Dear travellers of rough waters You are warmly invited to join in this 3 YEARS PROGRAMME for the reGENERATION of our SOULS VOYAGE: a SCHOOL and SANCTUARY for the SOUL TWO RIVERS rivering through the 3 years programme Sept 2024 to Dec 2026 - Registrations are open until June - limited to 25 students ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ TWO RIVERS rivering through the 3 years programme 1 - FEEDING and LEARNING of the LANGUAGE of SOUL Altar making - wild offerings - sacred postactivism - unlearning practices - feeding the soul - Grief Composting - fierce love - soul activism - intuitive writing - die the small deaths - welcome the rebirths - eARTh ART making beauty... 2 - BECOMING a DOULA for the birthing of ELDERS guided by a cohort of teachers and by my twin books: 9 passAGES to Die Alive and PathoSophy: A Living Art- Wisdom born of Grief and Suffering ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The next Q&A session with Azul Thome the creative visionary behind it is this Tuesday 9th April 5pm EET (Eastern European Time) for 90 minutes max. CHECK YOUR TIMEZONE I am so moved to now be ready to present to you the hive of 2024 and part of 2025 after much dreaming, spinning and weaving through the winter and early spring. While the world is falling onto itself, Soul is like a great underground River of deep imagination. We will voyage to and with Her in much praise and offerings. I PRESENT TO YOU THE ENSOULING CREW that will guide, challenge, inspire, feed, teach, share and accompany you on the VOYAGE! They come to you with their Water Body and a Sentient Being. The cohort is not only human. That was also a long time longing, to see teachers and guides with their wider family of entanglement… Here they are! With profound gratitude for their souls and medicine. FOR MORE INFORMATIONS
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"The human soul is hungry for beauty… When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming".
| This morning I would like to write about the toxic spell I am under with COVID19, the proposed journey from pathology to pathosophy through the sacred work of grief composting and the vital feeding of Soul. What happens if we move from allopathy to allosophy? What is the root of the collective terror and disorientation we feel? Can the disappearance of our nomadic freedom be the awakening call for loving more furiously and for radical generous cœurage? I am writing so when I forget again and fall under the strong spell cast on us, I can at least return to it. May it be so, inshallah and inshgaia! I have no answers. I am sharing my experience of the last 2 months when I was not sure I would come back from madness and illness. The last 9 months has seen me feeling dis-eased, very disorientated with a brain unable to do simple tasks I have been experiencing deep physical and psychic pain while feeling uncontrollable raw emotions. I am deeply exhausted with cough and breathlessness. The above list holds the perfect materials for an alchemist and a medicine person to be born and/or practice. The above list also holds dangerous materials and definitions for a corrupted system to use to control us and put on under a spell...the spell of terror, blind obedience and of course increase isolation from all that matters... DEPRESSION in OUR SYSTEM unable to grieve I took a risk to seek support from the allopathic system of my gp practice 2 months ago. I was immediately put on antidepressant, painkillers and valium. I took it all and walked again on that path of medicated pathology. I had to find something I had lost the last time I was there. So I put the pills on my altar and prayed for a safe return. After a few days of swallowing the pills I gradually stopped crying, the pains in my body dulled and a feeling resembling a voiceless stupor wrapped over me. I became controllable again, pacified and numbed. WILD GRIEF, MOVEMENT and FOREST After a few weeks I stopped it all and allowed myself to feel what i had parked for the experiment. First my immense grief, sorrow and rage moved again. I allowed my body to move and paint, stitch and embroidered through the many stages of pain and I relearned to lay on the forest skin while breathing with the trees, my kins. I needed to leave the home of Soul to return to it with some refreshed clarity. I am unsure if it is wise to use myself as the raw material but sometimes we are required to be the laboratory, the alchemist, the temple, the dangerous path, the prima materia and the patient all at once. PATHOLOGY and PATHOSOPHY Being conditioned to pathologies, our experiences of pain, strong feelings and suffering all our life we seem to look for something to fit these symptoms into. ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, depression, psychosis, bipolar, autism, manic, etc... When tired and alone we just want to rest there, for a moment, for a sense of veneered belonging, a home, however dysfunctional it is. I noticed that when I think of dying it gives me the same feeling of rest and belonging!!!? That makes me suspicious, it awakes in me to the possibility that something dangerously unfriendly is going on in our world right now. A world that makes us want to rest and belong in the arms of the system that harms and controls us... Are we part of a human system that would rather see us dying than living? Looking at the evidence, it is probably the case. After all our healing system is all about illness, not about well being, kindness or the thriving of life. People who are truly alive are dangerous! Perhaps because they are fearless, interconnected to the web of life and compassionate... These pathologies were named and defined by whom and for whom? Why have we accepted them with such docility? Same question can be transferred onto every part of our society, politics, laws, truths, all over the world ... These pathologies become prison cells, they take away our freedom, stifle our imagination and crash our dignity. They enable medication to be passed on without proper check about its true effect. Power is never shared with the sick and the suffering one. Our return to the web of life, to our wild grief, to our songs, dance, art, poetry, old stories and empowering myths are never part of the prescription. We are never asked about our relationship to our visible and invisible allies and to our well and wise ancestors. All of these threads are never spun by doctors and patients.. They are bellitelated, shamed and laughed at most often. They are flipanteley and dangerously named as irrelevant matters and discarded. If you have ever been in a psychiatric hospital you will know what I mean. Hospitals are the same. We love you nurses and some docs. It is the system and the anesthesia I am addressing here. OTHER WAYS I am reminded of a few of my mentors. Francis Weller about depression: " depression is a plea from the soul to stop all you are doing and go down on your knees to feel your grief" Martin Prechtel who said to a director of a psychiatric hospital: "Aha this is where you keep your shamans!" and of Malidoma Somé : What a real shaman sees at a mental institution So if we look at the spell of ALLOPATHY: "treatment of disease by remedies that produce effects opposite to the symptoms," The definition says it all. How can I break the strong spell of allopathy . I call on Sophia, I call on Allosophy: "wisdom born of the other" "Allo" means 'other..."Al": means 'beyond'... Where is 'Pathosophy' in this? where is "the wisdom born of suffering, of feeling" Where does she reside? Why is the breath of freedom and respect that come from the enquiry not encouraged by our medical system? I let you guess. SOPHIA Sophia is the feminine aspect of divine wisdom. You can see that She is not what the people in power will want to foster in the people they are meant to serve and protect. Recently I have been offered another emerging pathology : "long covid or post covid, or covid syndrome". In the uk the medical system is setting up a series of test at the end of November to identify us and create a new illness. The illness will lead to new medications . I rested there for a few days, in the seat of being part of the reffered one for the new experience. My ego and love of pioneer adventures got confused. I even felt relief again to belong to some study of suffering even if unknown. To fall into the void, to fall into the unknown frightens me, so I grab prematurely onto some offered solutions, like a shocked amnesiac, anaesthetised zombie. I realised this morning that I had given up the fight for beauty. That by being offered a comfortable and easy solution my whole being was weakening even more, divatilasing. By being offered a pathology woven in the terror of Covid19, added to the growing control of our lives, the world wide authoritarianism and a mad making system I became even more unwell. I was under a spell. I am under a spell. And the forgetting keeps happening, the falling asleep - again and again. It took me to look into the eyes of a painting I made in the forest to wake up to my strength again. That tree is becoming my temple. |
“I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that.”
― Martin Prechtel,
And words from Khalil Gibran on
PAIN
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break,
that its heart may stand in the sun,
so must you know pain.
Much of your pain is self-chosen
.It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings,
though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter
has moistened with His own sacred tears.”―
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
The Message of Water was given to Azul Thomé on 2nd December 2016 by the River Dart, Devon, UK after she fell on her knees asking the river how to love when there is so much loss? | "I was deeply touched by this message and felt the water call me to translate her words into the spirit of a song, that Mother Water could speak through music to our hearts and call us home... |
For all the people who have died of Corona virus without company or honouring and who are dying in mass now.
On Monday while being ill I received few messages from the Coronavirus. If you have not switched off then welcome , and I hope you can keep a soft view and a wide listening throughout what I am about the share with you. There is fear in my body as I write and yet I must pass this on. | Gaia’s evolution is initiated and activated when Corona’s DNA enters the DNA of a human. |
Being an "intuitive geneticist", a deep dreamer who travels through planes is a gift that has its price. | Being an "intuitive geneticist", a deep dreamer who travels through planes is a gift that has its price. However there is also a duty of care to share the messages if I feel that they might be of beneficial use. See for yourself and let me know in the comments section what it ignites in you if you wish. I would be delighted to read them. Any rudeness will of course be erased. |
Soul whispered to me of "pathosophy" (the wisdom of suffering) since being a child.
