Into the heart of the earth

After heading back to the UK I spent a week or so in the woods of West Sussex for some much needed R&R. The English woods incredibly beautiful, not like anything I've seen in Australia. They have a certain magical, fairytale-like quality, almost as though a gnome or fairy could emerge at any moment to say hello :-)

Here I participated in a week long course encompassing shamanic journeying, various energy practices (chi gong etc), exploring natural movement, bush survival skills and so on.

This was a lot of fun. During the course we built a natural survival shelter from sticks and leaves and each spent a night sleeping inside.

Hello! :-)

We also spent some time wearing blindfolds around the woods, practicing expanded awareness. One night we sat in the woods until nightfall, and made our way back to camp in the dark. I was surprised at how much fear came up initially but gave into it, relaxed and really enjoyed myself. There was a lesson learned here in letting go of the need to know where I'm going ;-)

Anyway, it was a great week, lots of fun and decided to chill out for a while afterwards and visit some sacred sites in the area. On the way back from Glastonbury we stumbled across this crop circle…

Crop circle, not the greatest picture I know

For those of you who may not know about crop circles, they appear in this part of the UK every summer, often around 60 or so each year. They have been known to appear inside of 20 minutes and the crops are not killed in the process, rather the stalks are bent. Very interesting. This is a good site for more info :-)