Contemporary Animism Annual Confluence

Animism is the belief that we are one small part of a greater intelligent whole and within this whole we all have a crucial part to play. This is a belief shared by our ancestors for thousands of years and with indigenous traditions around the world.

What would it mean for us to believe again?

Welcome to our Annual Confluence on Contemporary Animism, bringing together the many wonderful speakers and practitioners who have contributed to our programme this year.

Join us for a deep dive into animism, talking about and experiencing directly, the animating force that runs through nature, and through ourselves – that which allows us to connect and communicate with the place we are, the more than human world around us, and with our own sense of belonging and purpose.

What could be more important for us as human beings in this moment of uncertainty in our world? What could be more revolutionary, evolutionary and pressing, than to remember ourselves as part of nature?

The Confluence includes a morning Open Session with contributors to include Sharon Blackie, Stephan Harding, Andy Letcher, Angharad Wynne and Colin Campbell – and more to be announced. Expect speakers, conversation, sharing, and embodiment workshops.

Following lunch there will be an afternoon session of two 90 minute workshops

Wildness Within, With Philip Shepherd

Pioneering embodiment specialist Philip Shepherd will lead us through gentle, simple and original practices that soften the divisions we unconsciously hold in our bodies. As the body’s intelligence is unlocked, it opens us to nature, to the present moment and to each other.

Wisdom of the Earth Serpent, With Naomi Lewis

Naomi will take us on a short journey of deep imagination to the cave of the Earth Serpent, as we seek guidance, as we explore and expand our human boundaries and their porosity with the animistic and hidden world around us.

Date: Saturday 2 April 2022 London

Times:

• Open Session: 10am – 2pm
  • Sharon Blackie
  • Colin Campbell
  • Stephan Harding
  • Andy Letcher
  • Angharad Wynne
• Lunch Break: 2pm – 3pm
• Afternoon Workshops: 3pm – 6pm
  • Philip Shepherd
  • Naomi Lewis

Low Income Tickets

We have a limited number of tickets for people on low incomes. These tickets are self selected, please choose these only if you are not in full employment.

This event will be broadcast live and recorded for those in different time zones around the world.

Workshops

Philip Shepherd

Philip Shepherd is recognized as a leader in the global embodiment movement. He is the creator of The Embodied Present Process™ (TEPP), which he developed over 40 years of teaching embodiment practices, and shares worldwide in both in workshops and Facilitators Trainings. TEPP uniquely combines the two resources necessary for embodiment: effective practices, and a deep understanding of our culture’s blind spots, which tend to keep us in our heads. TEPP is based on Philip’s two books – Radical Wholeness and New Self, New World – which articulate the causes, perils and challenges of our culture’s disembodiment. Philip’s personal journey to embodiment includes cycling alone as a teenager through Europe, the Middle East, Iran, India and Japan; studying classical Japanese Noh Theater; co-founding an interdisciplinary theatre company; writing two internationally produced plays and a television documentary; and playing lead roles on stages in London, New York, Chicago and Toronto. In the non-Covid world, he travels the world sharing workshops and running year-long Facilitators Trainings with his co-director and wife Allyson Woodrooffe. His website and online courses are found at EmbodiedPresent.com, and he has a new book, Deep Fitness, coming out on October 12, 2021, which he co-authored with Andrei Yakovenko.

Creator of The Embodied Present Process
Best-selling author of Radical Wholeness and New Self, New World

Naomi Lewis

Naomi is well known world-wide for her love of the dark depths and her understanding of these locations as holy places to be mined and explored for their hidden veins of gold. Her work with this secret architecture over the past 17 years has allowed thousands of students from across the world to access the invisible realms of the ‘other’ they come to explore, and to uncover a clear and compassionate pathway, to profound communion with the sacred.  Having worked as the Educational Director of The Sacred Trust for the last 17 years, Naomi also now works with writers, film directors and dancers to visit the ancient origins and practices of performance and re-imagine the telling of story for our contemporary times.

Open Session

Sharon Blackie

Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer and international teacher whose work sits at the interface of psychology, mythology and ecology. Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of our native myths, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, social and environmental problems we face today. www.sharonblackie.net

Angharad Wynne

Angharad spent much of her youth exploring her Welsh homeland by foot and delving deeply into the western magic, healing and spiritual traditions in order to piece together the lost parts of her own indigenous culture. Connection and dialogue with with nature and landscape is central to her work as is the magic of everyday, the creation for meaningful ceremony for our lives today and sharing the spirituality and mythology of her homeland with others. A published author and poet, Angharad is also a storyteller who uses story as the starting point for deep enquiry and a source of timeless wisdom and healing. She regularly runs spiritual and creative retreats including the Return to Centre series for women, In the Footsteps of Ancestors, an annual pilgrimage following ‘Songlines’ across the sacred landscapes of Britain, and Dreaming the Land which she co-runs with partner and collaborator, Eric Maddern. She speaks widely about finding ‘the dreaming’ of place; of working with intuition, knowledge and landscape to draw together threads of spiritual practice which are connected and meaningful to and arise from specific geographical and cultural landscapes.

Dr. Stephen Harding

Since childhood Stephan has had a deep fascination with the natural world, and his scientific cast of mind lead him to do a degree in Zoology at the University of Durham and then a doctorate on the behavioural ecology of the muntjac deer at Oxford University. After completing his first degree he returned to Venezuela where he was a field assistant for the Smithsonian Institute, studying mammalian diversity in the rainforest and in the lowland plains. Stephan was appointed Visiting Professor in Wildlife Management at the National University in Costa Rica, where he lived for two years before becoming a founder member of Schumacher College in 1990. Stephan is author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Green Books, and editor of Grow Small, Think Beautiful. Floris Books. He is also the writer and presenter of the documentary film Animate Earth, produced by Angel TV.

Dr. Andy Letcher

After a brief spell studying physics and astronomy, Andy Letcher completed a degree in Ecology at Sheffield University, then a doctorate in Ecology at Oxford. It was as an eco-activist in the 1990s that he was invited to do a second PhD in the Study of Religion at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He is especially interested in the tangled and sometimes tortuous relationship between science and spirituality, and in so-called dark green religion. He has written papers on: the distribution of mammals across continents; fairies; mysticism; and psychedelic spirituality. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom.

Colin Campbell

Colin Campbell grew up in rural southeastern Botswana, the son of a renowned anthropologist and a creative healing mother. He is currently a practitioner of traditional African medicine, based in Cape Town, South Africa and the UK. He receives clients from all over the world, and facilitates international group processes relating to natural law, transformation, healing & personal power, sacred sites, and cross-cultural cosmology. His work bridges major world cities with ancestral homelands and forgotten wilderness, taking him from the Amazon Basin to Los Angeles, the sacred sites of Venda to the urban grit of Johannesburg, and remote Ethiopia to the City of London. Colin co-founded and co-runs a training school in Botswana for traditional doctors and sangomas with his brother Niall Campbell. He is also a lifelong artist and musician, his style once again bridging the traditional with the contemporary, the timeless with the timely, and the sounds of the sacred with the lyricism of electric rocking funk.