It will be through our willingness to be tempered, to walk with a broken heart, to compost collectively our immense grief and the courage to make amend, restore and regenerate the soil & soul of our beautiful home that we may know what it is to be a true human being. Whether we like it or not we are being initiated and 'passaged' into the next phase of being humans here on Earth. Like many of you I was diagnosed, pathologised, institutionalised and medicalised due to behaving 'oddly' and attempting suicide a few times. | Since being a child I have been wondering how to transform suffering into wisdom, into a gift for Life. As a Soul Activist ~ my whole life is now radically (rooted) in service to the sacredness of all Life. That clarity of purpose is a great ally. To be a Give Away for the thriving of all life, as all other species do, is a sort of homecoming in a world filled with homeless orphans lost between being alive and dead. Whether we like it or not we are being initiated and 'passaged' into the next phase of being humans here on Earth. All rites of passage can become a sacred initiation or it can stay a rough unprepared, unaccompanied and unwelcome initiation. It is up to us and to our capacity to create the world of our longing, the world of Soul, the world of the Soul of our Earth. Soul will always take us to the next edge of maturation and Homecoming. Our separation with all that Matters, with all that is made of matter is making life so very ill. It will be through our willingness to be tempered, to walk with a broken heart, to compost collectively our immense grief and the courage to make amend, restore and regenerate the soil & soul of our beautiful home that we may know what it is to be a true human being. |
Life is challenge. Life works us ~ as would a blacksmith who take a piece of steel to shape it gladly through fire, water and pressure ~ instructed by the movement of Soul.
SInce I was conceived suffering was breathing her sulfurique breath down my neck
Life tempered me through great and regular sufferings from birth propelling me to a multitude of foster care 'homes', through being a war child in Beirut then a refugee in France, to then being regularly and brutally violated until early adulthood by two adults who were perhaps to traumatised to mature.
What a fierce and fine training for where we are as a species.
Soul called me to her bosom when i had given up on humans relations including my own possible humanity. I created havoc bringing much suffering to my immediate surrounding. The claws of our colonising culture grabbed me ruthlessly.
Like many of you I was diagnosed, pathologised, institutionalised and medicalised due to behaving 'oddly' and attempting suicide a few times.
Each Death visited event happened at the crucial stages where my Soul called for a rite of Passage, when my psyche was ripening for an initiation into the next ecosophical manifestation of what being a true human means.
Our society does not want true initiated subversive and mature humans
Soul saw through the thick spell of pathologies (the science of suffering) and spoke to me through the seasons of the wild lands, earth rooted art and the sacred ways of the marginals and outcasts.
Soul whispered to me of "pathosophy" (the wisdom of suffering) since being a child.
I "knew" somehow that all this suffering will eventually be of use to others and to Life.
Earth told me and deeply dreamt me through earth~based ceremonies, deep rituals, renegotiating ancestral contracts and mending what was broken through Making the world of my Longing.
Each longing being a thread of Soul's wild imagination for a balanced way of Life.
She, Soul, speaks through you as well, through your deepest longings. I would say dare your life to give that longing to the thriving of Life. What else is there to do?
So i propose that there is a deep wisdom belonging to our earth that knows when our soul needs an initiation ~ that time requires a death of one state of being to transmute into the more mature state so we can serve life fully ~ all in response to the community we live in of humans and non humans.
Most of us have not been ‘passaged’ , have not been guided by the initiated Elders nor the mycelium of deep connection with all our relatives, them beings trees, animals, fungies, the living and the dead, the visible and the no-thing.
I propose that ~ Our earth’s wisdom and care weave her psyche within ours through Pathosophy.
'SOUL Activism is when Maturing as a Species becomes a Graceful and Rebellious act!'
What does it take to shift from a Rough Initiation to a Sacred Initiation?
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small.
There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness.
Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.”
