Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Ruby Reed is passionate about bringing people together in offline and online spaces that reframe how we see the world around us, and our role within it, so we recognise our ecological relationality, fall more in love with life, and actively participate in its ecological and spiritual regeneration. She is a community builder and a key figure in the UK alternative education space, where she takes an integrated and holistic approach with her work spanning a vast ecosystem and network from climate to psychedelics. Together with her sister Christabel Reed, Ruby has founded a number of organisations.
Ruby is the co-founder of transformative education and experience platform Advaya (founded 2015), as well as the co-founder and Director of Initiative Earth Charity and its Ecosystem Restoration and nature skills platform Earthed (founded 2023) and climate action campaign EcoResolution (2018-2022). She is a core team member of Medicine Festival since its inception in 2019, where she curates and hosts the talks stage and speakers across site and part of Be The Earth Foundation’s Flow Funding network. In 2018-2020 she led wellbeing across environmental action protests in the UK, setting up marquees and programmes in key sites across London as well as retreats for activists and changemakers.
Ruby has had the enormous privilege of learning directly from wisdom carriers, philosophers, indigenous leaders, academics, visionaries, economists and scientists from around the world. Her main interests are metaphysics and consciousness and how our relationship with these shapes our worldviews and cultures as a species. The idea of “transform your mind, transform your world” guides her work. She is passionate about the ocean and has been a yoga practitioner, diver and swimmer since childhood. Between 2014 and 2021 she taught yoga as a qualified yoga therapist, led nature-based retreats, and was also a competitive freediver. These days she simply enjoys swimming on the surface, which keeps her connected and happy.
Before starting her own projects, Ruby was an advisor, researcher and writer for leading art collectors in the UK and completed two Masters degrees in History of Art at Edinburgh University (ideal beauty and the body in the dawning of the enlightenment c.17th) and The Courtauld Institute (Latin American countercultures c.20th). She was set on academia and due to start a PhD at Oxford before having a change of heart and took a role in Private Sales at the auction house Christie’s in Private Sales (2012-2015).
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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.
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The voice of the feminine in its diverse forms and expressions is rising and being heard again.
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A transformational journey in somatic, spiritual, and practical approaches to forest care with practitioners from 30 nations across the world. This course has a simple objective: to transform the way you live with trees.
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A transformative online course exploring community, relationality & belonging in the worlds we live in. What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be in relationship with the ever-unfurling world we find ourselves a part of? What, exactly, is community? And who do we really mean when we say _we_? The Kinship 2022 course is an exploration into being together in a time when being apart has fractured our relationship to self, other, and the more-than-human in ways that have left us painfully adrift. It is a timely collective inquiry into how community, relationality, and belonging can revitalise our sense of aliveness as creatures of and participants in this animate earth, and how such a renewal might influence our actions towards greater flourishing. _One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone._ Shannon L. Alder
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Demystify the complex systems controlling wealth and power and reclaim agency. Led by pioneering activists, this journey explores how finance, big tech, and more intersect to deprive communities of sovereignty. Together we'll map leverage points to build capacities and rewrite stories towards collective flourishing.
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In this course, Dr Rupert Sheldrake shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have, over the years, hardened into limiting dogmas. This course has 13 modules, which are between 30-60 minutes long.
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Ahead of advaya's upcoming online course: Dionysus: Rave, Ritual and Revolution, we speak with curator and host Chiara Baldini all about Dionysus. We dove into the mythology, history and culture around Dionysus, one of the most intriguing deities of Western culture. The god of fertility, dance, vegetation, wild nature, ambiguity and egalitarianism sounds like the perfect match who will not disappoint us with the gifts of his mysteries. What role did ecstatic practices play in his rituals? Who were his followers and what were the reactions of the Greek and Roman authorities to their unruliness? What are the pre-patriarchal elements of these practices and what can we learn from them today?
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The facts of science, scientific techniques and technologies are real enough. But, the philosophy of materialism that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith grounded in a 19th-century ideology. It is time to set science free. We dialogue with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on all things consciousness. Does it exist beyond the brain? Where did our ideas on consciousness originate from? How do we move beyond it? Come to see how dogma limits our view of the world and reality, and open your eyes to the possibilities of science.
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Introducing advaya's upcoming course, Wisdoms of Water, we explore with curator Virginia Vigliar the symbolism of water in mythology, counterculture imagination, and political discourse, highlighting its symbolism for persistence, imagination, and connectedness.
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Charlotte Pulver recounts how a single water droplet holds thousands of memories, evoking feelings that remind us of ancient relationships of reciprocity - ones that are familiar, yet somehow forgotten.
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Max Dashu discusses the history of witchcraft, folk practices, and the persecution of wise women, emphasizing the importance of reclaiming the concept of the witch and examining biases in historical sources.
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Ahead of advaya's upcoming online course: Dionysus: Rave, Ritual and Revolution, we speak with curator and host Chiara Baldini all about Dionysus. In this webinar, we dove into the mythology, history and culture around Dionysus, one of the most intriguing deities of Western culture. The god of fertility, dance, vegetation, wild nature, ambiguity and egalitarianism sounds like the perfect match who will not disappoint us with the gifts of his mysteries. What role did ecstatic practices play in his rituals? Who were his followers and what were the reactions of the Greek and Roman authorities to their unruliness? What are the pre-patriarchal elements of these practices and what can we learn from them today?
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The facts of science, scientific techniques and technologies are real enough. But, the philosophy of materialism that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith grounded in a 19th-century ideology. It is time to set science free. In this webinar, we dialogued with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on all things consciousness. Does it exist beyond the brain? Where did our ideas on consciousness originate from? How do we move beyond it?
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This webinar explores lessons from water on liberation, healing, and transformation in a time where these are sorely needed.
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Trace pathways of myth, archaeology, nature connection back into pre-patriarchal cultures indigenous to these lands, cultures that centered the earth and the female divine.
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A special event exploring Cultural Narratives & Imagination. Part of the advaya x Chelsea Green Publishing series: Food, Farming & Healing Our World.
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Part One of The Regenerative Activism Series: Deep Change Participants: Ann Pettifor (Green New Deal), Shaun Chamberlin (Fleming Policy Centre, Transition Network & Dark Optimisim), Fran Boait (Positive Money). Moderated by Ruby Reed (advaya & EcoResolution) Ann Pettifor, an architect of the Green New Deal says, "We can choose to survive. But in order to survive, everything must change. Everything". This is the scale of the challenge that new economic thinking and radical collective action needs to face. The structure of our economic system, driving both environmental destruction and social fragmentation, needs a radical overhaul. This panel brings together activists and thinkers who are facing the scale of that challenge. Each of them is developing inspiring approaches to systemic transformation, asking deep questions about the assumptions and beliefs that drive the system and the specific structural changes that are needed.
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The first gathering in the online series Food, Farming and Healing Our World, a collaboration between advaya and Chelsea Green Publishing.