‘The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.’ Paul Shepard
​~~~~

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that labor
at night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought,
is it dry, the cups empty,
wheeling, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep,
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

                                  -Antonio Machado
TESTIMONY 2022

Inside the Grief and Gratitude initiation, Azul is a force-field of intention. Rites of passage, truth mandalas, the practice of intimate consent, and pathosophy (wisdom born of suffering) are woven into the vital medicine Azul offers for broken warriors, outcasts, the grief-laden, and victims of Life. She sings us home, in all our prima materia, and we return to our villages, carrying the sensual, tingling tatters of connection. We now know a deeper way. We carry seeds from sorrows, devotion from defiance, and liberation from limitation, and we ready our kin for their journeys.


Throughout this initiation, I left nothing behind. The journey enabled me to accept and “altar” the estranged parts of me – the over-accommodating, toxically numbed, beaten down person who had vanquished her dreams for societal acceptance. I composted my deep longings into liberations. 

Today, I carry the gifts of astonishment, for life just as it is; a belief in the marvelous, cosmic connections we move within; profound respect for rites of passage and ceremony to move through the thousand-cuts of being alive; and gratitude for Azul, and all the wisdom-keepers who have embodied a different way of being. I make a declaration to hospice Nature, and to sing for the unsung. May it be so.
JENNIFER COMEAU

TESTIMONY -  2022

I am sensing a new and quiet emergence and direction emerging from my being since working with Azul. After recent numb, frozen time occupier state. The process feels like its continuing to reconfigure my being in small and simple ways as I write this. I recognise a quiet knowing and wisdom in Azuls gentle presence, guidance and witnessing. I am grateful to her wisdom journey, her allies and her kin (blood and water)
 
​Eleanor

TESTIMONY 2022

In his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O'Donohue wrote, “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practised careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.” could have been a declaration governing Azul Thome՛’s approach to her crafted rituals, storytelling and artistry.

As of now I’m a former initiate of Azul Thome՛ and as I look back to my journey with my former mentor and friend, I too have honed my own approach to grief with greater depth and understanding. Azul’s inspirational artistic expression has brought a form of beauty of her own and encouraged us to bring our artistic expression into our work. Unfortunately, my artistic expression won’t be putting any bread on the kitchen table for my children's consumption any time soon; but like O’Donohue I too see greater beauty in all things both human and non-human. 

JOHN MOIR 
TESTIMONY 2022


How to hospice a dying world? How to move with grace in times of trouble? How to not end up a hungry ghost after dying? These were some of the questions that I was living with when I came across the advertisement of Azul’s “6 Gates of Grief Apprenticeship/Initiation into Gratitude and Grief”. It seemed to me that becoming more skilled at grieving (and praising) was a fundamental piece of the puzzle. When I joined the apprenticeship, I was a novice griever – I would either go numb or feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of grief wanting to pass through me. Growing up in a culture that is death phobic and grief illiterate, I sat almost frozen in the first two grief composting councils, not knowing what to do with myself or how to be with the big emotions of others. This kickstarted a process of decolonizing my mind from a culture that wants to repress, deny, solve or fix things that are incontrollable. Only when I gave full permission to my heart to break open further and to express itself, without fear of shame or judgment, could I contribute to and benefit more freely from the grief composting councils. This journey towards expressing more of myself and allowing my “dangerous voice” to come through has only just started but has benefitted much from the safe container created by Azul and Cristina. The support from the other apprentices, particularly in our monthly triad sessions, has been invaluable and created friendships that will last for life. The apprenticeship has made itself felt in all areas of my life, almost imperceptibly so, as it is mostly the “small” things that have changed. But the small things always end up being the big things, no? I have a stronger connection to my heart, my innate ability to create, a stronger relationship with the unseen and feel more supported by Life. Sometimes my heart wants to burst with gratitude for the beauty of life. I did not think it would be possible to combine an apprenticeship and an initiation into one and the same offering, but Azul and Cristina proved me wrong. My Soul feels more and more alive and in alignment with its purpose. I look forward to using the skills gained in the apprenticeship to host local grief tending circles and ceremonies that contribute to creating the world of our longing.

MARIANNE BRITTIJN (Cape Town, South Africa) 

TESTIMONY -  2022

Azul and her allies were exactly what I needed at a time in my life of deep searching and recovery from trauma. She helped me sink into the dark and find the medicine there, and then slowly guided me back to the light. Her manner of deep listening, artful questioning, and her wealth of resources, wisdom and knowing was a potent mix that helped me feel safe but at the same time pushed to explore beyond the edges.
Mentoring with Azul is really a meeting of souls and being seen in a whole new way.
I have deep gratitude for her and what she brings to the world.

