You are warmly invited to scroll through the slide show below to help you get a sense of SOULand growing Programme
SOULand is a response to our traumatised, collapsing and transforming world.
It is a growing Programme of soul rooted rituals, resilience trainings, eARTh and deep mentorship
to restore our humanity back to a sane relationship with the Earth, mature the human soul
and Make the World of our Longing as a graceful gift to Life.
Knowing now it is probably to late for us and... 'Dancing the Wild Dance of no Hope'
It is a vision of a great gesture of gratitude to Earth.
It is soul activism.
—Azul-Thome´, founder of SOULand
It is a growing Programme of soul rooted rituals, resilience trainings, eARTh and deep mentorship
to restore our humanity back to a sane relationship with the Earth, mature the human soul
and Make the World of our Longing as a graceful gift to Life.
Knowing now it is probably to late for us and... 'Dancing the Wild Dance of no Hope'
It is a vision of a great gesture of gratitude to Earth.
It is soul activism.
—Azul-Thome´, founder of SOULand
SOULand: Making the World of our Longing has recently become SOULand : Making the World of Earth's Longing in response to Corona Virus insights.
SOULand is a response to our uninitiated, traumatised, collapsing and transforming world.
It is a growing programme of nature-informed rituals, a mycelium of trainings&apprenticeship, eARTh and mentorship. To restore and weave our humanity back to a deep & wild relationship with the Earth, mature the human soul and co-create the world of our longing. It is a vision of sanctuary, a great giveaway. It is soul activism.
SOULand is a response to our uninitiated, traumatised, collapsing and transforming world.
It is a growing programme of nature-informed rituals, a mycelium of trainings&apprenticeship, eARTh and mentorship. To restore and weave our humanity back to a deep & wild relationship with the Earth, mature the human soul and co-create the world of our longing. It is a vision of sanctuary, a great giveaway. It is soul activism.
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Making the World of Earth's Longing Longing is the language of SOUL. A current moving through us, whispering wildly to us how to come back Home. Most of us behave as if we were homeless to our SOUL and orphaned to our Earth with great consequences. When we feel deep longings moving through our bodies and through our dreams we are blessed by SOUL. So what happens to these Longings? Why are we in such dire state if SOUL constantly speaks through our imagination, hearts and dreams? Are they like seeds falling on concrete? What does our SOUL need? These longings moving through us... could be bringing us to one of the initiatory gates of grief. Grief of not being welcome, wanted, enough, or of not knowing enough, have enough support, money, skills etc...Paralysis, shame and envy can become the new guests in our beings. Grief is a gate that most of us want to avoid at all costs, even if it costs us our lives ~ therefore we never move beyond the call of SOUL. An initiation to empower us to create the world of our longing is miscarried. We stop, numb and stay small not to feel our sadness, our numbness, our fears and anger. We are not skilled in Grief neither in Love. A terrible poverty takes place in our heart and imagination. SOULand provides collective spaces for the release of our sacred grief, so we can meet ourselves as creative gifted human beings ~ a little more empowered and resourced to make the World of our Longing as a great gift... Initiation Initiation is a invitation to wildly court and lean into the SOUL of four Sisters - Grief, Love, Death and Birth. There is no true initiation without the ‘small’ death of our personality, our set positioning in life or our childlike naivety. A well held initiatory ritual will bring us closer to a homecoming, a return to our interconnectedness with all of life, transforming our sense of being homeless or orphaned into belonging. Most importantly we move from being zombies in our lives to being fully aware of our death and therefore offering our lives fully for the thriving of Life... https://www.souland.org https://www.facebook.com/Soulandmakingtheworldofourlonging/ Grief Composting Circles and Apprenticeship The Grief Compositing Circles are communal rituals of 4 hours infused with beauty and connection with all beings, humans and all others. Grief in this context is the welcoming of anger, fear, sadness, despair, numbness and the mystery of all these emotions as we welcome them in a collective safe space. The Circles hold an important part in total darkness as if in a compost heap, a womb or a kiva. Sounds and wailing are freely used to encourage our wild and sensuous selves to be present. Wild means of nature, not feral or out of control! CIRCLES: https://www.souland.org/grief-composting.html TRAININGS: https://www.souland.org/training.html FACEBOOK GROUP https://www.facebook.com/groups/griefcompostingcircles/ The Message of water Water is SOULand’s main guide. One grey day of December I found myself by the river Dart in Devon