A Journey Home

A Journey Home

A transdisciplinary journey with leading hearts and minds of our time

A unique learning journey with leading hearts and minds of our time. Learn new and adaptive ways of being that allow us to navigate these times of transition with resilience and creativity.

Hosted by advaya and Eve Annecke

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Course modules

Relating & Relationships

How we come to relate to ourselves, others and the more-than-human creates the context from where our actions, beliefs and attitudes arise. In the first module, we dive into relating. We explore practices, ways of being and ways of knowing that allow us to come into deeper relationship with Life. With Pat McCabe (thriving life design), Merlin Sheldrake (microbiologist & author of Entangled Life), Riane Eisler (cultural historian & systems scientist).

Food & Farming

A holistic approach to personal, social and ecological wellbeing must explore not only the kind of food we eat but, more importantly, the way in which our food is grown and produced. Industrial agriculture is destroying the health of people and the planet. What are the solutions? With Dr Vandana Shiva (physicist, anti-globalisation and seed sovereignty activist & author), Brooke Bridges (founder of Storytelling for Social Emotional Learning), Jyoti Fernandes (Via Campesina and Land Workers Alliance), Ian Solomon-Kawall (Freedom Teacher Guide & May Project Gardens), Amber Tamm (Farmer and Healer), Josina Calliste (Land In Our Names, LION), Kos Gangsters, Dee Woods (Granville Community Kitchen).

New Economies

Many of us think about economics as men in suits on Wall Street or Politicians arguing about money, but the economy is inextricable from social and environmental justice and interconnects us all. It is present in almost every element of our lives and dominates global culture and society. In this module, we break down what ‘the economy’ is really all about and what ‘new economies’ would entail, and develop the powerful knowledge needed to answer back the next time someone says “we can’t afford a green new deal”! With Alnoor Ladha (Sufi, The Rules & Culture Hack), Jason Hickel (author & economic anthropologist), Helena Norberg-Hodge (Local Futures & Economics of Happiness), Camila Moreno (Heinrich Böll Stiftung), Shaun Chamberlin (Transition Towns & Fleming Policy Centre).

Depression, Addiction & The Shadow

For many of us, addictive behaviours and depression play a critical role in the way we, or our loved ones, experience life. In Module Four, we will explore the shadow, the trickster, depression and addiction. How can we be gentle with and in touch with the less-comfortable aspects of our being? How can we adapt the way we come to relate, or cling, to things that cause us suffering? How can we become curious and aware of depressive tendencies without pathologising these states of being? With Bayo Akomolafe (author, speaker, lecturer), Lyla June (Indigenous environmental scientist, educator, and musician), Jay Griffiths (author), Colin Dunsmuir (yoga therapist, author).

Death & Grief

How do we collectively and individually hold death? What effect does the modern day's "War on Death" have on our personal and collective psyche and our ability to feel truly alive? How does this denial affect the way we treat the natural living world? In this module, we explore the place of death and how we can come to honour death, holding it in a light way. With Charles Eisenstein (author and speaker on anti-consumerism, interdependence, and how myth and narrative influence culture), Stephen Jenkinson (death doula, elder, teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, farmer and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School), Kaira Jewel Lingo (mindfulness teacher, mentor, dharma teacher), Colin Campbell (practitioner of traditional African medicine), and Selena King (death doula).

Embodiment, Movement & Trauma

Somatics is the study of the soma, a Greek word that means "the living organism in its wholeness". It is a methodology for transformation that helps us understand that change doesn't come simply from thinking differently. The process involves shifting what we understand, what we can feel, and what we practice, reconnecting us with the incredible data and resilience of the body. In this module, we dive into the poetics of the body for a month of embodiment and movement. We explore how can we move beyond short-term and talk-based therapies into lifelong personal and social evolution through trusting and following body states. We investigate how somatics relates to social justice. With Sister Euphrasia Nyaki (psychotherapist/holistic healer in northern Brazil), Dr Christine Caldwell PDH (Bodyfulness, founder of and professor emeritus in the Somatic Counseling Program at Naropa University), Rae Johnson (PhD, RSMT, BCC, a queer-identified scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice), Ra Vuyi Quebeka (multidimensional storyteller and sangoma/healer).