Vanessa B

 creative enSOULing Mentoring

with Azul Thomé 

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Azul Thome
Hello dear apprentices to Grief, Love, Death and reBirth.

As well as the ceremonies and collective apprentices I offer, throughout the year,  one~on~one and small closed group of mentoring and grief composting counselling sessions in the SOULand Way.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As many have sensed and observed, we have passed the time of preparation.

The mentoring I offer has matured and ripened, as I have, in the last two years - through hosting the virus, loosing all - home, money and work and now finding myself in France after 34 years in England.

Like many I have been tempered, smithed by the hands of soul now apprenticing to placing my forehead to soil , heart above the head, humus making, in endurance and entanglement with beauty and mystery .

When I have the privilege to mentor and accompany people, as they themselves passage, I bring the whole council of all beings with me. I bring the well and wise ancestors. I also bring the artist, the alchemist, the visionary, the medicine of the one in exile, trained since birth to the natural laws of seasons, cycles, patterns, in how to adapt and belong to the present moment. I will listen to them in you.

People and small group who seek to eat at my generous and abundant table are welcome and legitimate.
What we always start with is feeding life. We also meet the four sisters - Grief, Love, Death and Rebirth



I also hold a Person Centered Counselling Diploma (Carl Rogers), an Art Therapy Certificate and a MA from Schumacher College I titled: " the Art of collective Grief as if Life and Death really Matter" 
Before we embark on a journey together I will give 30 minutes free on Zoom for us to meet, for you to ask any questions and feel into the work I offer.

I am not a psychotherapist neither am I 'qualified' psychologist.
I offer deep creative soul work informed by a tempering life and 25 years of deep personal and community work as a dedicated soul activist, ritualist, animist and artist.

Once we agree to work together we will agree on the number of sessions to start with to be reviewed at the end of the cycle. I might send you on soulful tasks like seat by a river, make an eARTh object or visit a particular tree or plant...

My hourly fee ~ your investment:
£90 to £130/hour (depending on what you can afford, how many you are etc...)  
I always have one space as a gift to someone who has lost everything.

​Once we agree that we want to work together i will ask for the agreed fee to be transferred before we begin.

I ask that you commit to a minimum of 4 sessions

I work in English and in French 
​I look forward to hearing from you!
with gratitude and attentiveness.
Azul Thome

PLEASE NOTE: I will require 48hours notice if you need to change your session.  Thank you for your support and understanding. 
"I witness your process as a woman in full awareness of her capacity to listen to earth, to listen to life, in all of its many forms, and to “channel“ from these places to inform us all. You do this in words, and in your artwork so powerfully. I feel that this medicine is absolutely key to the world right now, and is mostly disregarded although that is shifting. 

​To see all of your deep meditation/relationship/opening/vision/artwork that depicted many of our non-human relatives being really seen for the Medicine it is and put into service during the XR Movement in London was like witnessing the breaking of a barrier to a portal that is now open and available for the world. 

I have also witnessed the way that you have held this deep power, its elation and pain mostly alone, though you have tried to share it with us. And even though it took such a long time for the opening to come you were steadfast. 

You are in it for all the right reasons. When they let me know that they were giving me this gift, it wasn’t long at all before I knew it was to go to you. I hesitated, so this is me self-witnessing my own paradigm, because I said shouldn’t I give this to an indigenous person? 

And then I laughed because I know you are so deeply indigenous, and my work has been so much to acknowledge how indigenous the lineage of the UK is. 

You feel that the same way that I do, probably 10 times more so actually. ...

PAT MCCABE
Azul  possesses an extraordinary ability to give voice to those pieces of soul that have been marginalized in our modern frenzied culture.

Her counsel is a form of re-membering where we recall what we instinctively know, but have forgotten. She helps reknit our lives back into the ongoing conversation with the green world, with air and water, light and color.

Insightful, intuitive and deeply sensitive to the connective tissue that binds soul and world,

Azul’s One2One offerings invite us back into an intimacy with the surrounding and enveloping earth. Listen and find yourself entering a larger, more animate world.
​
Francis Weller
"This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness” 
​- Mary Oliver -
'Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outwork of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys.

​For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.'

​Rainer Maria Rilke, August 1904 ~ Letters to a Young Poet
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with love
SOULand, Azul Thome, Soul Mentoring, Grief Composting, WomBelt weaving, Apprenticeship, Pathosophy, Water ceremonies, Black tent Council, Earth Temples, eARTh ART, Soul Songlines, Inner Council, Soul Activism, Rituals, Initiations, Returning to Earth what was Stolen, Mending the gold thread,