who gifted me with an astonishing message of Love. ‘’My dear child do not worry about me, Water. I recover quickly with the song of our birds, the love of trees, with movement, moments of rest and the prayers moving around our Earth. I regain balance with your heartfelt tears, your remembered songs added to the ones of so many now. Do not focus your energy on 'Saving me'. Something way more profound is taking place right now, listen and observe! All of us; Soil, Water, Plants, Air, Animals and all Ancestors are Calling you Humans, to us so we can Save your species. We know and have known for a while that you do not have much time left if you do not wake up to your birthright Belonging to Earth and come Home soon, real real soon. We keep dying, we keep Giving Away our Lives to shake you up from a deep and very long amnesia. Once you can allow the truth and quality of such Love to permeate through your traumatised being and desolate soul you will wake up from a life time of anaesthesia to your immense grief and capacity for Love. When you create containers of sacred beauty that opens your Heart to what Love truly is then you will realise with a massive sob that you were loved all along, always have and for ever by all of Us who you think You are Saving! You have five years as a species to Wake up, Mature and Remember in your bones that you belong to Life " https://www.souland.org/water.html Conversations with Grief and Water Conversations with Grief of Water is a series of interviews with women and men engaged fully with our collapsing world, our dying systems and our grief. People engaged with deep love and longing to fully participate in our world in ways of soul and beauty. They respond to the message of Water received on 2nd of December. So far I have spoken with and recorded Joanna Macy, Simon Be, Li An Phoa, Jon Young, Francis Weller, Manda Scott, Pat McCabe, Megan Hollingsworth, Stephan Harding, Pablo Servigne and Stephen Jenkinson… each one bringing a thread for a cloth weaving in the past, present and future… I anticipate mystery and our bone memory to be awakened by it. https://www.souland.org/conversations-with-grief--water.html Earth Temples on the edge of cities I have a vision of an Earth Temple at the edge of every town and every city. A circular womb-like place of astonishing beauty celebrating all of creation .. a place to rest into, reflect, pray, listen, speak and sing to all sentient beings and restore our animist selves. After a year of dreaming, drawings of the Earth Temple have arrived. It is 25 Meters wide. Blessed by 2000 generations of ancestors. 4 living entrances and a Kiva in the centre. A Feminine shaped Temple for all. Made of the local material found on site. I am calling for a meeting with anyone who resonates with helping create the first Earth Temple - Makers, Cobbers, Strawbellers, Glassmakers, Carpenters, Alchemists, eARTh Artists, Planners, Weavers of Natural Laws, Shambhala Warriors, and other cracked and called human beings. https://www.souland.org/earth-temple.html |
Life Cairn in Totnes
Every 24 hours, between 100 and 150 species of animals, invertebrates, fungi and plants go extinct. They will never court, sing, nest, seed, or dance their life-bringing rituals again. They are not dead - Death being food for the birthing of new life, no they are extinct! ...
Can we ponder on the difference in our own heart and the impact on our soul?
We are increasingly noticing that we need to gather and rise up in circles and community groups to meet the enormity of the consequences of our long term disconnection to the interconnectedness with all of Life thus bringing up an immense grief, un~skilled and feared in many of us.
On the 1st December, the Totnes community is invited to create a Life Cairn, a memorial for the honouring of Extinct Species. Please join us if you are touched by the 6th massive extinction of Life on Earth and want to give Away your gifts, broken hearts and talents to this offering.
Artists, singers, musicians, children, elders, mothers, fathers, lovers of all sorts and all two, three and four legged welcome!
https://www.souland.org/life-cairn-in-totnes.html
See Life Cairn in Totnes Event on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/events/1773741646245298/
"WomBelt: Weaving Women back into Matter"
Our womb is a place of great wisdom for ourselves and one another, to stand soulfully and maturely on and for our Earth's wellbeing. Any trauma will create a dam and a great blockage to the river of our lives.
A Wombelt is made using the backstrap weaving method. Making a Wombelt is a ritual, a rite of passage, a way back to mattering, to honour our womb and the space holding it. We are weaving ourselves and our stories back together for one another, to skill up, to mend, to actively pray for one another.
Because we Matter, we are matter, mater, mother, Earth...
Life Belts
A day ritual of backstrap weaving for men and woman called to make the world of their longing by weaving the soul threads of their lives around a tree.
Collective Wombelts
WomanFest, the first All Women Radical Participation festival.