Consciousness, Spirituality & Meditation

If we haven't cultivated mindfulness in our attention, how do we ever expect to break out of the cycle of crises response? Meditative practices are instrumental to catalysing harmonious change on both a personal and collective level. Through mindfulness and meditation we can deepen our ecological connection and cultivate the clarity we need to navigate these times of uncertainty and change. We explore consciousness, the science of spiritual practices and meditation. With Dr Rupert Sheldrake PHD (scientist, biologist and author), Matthew Fox (spiritual theologian, Episcopal priest and activist for gender justice and eco-justice), Satish Kumar (peace activist, pilgrim and author), Dr Sam Gandy (Psychedelic researcher, Beckley Foundation and Imperial College London).

Myth, Story & Imagination

In a world of divisions and polarisation, shared stories allow us to come together, shift narrative, hack culture and truly drive change. In Module Eight, we will be joined by mythologists and storytellers to delve into the mythic imagination. With Sharon Blackie (an award-winning author, psychologist, and mythologist with a specialisation in Celtic Studies), Carolyn Hillyer (musician and artist), Colin Campbell (practitioner of traditional African medicine), Andreas Kornevall (author).

Reimagining Activisms

How can we re-imagine "activisms" and transform our methods and attitudes to ensure both inner and outer transformation? How can we expand our understanding of who we are and where we are, whilst building cross-movement solidarity and co-creating transformative societal change? How can we unite, within and without? For our final module, we gather our learnings to investigate how we can participate in co-creating a world that thrives with joy and celebration. With Brontë Velez (works in urban gardening and social justice, with an intention to compost the violences forged by environmental racism through radical imagination), Alastair McIntosh (a Scottish writer, broadcaster and activist on social, environmental and spiritual issues), and Adrian Kawaley-Lathan (works in peacebuilding, storytelling and communications to transform apathy into action).

Course information

About the course

Ultimately, we will be going on a journey of falling deeper in love with our embodied existence and exploring how we support the transition towards a just and regenerative future.

In a world where the old maps just don’t work anymore, we are on the hunt for an adventure in creating new ones. Different coordinates. Recharting our course to find our way home.

It’s nonlinear. And the questions that intrigue us are: What is home? Who on earth am I? What do I do? Alternative economies, other ways of knowing and being, relating, community, being in our bodies, myths and stories, death, addictions, poetry, prayer and practice.

A different coordinate each month navigated by: an evening gathering with amazing guests; a practical workshop; individual journeying through practice, dreamwork, one-on-one meetings with us.

If you’re the kind of person who is a little on the edge, or already stuck in, who may or may not consider yourself ‘spiritual’, and still deeply curious, who yearns to make a difference in the world, and for whom life matters, then come along and join the fray.

A Journey Home: it’s entering new thresholds, finding portals of possibility and creating different stories - dynamic, gritty and cool.

Course includes

9 Modules
49 Sessions
42 Speakers
Curated readings, resources and embodied practices
Community discussion area
Video and audio available

Teachers

Eve Annecke Picture

Eve Annecke is a Bertha Fellow exploring an independent inquiry into the art and power of retreat. She is a teacher and writer, with a special focus on retreat-based work, facliitating transgressive and transformative learning. In South Africa she co-founded Lynedoch Development, Lynedoch EcoVillage, Lynedoch Children’s House and the Sustainability Institute.

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Merlin Sheldrake Picture

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science.

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Riane Eisler Picture

Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide.

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Pat McCabe Picture

Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker.

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Christabel Reed Picture

Christabel Reed is a yoga teacher and yoga therapist trained in Hatha, Ayurveda and the lineage of Krishnamacharya and Sri Desikachar. At the heart of her practice and teaching is the exploration of how we can come back to our most natural state — to our wholeness. In 2015 Christabel and her sister Ruby founded Advaya, the London-based system change initiative that organises around the principles of radical regeneration and joyful revolution.

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Ruby Reed Picture

Ruby co-founded Advaya in 2015 and Earthed in 2023. She is a community builder, curator, creator and lover of water fascinated by how we relate to the world around us.

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Vandana Shiva Picture

World renowned intellectual and advocate for the preservation and celebration of biodiversity against genetic engineering and the negative impact of globalisation. She is an important voice in favour of people-centered, participatory processes; support to grassroots networks; women rights and ecology. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an “environmental hero” in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia.

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Brooke Bridges Picture

Brooke Bridges is a mental health advocate and founder of Building Bridges SEL: Storytelling for Social Emotional Learning. Her own journey to mental wellness inspired her wish to help young people become aware of their emotional experiences through storytelling. Before she moved to the Berkshires about three years ago, she was a model and personal chef. In the Berkshires, she’s made and sold bagels at farmers markets and has been working administratively (and doing some planting) at Soul Fire Farm. In the past year, Bridges introduced more than 6,000 kids to open conversations on mental health. She has also returned to school for a degree in developmental psychology and neurobiology.

