ourselves back into the roots from which we swam, crawled, wound our way. Over the course of this cycle we come into the energy of the waxing moon. Listening to the clear knowing of a new flame, and the innocence of praise, we shed our human skins to make space for our hybrid kinship to be revealed through imagination, embodied encounter, creative practice and ceremony.
House of Rivers
Welcoming in the South, we ground into body and earth. Place of wildness within and without, we explore the pathways of movement our bodies want to make through the internal and external terrain. We work with muscle, fascia, blood flow. We grow with earth, soil, mud. We beckon in the voice through call and response to our more-than-human kin and invisible others. We are in the garden of exploration, encountering the possibility of earthly pleasure and its rivers of guidance as well as its boundaries of care. We work with the energy of the summer solstice, and the full moon. Water is our element, its riverine passages and its wide oceanic body. Place of family, clan, and earthly systems, we work to restore the flow of life to any stuck areas of our internal and wider systems of belonging. Cultivating belonging to the wild earth, we build resilience to trespass over the smaller contracts we have made in these primary systems, stepping more fully into what our soul longs to live. Listening to the wild rushing rivers of mystery and the pull of our deeper participation in the world, we make space for our hybrid kinship to be revealed through imagination, embodied encounter, creative practice and ceremony.
House of Veils (October)
Welcoming in the West, we begin to descend like the setting sun through the veil between worlds, to an underground encounter with deep time memory. Place of visions in the dark, of deep longing and mystery pulsing in the underworld. We begin to lay the bones down as an offering for the ancestors, the skeleton of our ceremony house. A place to listen deeply to the shadows, glimmers and undertones of our soul story. We work with the energy of autumn, Samhain and the waxing moon. Air is our element. We leave home and the familiar too-small story of our lives to wander in the darkness, asking for a different kind of sight. We may encounter grief as a pathway to and from praise, a beckoning to that which was forgotten and longs to be returned. We may encounter shadows and learn how to court them and include them in our creative practice, ritual and ceremony. We work with integrating what has been banished, uncovering what was too big to be planned for. Working with our dreaming as that which emerges from the earth itself, we make space for our hybrid kinship to be revealed through imagination, embodied encounter, creative practice and ceremony.
House of Bones (November)
Welcoming in the North, we come to the ceremony house, the place of spirit, elders, bones and ancient wisdom. Here we attune to the care and nurture of the grandmothers, the stark seeing of hag, and the memory of wisdom as it sits in earth and skeleton. Working with the bones we come to the still point of the spine. We ask what it means to integrate the stories that have been given through our encounters, and how to gather them back into a prayer for the earth and the next cycle. We work with the energy of winter solstice, and the dark moon. Earth is our element, the place to bury and rest our journeys. We delve into our ancient memory of gathering together between fire and loom, and spinning the tales of where we have been and what has been revealed to us. We work with the tools of deep listening to reflect to ourselves and one another this deeper mythos as we make space for our hybrid kinship through imagination, embodied encounter, creative practice and ceremony.
Closing Ceremony
The journey completes with a re-turning to face the East, as the Dawn of endings and new beginnings. With the wisdom of Spirit we ask how the journey turns us back towards our communities, and the greater whole.
Is this course for you?
This course is for those who want to listen to the intelligence of land and its relations; to encounter mystery and dialogue with it through tangible, creative forms. Do you feel an underground murmur, a sense of another way of being and belonging to the world? This is for those wishing to embark on - or already in - this dialogue, who desire the container and collective pathway to anchor this practice and embed it at the centre of their lives. Do you feel the call of listening to the animate world in a time of ecological breakdown? Together we cultivate a willingness to shed what might no longer serve, in stepping into a deeper and more mysterious entanglement with the world as an ecological self. This is a space for ushering in with hands, body and ceremony one’s own personal, earth-emergent mythology, and crafting it into the collective through practices of mutual witnessing and encounter with more-than-human presence.
Workshop Fees
Total for whole cycle (4 seasons): £599
Individual cycle (1 season): £199
What does the cost cover?
Each cycle: six online sessions, including guest teacher session, workshop material, mentorship between cycles via voxer messaging.
Participants are encouraged to take all four cycles; if for some reason the dates don't align, each cycle can be taken as a stand alone journey.
Guest facilitator sessions will be recorded. Independent exploration materials will be shared as pdf and audio files. However, the online sessions of the four house cycle will not be recorded, due to the nature of council as our mode of being together online; participants are asked to be present for all sessions.
Access
The materials for the cycles can be engaged with in a multiplicity of ways. The movement sessions will be appropriate for different kinds of mobility; the materials will be given in pdf and audio form. For other questions and specific needs around access, please get in touch.
There are two scholarship places available for the whole cycle for BIPOC participants. The scholarship places require a short letter of interest, please reach out with any questions. The scholarship cost for the complete four journeys is £249.
THE TEACHINGS
Laura is an artist, writer and facilitator. Her practices are infused with learnings and trainings from a range of disciplines, including somatic movement, storytelling, visual arts, kundalini yoga, family constellations and a longstanding body of practice developed in collaboration with more-than-human and human ancestors. She has a deep reverence for all animate beings, including river, stone, ancestors and myth itself, and a dedication to our mysterious imaginal capacity to meet and dialogue with less visible worlds. She is deeply bound to the otherwise force of rivers, and the queer communities and ancestors that make her being possible. Her work in guiding others in the encounter between wild world and wild psyche is supported by ongoing training with Animas Valley Institute.
Each cycle will include a session with a guest artist (tbc) bringing additional threads of somatic practice, grief work, plant medicine, re-storying, shamanic practice, and offering decolonial, queer, and disability justice perspectives.