― Francis Weller
From a full heart! Warm greetings from beautiful Totnes, UK and the river Dart ~ The seal and the heron are here, flowers have exploded in Eros beauty and all trees are now with a 1000 greens... This is a well overdue Newsletter! https://mailchi.mp/f3db1b…/the-initiatory-dance-of-rebellion I don't know about you but it has been incredibly EPIC in my life and the ones around me since the start of last November ...#extinctionrebellion #strike4climate #culturedeclaresemergency #deepadaptation #earthprotectors ... SOULand has been engaged in the above adding threads to its active prayer: Making the World of our Longing in small and steady ways Below are some these moments with links. And few INVITATIONs to JOIN SOULand Programme more details as youscroll down: ~ WOMEN INITIATION~ A yearlong Ensouling and Creative journey ~ GRIEF and SOUL APPRENTICESHIP~ A year long for men and women ~eARThONLINE SHOP~ Open ~ Earth Temples in Cities~ London first? ~ SOULand Grief Apprenticeship enFrancewith Pablo Servigne and Nans Thomassey ~ London Water Pilgrimagelaunches XR Actions on 15th April ~ Extinction Rebellion April's Actions in London. Our Totnes community had a strong and wonderful presence on Waterloo Bridge that we occupied and transformed into a Garden Bridge for 7 days and nights. The Black Tent was there as an Earth Temple for rest and mend our broken relationship to our Living World. It was a deeply transformational experience. We are now gathering the learning and soon will be preparing for the next Actions... ~ POLLY HIGGINS ~ R.I.P When our dear Polly died on 21st April I fell on Waterloo Bridge while the police made a mass arrest and rebels sang love songs, Greta spoke at Marble Arch that day and it was Earth Day ~ The next day I felt moved to create a ritual of 40 days of mourning and Ancestralisingvigil for Polly Higgins~ Ways of honouring our dead ~ to accompany the ones we love to the shore of their ancestors. This will be made into a little book for her hubby Ian and team. Here is Day 27 of (40). If you want one booklet emailme with a bit about you and Polly :[email protected] ~ Culture Declares Emergency~ Arts and Culture organisations and individuals declare a Climate and Ecological Emergency SOULand has declared Emergency and so have I as an Individual! Deep Adaptation proposed by Jem Bendell~ Learning each day about the 4 R's after our gathering last December with Jem and 35 others rebels. ~ Resilience ~ Relinquishment ~ Restoration ~ Reconciliation Who best but the bees to know these 4 R's ~ My latest flag of the Dark Matter and Anima Mundi Series: The Bees... They have been here for 120 million years... SOULand Programme and projects ~ GRIEF and SOUL APPRENTICESHIP~ A year long for men and women in 2019 and 2020 ~ Women Initiation~ A Yearlong EnSouling and Creative journey in 2020 ~ Earth Temples in Cities~ wild and wonderful dreams To create one on the edges of Waterloo Bridge, near the River Isis/Thames where the IMAX cinema is at the moment. Working group happening in Totnes twice a month. EVENTSand PROGRAMME the next few months SOULand at FESTIVALS 19th to 21st July Hawkwood College, UK ~ Seeds Festival in Stroud I will bring my eARTh, theEarth Temple in the CityVision, a Grief Composting Ritualand a Water blessing ceremony ~~~~~ 8th to 12th August, near Frome, UK~ WomanFest UK I will be there with the Black Tent and part of SOULand Programme AZUL eARTh New eARTh pieces: " Dark Matter and Anima Mundi" and "Archetypal Daimons" now available to purchase as Cards, Print and Giclé on canvas. A Little Shop is now OPEN ~~~ SOULand dans la Drome en FRANCE ~ SOULand Grief Apprenticeship enFrancewith Pablo Servigne and Nans Thomassey 15 Juin a Die~ Azul Valerie Thome en Conference avecPablo Servigneet Nans Thomassey 16 Juin pres de Die~ Azul Valerie Thome offreun Cercle de compostagede Deuil 12 au15 Decembre 2019 pres de Die~ AprentisSAGE de l'Ame et du Deuil arrive enFrance Plusd'infos:[email protected] ALSO... an ONLINE Grief and Homecoming for XR a Grief Composting for the Rebellionin Totnes, UK ~ 26th June a Water Ceremony will happen in Oxford on 14th July by Isis River. a WomBelt :Weaving Women back into Matter, Totnes, UK ~ 3rd August A bientot dear all and stay connected in these troubled and extraordinary times... Rest in Peace and in Love dear Polly xx with Love, Azul Valerie Thome www.souland.org |
"SOULand is a response to our uninitiated, traumatised, collapsing and transforming world. "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. The Message of Water | SOULand: Making the World of our Longing... Longing is the language of SOUL. A current moving through us, whispering wildly to us how to come back Home to Anima Mundi ~ The Soul of the World. What does longing have to do with an Apprenticeship to Soul and Grief? . 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... ~~~ Grief Composting Circles 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 the sensuous land and waters, not feral or out of control! The circles weave also the work of Francis Weller ~ Joanna Macy ~ Sobonfu Some ~ Steven Jenkinson and Martin Pretchel among others. ~~~ 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. |
"Thank you SOULand for turning your gentle light onto long forgotten place and spaces which were desolate and ghost like within me. " Apprentice
"The strong, robust and respectful container you wove created a space for me to express my grief in all its wild forms. I love that.
The emphasis on personal responsibility and sovereignty is a welcome addition to allow me to find my own way." Apprentice
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