The old myths and philosophies of the West offer up a world in which everything is alive, and has purpose and intentionality of its own. Our oldest stories show us what it might be like to inhabit an animate world in which humans are fully enmeshed. In which animals and birds always have something to teach us, and trees and plants can save or cure us. In which divine women are not only immanent in the land, but are the mediators between the land and the Otherworld, bearing its lifegiving gifts. But over the centuries, these old traditions have been deliberately overwritten, and that sense of awe, of connection, of belonging to a mysterious world which has many depths and layers to explore, is largely missing in our lives today. We’ve lost the voices of the ancestors who might show us how to take up the shimmering story-threads of the past, and weave them into the tapestry of a very different present.

During this retreat, we’ll learn once again how to fully participate in what psychologist James Hillman called ‘a psyche the size of Earth’. We’ll go out and listen to the land’s dreaming, and in the process, we’ll find ourselves getting dreamt. Through story, journeying, writing, map-making and land-based practices, we’ll explore the imaginal in the land, questing for the richly mythic and archetypal Otherworld of native British and Irish traditions.

The work we’ll do is rooted in mythology and archetypal psychology – but above all, it’s rooted in a deeply grounded participation in the land where our feet are planted. We’ll learn to re-enchant ourselves, to restore the more-than-human element in our sense of self, and to weave ourselves more deeply into the living stories of our places.