Azul wove for three days. She invited the women to respond to the question ‘What is your deepest wildest longing?’. 73 women wrote their response onto a roll of fabric. Each scroll was inserted into the weaving, therefore creating a collective Wombelt of our deepest and wildest longings. At the closing ceremony, the belt was given away and wrapped around the hips of Tanya Jacut, the visionary woman of this festival.
Oxford Storytelling festival
Azul was invited to weave her Wombelts. She decided to create only one ~ a collective Life Wombelt weaving people’s longing into it. She invited people to respond to ‘What is the world of your longing and belonging?’. Their responses are written on little fabric scrolls and inserted in the weaving. There is 108 responses offerings in this belt. The belt is to be given to a cave yet to be found. A cave, a Kiva is an Earth womb able to listen to such a soulful gift.
https://www.souland.org/wombelt.html
https://www.facebook.com/wombelt/
Inner Council of a Woman Queen
The archetype of the Queen when welcomed in its entirety is in service to something bigger than herself. The Queen with her King learns to listen and protect life both within the inner council and within her community of human and non-human beings.
The other 8 archetypes of the woman are then at her service. They are the Mother, the Child, the Nun, the Maiden, the Lover, the Huntress, the Magician, the Crone.
Listening to our inner council brings us to meet our inner archetypes, to welcome their lights and their shadows, to nourish decision-making for the thriving of Life.
Each flag became an invitation for the Daimon of one archetype to find the place to belong and share their deep wisdom. The meeting of the archetype and the other than human invites and welcomes an animist understanding of our archetypes.
This is a generous response to a prayer for soul sanity.
https://www.souland.org/inner-council-of-a-woman.html
Inner Council for men and women to come 2019
Returning to Earth what was stolen
Returning to Earth our silver, gold, precious stones, diamond, ivory, coral, platinum.
All those have been extracted with terrible violence and destructive impact to all living beings. The mining destroys rivers, people, animals and whole ecosystems to feed our greed and addiction to power.
I invite us to join me as I also return the result of my time as a goldsmith and silversmith in our mountains, forests, rivers and seas. To feel our sorrow, say sorry and make amend to come back momentarily to some resemblance of sanity.
We can then honour our creativity and the alchemist in us by using local and renewable material in a sacred way again.
https://www.souland.org/returning-to-earth-what-was-stolen.html
Every 24 hours, between 100 and 150 species of animals, invertebrates, fungi and plants go extinct. They will never court, sing, nest, seed, or dance their life-bringing rituals again. They are not dead - Death being food for the birthing of new life, no they are extinct! ...
Can we ponder on the difference in our own heart and the impact on our soul?
We are increasingly noticing that we need to gather and rise up in circles and community groups to meet the enormity of the consequences of our long term disconnection to the interconnectedness with all of Life thus bringing up an immense grief, un~skilled and feared in many of us.
On the 1st December, the Totnes community is invited to create a Life Cairn, a memorial for the honouring of Extinct Species. Please join us if you are touched by the 6th massive extinction of Life on Earth and want to give Away your gifts, broken hearts and talents to this offering.
Artists, singers, musicians, children, elders, mothers, fathers, lovers of all sorts and all two, three and four legged welcome!
https://www.souland.org/life-cairn-in-totnes.html
See Life Cairn in Totnes Event on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/events/1773741646245298/
"WomBelt: Weaving Women back into Matter"
Our womb is a place of great wisdom for ourselves and one another, to stand soulfully and maturely on and for our Earth's wellbeing. Any trauma will create a dam and a great blockage to the river of our lives.
A Wombelt is made using the backstrap weaving method. Making a Wombelt is a ritual, a rite of passage, a way back to mattering, to honour our womb and the space holding it. We are weaving ourselves and our stories back together for one another, to skill up, to mend, to actively pray for one another.
Because we Matter, we are matter, mater, mother, Earth...
Life Belts
A day ritual of backstrap weaving for men and woman called to make the world of their longing by weaving the soul threads of their lives around a tree.
Collective Wombelts
WomanFest, the first All Women Radical Participation festival.
Azul wove for three days. She invited the women to respond to the question ‘What is your deepest wildest longing?’. 73 women wrote their response onto a roll of fabric. Each scroll was inserted into the weaving, therefore creating a collective Wombelt of our deepest and wildest longings. At the closing ceremony, the belt was given away and wrapped around the hips of Tanya Jacut, the visionary woman of this festival.