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Jyoti Fernandes Picture

Jyoti is the Chair person and Campaigns Coordinator of Via Campesina and Land Worker’s Alliance. She is currently working on a campaign to influence DEFRA to adopt more policies to promote food sovereignty. She works to represent small-scale producers around Europe in the European and Global agricultural institutions.

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Amber Tamm Picture

Amber Tamm Canty is a young, black, women who’s life experiences weaves together the interdisciplinary ways of working & healing with earth in full spectrum. The better part of her work experience has been agriculture but in the last 4 years she has come to possess knowledge in cannabis, farm education, permaculture, tropical agriculture, agroforestry, urban farming, floral arrangements and lastly the healing powers of the Earth.

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Ian Solomon-Kawall Picture

Ian Soloman-Kawall aka KMT is a Freedom Teacher Guide who uses art [hip-hop] for social awareness and social cohesion. He is Co-Founder of the May Project Gardens which brings communities together to act collectively.

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Josina Calliste Picture

Josina Calliste is co-founder of Land in Our Names (LION), a Black-led, grassroots collective committed to reparative justice in Britain by securing land for BPOC (Black people and People of Colour) communities.

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Shawn Alimohammadi Picture

Shawn Alimohammadi graduated from the Stellenbosch University Centre for Sustainability Transitions with his Master’s degree in sustainable development, management and planning.

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Dee Woods Picture

Deidre ‘Dee’ Woods is an award-winning cook, community food educator, urban agriculturalist, broadcaster, and researcher, with over 25 years’ experience of working in diverse communities. In 2016 she was awarded BBC Food and Farming Awards, Cook of the Year.

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Kos Gangsters Picture

Kos Gangsters grow food, share stories, inspire communities and change lives in the process.

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Jason Hickel Picture

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics.

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Alnoor Ladha Picture

Alnoor is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules (www.therules.org), founding partner of Purpose (www.purpose.com) and board member of Greenpeace USA (www.greenpeace.org). Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, storytelling, and technology. As a founding member and the executive director of The Rules, he is part of a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers, and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

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Helena Norberg-Hodge Picture

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the local economy movement. Through writing and public lectures, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for four decades.

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Camila Moreno Picture

Camila’s is a researcher in Rio de Janeiro and her main study subject has been the interfaces between reasoning on climate change and the greening of capitalism. She is a working group member of Political Ecology of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO – Conselho Latinoamericano de Ciências Sociais) and the International Council of Red for a Latin America Transgenic Free (RALLT).

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Shaun Chamerlin Picture

Since 2005 Shaun has devoted himself full-time to exploring the dominant cultural stories and ‘myths’ that chart the course for our society and, in particular, how we might change direction before we end up where we are headed. His efforts have been covered across the UK press, including by the BBC, Guardian, Sunday Times, Independent and Daily Express, as well as internationally by Time magazine, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times.

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Shirley Mambadzo Picture

Sustainable Food Systems: CEO of Eden Greenfields | MPhil: Sustainable Development candidate | Social Entrepreneur

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Jay Griffiths Picture

Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester and studied English Literature at Oxford University. She spent a couple of years living in a shed on the outskirts of Epping Forest but for many years she has been based in Wales.

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Lyla June Johnston Picture

Lyla June is an Indigenous environmental scientist, doctoral student, educator, community organizer and musician of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages from Taos, NM.

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Bayo Akomolafe Picture

Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network.

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Colin Dunsmuir Picture

Colin has been honoured to be an experienced Yoga Teacher Trainer and Yoga Therapy Trainer in the tradition of T. Krishnamacharya and his son T.K.V. Desikachar for many years. He is also a British Wheel of Yoga diploma course tutor and continues his studies under the careful guidance of his mentor and teacher Bernard Bouanchaud. He teaches yoga full time in central London, specialising in teaching 1-2-1, yoga therapy and training and evolving yoga teachers.

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Charles Eisenstein Picture

Charles Eisenstein is a world-renowned teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilisation, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution.

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Stephen Jenkinson  Picture

Culture activist, worker, author ~ Stephen teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded the school with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010, convening semi-annually in Deacon, Ontario, and in northern Europe.

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Kaira Jewel Lingo Picture

Kaira Jewel Lingo teaches Buddhist meditation, mindfulness, and compassion internationally, with a focus on activists, people of colour, artists, educators, families, and youth.

