The founding of Ruskin was, in part, inspired by the fictional tragedy of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which highlighted the social and economic impact of preventing working-class people from attending Oxford University.

Tomorrow morning there will be thousands of people flocking to Stonehenge, arriving just after 5am in the cold and dark of a new moon, gathering together to celebrate the Winter Solstice dawn at the ancient monument.

While most people today are familiar with Halloween, the more ancient festival of Samhain is often unknown. Yet, Samhain marks an important threshold on the ancient calendar and is, perhaps, the most sacred event on the ancient Wheel of the Year, one which dives to great depths into the mysteries of life.

I talk a lot about how people are part of nature, how distancing ourselves from the natural world is detrimental to our mental health and how finding connection with more-than-humans could be the way to solve the problems of our world. Yet, while this remains true, it depends on people’s ability to access nature easily and that’s not the case for many people, beyond the parks and gardens of towns and cities. In England, people only have access to a miniscule 8% of the land.

The art of tracking is usually associated with stalking and hunting animals and is a foundational skill of our ancient ancestors, in times before animals were domesticated and farmed. Whilst it remains useful for us to learn the marks and signs that animals leave in the land as they go about their daily lives, one of the key skills of the tracker is sensory awareness, which is a skill that has relevance for everyone in the modern world.

Soul retrieval is a powerful healing technique and the core element of my shamanic healing practice, though what it’s all about is not widely understood. In discussing it, we need to dive into some of the core aspects of shamanism and the spiritual perspective which underpins it.

Animism is the awareness of life in all the beings on the Earth, including the land herself. As all beings have life, they can be communicated with, worked with and honoured. We are all interconnected in the web of life. But its more than that…

The word animism is couched in colonial power and patriarchy. While it has become a modern buzzword, describing someone who lives in harmony and respect with the natural world, understanding its roots gives us the power to rebirth and reclaim the word from its dark past….

As the Black Lives Matter movement is firmly within the public eye, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it feels appropriate to discuss prevailing attitudes towards indigenous people and how they continue to be marginalised and persecuted throughout the world today. Although it might seem strange to claim we were once all indigenous, it is important to bring awareness of our shared history. We are all one people, with many faces and many cultural differences, but we are one people nonetheless. 

It’s always been there, this mystery of the feminine; a quiet and deep knowledge unfurling slowly and gently backstage within my consciousness as life passes. It catches me by surprise at times, expressing itself through my words before I blink.

Over time I learned that the practices of the spirits I met from prehistoric Britain were part of a wider shamanic culture and the more that I was finding out about that, unearthing that and arguing that, the more that I could see that what had been lost in this land was akin to what indigenous peoples experience in their shamanic cultures. And the more that I connected with the spirits of prehistoric shamans, the more I began to create threads linking a British indigenous shamanic tradition with the modern world.