Oxford Storytelling festival
Azul was invited to weave her Wombelts. She decided to create only one ~ a collective Life Wombelt weaving people’s longing into it. She invited people to respond to ‘What is the world of your longing and belonging?’. Their responses are written on little fabric scrolls and inserted in the weaving. There is 108 responses offerings in this belt. The belt is to be given to a cave yet to be found. A cave, a Kiva is an Earth womb able to listen to such a soulful gift.
https://www.souland.org/wombelt.html
https://www.facebook.com/wombelt/
Inner Council of a Woman Queen
The archetype of the Queen when welcomed in its entirety is in service to something bigger than herself. The Queen with her King learns to listen and protect life both within the inner council and within her community of human and non-human beings.
The other 8 archetypes of the woman are then at her service. They are the Mother, the Child, the Nun, the Maiden, the Lover, the Huntress, the Magician, the Crone.
Listening to our inner council brings us to meet our inner archetypes, to welcome their lights and their shadows, to nourish decision-making for the thriving of Life.
Each flag became an invitation for the Daimon of one archetype to find the place to belong and share their deep wisdom. The meeting of the archetype and the other than human invites and welcomes an animist understanding of our archetypes.
This is a generous response to a prayer for soul sanity.
https://www.souland.org/inner-council-of-a-woman.html
Inner Council for men and women to come 2019
Returning to Earth what was stolen
Returning to Earth our silver, gold, precious stones, diamond, ivory, coral, platinum.
All those have been extracted with terrible violence and destructive impact to all living beings. The mining destroys rivers, people, animals and whole ecosystems to feed our greed and addiction to power.
I invite us to join me as I also return the result of my time as a goldsmith and silversmith in our mountains, forests, rivers and seas. To feel our sorrow, say sorry and make amend to come back momentarily to some resemblance of sanity.
We can then honour our creativity and the alchemist in us by using local and renewable material in a sacred way again.
https://www.souland.org/returning-to-earth-what-was-stolen.html
Are we called for the greatest initiation into maturity ever entrusted to us? 
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The Rock peoples of Wales. a Gateway
...we are faced with the possibility of our own extinction as humans—a demise caused by our own actions; an amnesia about what it means to belong to an animate Earth; and a numbness created by a culture that simply cannot cope with emotion, much less death, on the scale we are now asked to absorb... What if we let our grief ripen us, temper us, initiate us, and then standing together, strong and heartbroken, carried our longing like a lantern into this dark night? 
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"If we are not first heartbroken by what is happening to our planet, the earth community, the people we love, and ourselves, all other forms of preparation for our daunting future are quite simply, incidental. The collapse of industrial civilization will result in unimaginable loss of life, and those who survive will either become bigger people, or they will be emotionally and spiritually decimated. The heart, not the head, determines the outcome of that reality."
— Carolyn Baker
some beautiful WORDs of people passing through the gates of SOULand
Dear SOULand thank you for arising through Azul and for her integrity in passing on this wisdom as it grows and for her to be willing to stay in the fire even when it burns and keep sharing at it grows and reshapes.
This is a living teaching that is alive because of the willingness to embrace the dead.
I loved the giving of ritual through experience and in that way I can take it all in its pieces and add it to my other pieces that will become an offering to the healing of humanity.
This is empowers rather than given a format to reproduce. As I experience each ritual, I can make it my own and share it from that place of knowing and learning.
Thank you Azul for demonstrating humility in the face of criticisms and showing me the strength of staying true to the teachings and to the trees and ancestors who are guiding you.
This sharing is deep, raw and visceral. It inspires me to take ma raw passion tempered by listening to the guidance of nature, out in tot he world, however it shows up... with honesty and love. I hear that action needs to be taken and I will. I am acting in deep love.
Joy Gaia
Thank you all who have had the calling and the courage to court with Grief, Death, Love and reBirth this weekend . Here is some of their words: Food and balm for my soul and for SOULand <3
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The world, no not the World. Society today can feel barren and bleak, empty and dry
SOULand brings to my life a rich, raw, real, fertile place of belonging
A place my soul can be heard, can land in safety and truth ~ Gratitude and Grief Alchemy
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SOUL
We are coming home what it really means to be human _ fully feeling, fully living, fully loving, fully here on this Earth with all its beauty, grief and gratitude woven in with all our relatives of all kind.