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Beloved Sara Zaltash Picture

Beloved Sara Zaltash is queer British-Iranian astrologer, artist and musician, dedicated to raising the voice of GodS. With roots in sacred climate activism, they apply their skills as a performer, diviner, writer, singer, facilitator, teacher, space-holder, ritualist and community organiser to weave holy healing across all spheres of life.

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Colin Campbell Picture

Colin is currently a practitioner of traditional African medicine, based in Cape Town, South Africa and the U.K. He receives clients from all over the world, and facilitates international group processes relating to natural law, transformation, healing and personal power, sacred sites, and cross-cultural cosmology.

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Selena King Picture

Selena is a facilitator, researcher, and writer, as well as being a Quietude graduate.

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Christine Caldwell Picture

Christine Caldwell, is the founder and professor emeritus of the Somatic Counselling Program at Naropa University, where she taught somatic counseling, clinical neuroscience, research, and diversity issues.

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Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki Picture

Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki is a psychotherapist offering alternative forms of preventative health care and holistic healing to adult and adolescent women and their impoverished communities in northern Brazil.

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Rae Johnson Picture

Rae Johnson, PhD, RSMT, BCC is a queer-identified scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice. Key themes in their work include the embodied experience of oppression, somatic approaches to research, and the poetic body.

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Ra Vuyi Qubeka Picture

Vuyi’s work explores the verity of divine feminine wisdom, while confronting our collective traumas (familial and collective) through art and ceremony.

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Dr Rupert Sheldrake Picture

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 100 technical papers and twelve books, including Science and Spiritual Practices. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and philosophy at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and director of studies in cell biology. From 2005-2010 he was director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, for research on unexplained human and animal abilities. He is currently a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and also of Schumacher College, in Devon

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Satish Kumar Picture

A former monk and long-term peace and environment activist, Satish Kumar has been quietly setting the Global Agenda for change for over 50 years.

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Matthew Fox Picture

Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America.

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Sam Gandy Picture

Sam sits at the cutting edge of psychedelic research, working as Scientific Assistant to the Director of the Beckley Foundation, and as a collaborator with the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London.

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Carolyn Hillyer Picture

Carolyn and her partner Nigel are renowned musicians and artists who live and work on a thousand-year old farm in the ancient belly of Dartmoor, a mist-veiled landscape of wild hills, peat bogs and heather moors in the south-west of England. The inspiration for all their work is drawn from the raw beauty, untamed spirit and primordial memory of this ancestral land. Their creative output includes music albums and concerts, books and workshops, paintings and art installations, traditional flute and drum making.

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Andreas Kornevall Picture

Andreas Kornevall is an ecological re-wilder who has planted over 200 woodlands across the UK with his charity the Earth Restoration Service, he also co-founded a voluntary work organisation (WorkingAbroad) that sends out volunteers to work with ecological restoration in the most endangered ecosystems world-wide.

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Alastair McIntosh Picture

Alastair is one of the world’s leading environmental campaigners, distinguished in his ability to join together the outer and inner life. His book Spiritual Activism explores such paths of reconnection of the inner and outer worlds, which he argues is nothing less than learning how to sustain the flow of life. If we don’t do this, he states, “then our work will fall on stony ground, we’ll burn out or we’ll sell out.”

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Adrian Kawaley Lathan Picture

Adrian Kawaley combines his expertise in peacebuilding, storytelling and communications to transform apathy into action. Adrian combines his expertise in peacebuilding, storytelling and communications to transform apathy into action.

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Brontë Velez Picture

Brontë is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). As a black-latinx trans-disciplinary artist, designer, trickster, and wake-worker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking and prophetic community traditions, environmental justice, and death doulaship.

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What our students say

It's been a while since I finished this course, which took me through the fallout of the global lockdown, started me thinking about how to bring all the different parts of myself to my work and life and encouraged literal and metaphorical journeying 'home'. What I most enjoyed was the variety it offered and the way that it melded the personal, collective and ancestral. There were different ways to learn together, in pairs and individually and the final collection of the work generated as a community is something that I can return to every now and then as a resource for my work in social justice, dance and liberation. Highly recommended!

by Hawah Bunduka

Learning outcomes

  • Exploring what it means to be human in the world today.
  • Building a sense of belonging and developing purpose.
  • Building connection, resilience and inner strength.
  • Exploring different ways of being and knowing.
  • Learning and experiencing practical wisdom.
  • Further developing abilities to connect with ourselves, nature, community and that which is often invisible.
  • Creating perspective and understanding of interconnections and patterns
  • Falling in love with the world again and again through re-enchanting active change
  • Further developing an ability to navigate times of transition and crisis.

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