Visiting The Pinnacles at Phillip Island – it’s too small to see in this pic, but we watched enraptured as a lone seal surfed amid the swirl. Now there’s a refined art of the mammal’s dance with the wildness of water and stone. Artfully engaging with the depth and complexity of the elemental world – that’s the intention of the Writing Wildness course. This course has evolved out of my PhD research into both the science and the shamanic history of the body’s role in deep nature connection and how that can be expressed creatively.
In this course we work with the elements, with water and stone for instance, and find ways our bodies attune to their deep and ancient relationship. We explore ways in which we are this intimacy; our blood, our bone, our tears, our tides. And we experience how these raw and elemental forces are foundational to how we come to know ourselves, being, in fact, the very essence of both our stability and our flow.
If you’re interested, send me an email to let me know, and subscribe to this website to get word of when the next one will begin.
Below are some words from some past participants of these courses:
This is deep and profound work of joy and connection, healing and offering much meaning. …It deepens authentic living in surprising and beautiful ways. I love the community, and the intimacy of the small groups in breakout rooms. I feel supported both personally and professionally. Thanks Maya for your bravery and vulnerability, I think this is the leadership we need in such times. – Kerryn
I see the work you are inviting us to do as very significant, hugely important, and an integral step on the path to deep relationships. The work is profound, it can seem light and playful yet brings real shifts to a sense of interconnectedness with everything that is. – Bronwen
You create a safe container and encourage and listen without judgement. It is a lovely process to allow the more-than-human world to have a voice, to be witnessed and to have agency, and this further enables a sense of belonging. Co-becoming means to loosen fixed concepts and to be with the other in a different more expansive way. There is an entering into a new pattern of relationship that is entangled, embodied and alive. It allows a new way of perceiving to emerge; pattern-thinking. The discussion, the witnessing others, and the embodied exploration all enabled a new way of being with this more expansive world. – Jackie
The aim of ongoing work is to develop a regular practice of deep nature connection through honing our sense perception, accessed via embodiment and writing practices: a yoga for our Earth soul. It also aims to support our presence and intimacy with the more than human world between sessions, to learn from each other through sharing our connections with the animate world within the group, and to be inspired to share these ways of knowing with our communities. For me, this is where my activism must now come from – a place of deep wonder, communion, and trust in the intelligence of life – in order to access more collaborative, earth-centred ways of knowing and being.