Re-membering - becoming once more attentive members of life community.
SOULand
The depth fo your offerings blows me away . Please keep walking that walk with us, following spirit and being the pioneer of life and death that you are
Thank you and deep bows from my soul to yours. Nikki <3
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Who would have thought that there could be so much joy in grief?
The witnessing and honouring of a being in their pure, raw unadulterated expression of deepest sorrow and grief touches in a way that inspires deeper connection to all of creation and a re-membering of all shadow parts that we don't dare to share but that may be so welcome when we do.
What a privilege. I am so grateful, I needed to call to step in & do this work.
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I am coming home to my village. I am part of a work that is moving the tectonic plates of the Earth. Here is a key that is crucial in humanities journey of restoration of the old ways. The ways that make sense, the ways that serve life and honour life and our place in this sacred web. Like Water for my Soul.
Ayla
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Dear SOULand
A thousand thank yous for opening the precious and essential doorway to grief, this prayer of longing and love to the world. This thread is deeply needed, like medicine for a starved soul. Deep in my body and the wider body of the land, these tears you invite replenish and refertilises a wasteland. Thank you for weaving me back into the web of belonging
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SOULand of golden-lit branches. SOULand of moist dark soil.
I commit to wake up again and again.
Wake up and see all the colours of emotion you wake in my skin.
I commit to dive into the dark.
I commit to wash myself with sorrow.
To grow the seeds of your soul into my branches.
Titiane
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Dear SOULand
Keep responding, keep the center, keep watching, keep in touch, keep the old, keep re-birthing into new. Something happened that was good for me, and good for those I help, this weekend. I refuse to gush. But I am with your sincere keeping on. Abraha
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Dear SOULand
On the path towards my resilience, you initiated my inner child and all the parts of me which needed strength, holding me
SOULand you are compost for the soul, you help me alchemise all that moves my guts and transform it into fertile ground, making it a gift for the future to come.
SOULand thanks for keeping me alive and fierce, for hearing the drums of death next to the songs of love.
You reminded me how brave I am, how rituals and connexion to other beings are our deepest true nature, how ancestors and guides will support us in the darkness.
Thousand times thanks and my heart blessings
Linda
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The shimmering attracted me
The shy glint caught my eye
then I finally drew back the veil
and entered.
Into a world I had longed for,
longer than I can say
longer than my ancestors can say
we all came in together
Mycelium, sky, water, soil, feathers, bees, stones, trees, webs, baskets, beetles, flys, bears, fish, elephants, stags, cats of Africa.
Together we declared our love, in tears, anger, laughter, rage, mysterious silence, song, drum, beauty.
We loved hard and deep and the bees
wove us together with a golden
thread of their hybrid honey
We feasted and now we go to feed,.
Lucyann
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SOULand is the place of our longing
After 3 days of ritual and teaching, it is evident how this place is a co-creation of our weaving. I am heartened to feel the strength of men and women growing in their maturity to welcome grief, gratitude, death and re-brith back into the fire of their homes and communities.
The village needs the village fire, and I have seen how we can welcome it. I have seen how all beings welcome it - the human and non-human, the ancestors. This fire is needed. The Earth calls it. I remember
Love, Kristinha
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“ You are creating a village for me to enter safely into and receive what I expect to receive.
To know before my birth that there are sane humans out there on Earth. You are teaching me to grieve, to laugh, to cry, that I am safe to be heard, to be courageous, that my life is worth being honoured and cared for. I am a messenger of hope, the dawn before the dark. I will be a man of the new time. “ <3 Baby the unborn yet... ( in Ayla’s womb at 6 and a half months)
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We find our souls in natures bounty ~ we feel fragmented but we find ourselves in all the parts, flowers, trees, rivers, animals. Like the great work of soul alchemy- we bring this weaving into the golden thread, reconnecting with all of life - in homeopathic vibrations of spirit animals or through diving in fully to river gushing.
There can be blockages on this path of reconnection to our soul nature as they are one Grief. In the way we know best we dive into this grief
There are layers upon layers from all angles
As grief’s tears break the dams of blocks in our hearts, our beings, our souls
open to pairs gift-love
A love under and deeper and more blessed than we can ever imagine.
A joy that we can feel our tribe, our village
I can hear them singing the most beautiful ancestral symphony in the wild hills of the land i belong to
Helen K
https://www.souland.org/training.html
'Listening' eARTh created by the River Dart. Azul Thome