The School of Awareness
Welcome, traveller
At the School of Awareness, we believe the power to transform lies within you. Our mission is to reconnect individuals to the profound potential of the human awareness to catalyse self-healing, personal growth, and spiritual unfoldment in service of life and the more-than-human world.
Our Vision
The School of Awareness is a sanctuary amidst the madness of times such as these. We offer a still point where you can draw deep on the profound intelligence of your Being, connect to the native wisdom of the body, and the healing power of the natural world. These are life-enhancing tools for urgent times, fostering a more harmonious relationship with yourself, a deeper connection with the earth and an embodied bridge to the sacred.
What would you like to learn?
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Become a Nature Therapy Guide to Cultivate Belonging
Are you interested in helping others to benefit from the healing power of nature? Join me on a 9 month in-depth training to become a certified guide with Metavision Institute.
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Learn Somatic Focusing to Self Heal & Transform from Within
Learn a profound tool for deep inner listening called Focusing, which teaches you to tap into the native intelligence of the body, and to come into relationship with the family of inner parts. Focusing 1 and Focusing 2 courses available
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Learn Repression Tools to Heal Trauma, Addiction & Anxiety
Learn the Kiloby Emotional Repression Method, a powerful new somatic paradigm from the US which teaches you how to use somatic inqujiry tools to resolve the deep, unconscious programs in your body that underlie a raft of issues such as addiction, depression, chronic pain, anxiety and toxic shame
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Learn Earth Based Listening to Connect to the Natural World
Do you ever feel like you don’t belong or have this gnawing sense of placelessness? Learn the art of Earth Based Listening, a somatic skill that opens the doorway to a felt, embodied sense of connection with the more than human world
Discover Your Path to Healing and Growth
RECONNECT WITH YOURSELF
Our healing and wholing programs focus on teaching you how to reconnect with your body, mind, soul and spirit. Through somatic practices and nature-connection techniques, you will learn to listen to your inner voice, call home the lost and orphaned parts of you, and unlock your potential for self-healing and growth by dissolving the programs that keep you in suffering.
RECONNECT WITH THE EARTH
The School offers pathways to remember the ancestral wisdom that we are not separate from the earth. That the more than human world is kin. To glock this in the body, in the cells and the marrow of our bones. From forest bathing and inner parts work on the land to nature therapy guide training, Earth-Based Listening, rites of passage and vision fast ceremony, our practises help cultivate a living reciprocity with the earth.
RECONNECT WITH THE SACRED
Through the doorway of the body, we teach processes that naturally connect you to the deeper, sacred dimensions of Being. From soul-centric work, which explores your fundamental place and purpose in the web of life, to embodied experiences of the non-dual or sacred facets of Being, uncover the core of what it is to be you.
Learn to be your own healer
The School of Awareness is no ordinary school; one with four walls, rigid doctrine or unyielding world view. At the dawn of the 6th mass extinction, our human stories of severance, dissociation and trauma writ large in the many unfolding catastrophes of our time, the School teaches you the tools to begin the work of healing from within. This is the deep path, and one that offers hope for lasting change. We cannot change the status quo if we do not first turn towards our own suffering, calling home the lost and orphaned inner ones as a way to set the stage for planetary healing. This is the way of the Shambhala warrior who, in the thick of a busy, modern life, is willing to do the inner work, catalysing processes of change that ripple outward. If you are already in therapy, the school gives you tools to complement it, empowering you to work on yourself outside of sessions with your therapist, and liberating you from depending solely on them. From Somatic Focusing and deep Repression work to the art of self-designed ceremony, the School gives you back the tools and the power to effect meaningful change in your life.
For you. All of you.
What brings you to the School, traveller? Perhaps you have hit a wall with traditional talk therapy, are looking to go deeper than Mindfulness practice, or are longing to for ways to deepen your growth and healing. Perhaps you feel stuck in limiting self beliefs, feel deeply misunderstood or marginalised by others or victim to a society that is inherently traumatising. Perhaps you feel bone-deep disconnection to the earth or feel adrift, without purpose or real place. Whomever you are, you are welcome here.
The School of Awareness stands with you, for you. It offers compassionate and fiercely unconditional space for you to heal, recognising that there is far more to you than your thoughts, wounds, inner critic or the perceptions of others would have you believe. In service of this, the School will not label, judge or pigeon hole you. It refuses to diagnose or pathologise, trusting that whatever you are going through has deep intelligence. That your wounds are the very doorway into the healing you seek.
Book a Free Discovery Call to Learn How the School Can Support You.
5 dimensional Healing
The training at the School of Awareness extends beyond the ordinary scope of therapeutic work. Its teachings are founded on a radically holistic, all-of-person model that spans not only mind and body, but also earth, soul and spirit. It offers both an intimately personal approach to healing and wholeness, but also one that is transpersonal. This recognises that the deepest truth of you extends beyond psyche (mind) and soma (body), incorporating your intrinsic connection to the earth, as well as to the vaster, sacred elements from which you are wrought (soul and spirit).
At each level of healing, a specific stratum of suffering is addressed, yielding a freedom that is more holistic and that dynamically opens you into the fullness of who you are. Driven by the need for a more somatic, or embodied, approach to healing, earth-connection and spirituality, the school empowers students to learn with both body and mind. This cultivates a learning environment that has nothing to do with ‘belief’ or abstract concepts, but a wisdom and way of knowing that is felt in the body and the cells of your being.
Drawing on cutting edge work in the fields of deep ecology, contemporary soul craft, somatic therapy and embodied spirituality, the school offers tools that are eminently practical for the very real challenges of a full-tilt life.
Wild alchemy. Wild gods
With deep reverence for the many and varied wisdom traditions of the world, the school points to the wild divinity in our suffering, in our traumas and in the patterns that repeatedly haunt us. Where once our ancestors might have supplicated external deities for their power to heal, we can now also dance with the sacred energies that lie hidden at the centre of our deepest wounds. In service of our own healing, we can bring the phenomenal alchemical power of the human awareness to bear on the patterns and internal shades that afflict us. Through deep and skilful awareness practises, we can metabolise the deep programs and wounds that constellate our suffering: first bringing them into awareness and then compassionately staying with them until they are called home. In so doing, we learn that the doorway out of suffering resides within it. Not in turning away from or burying our pain but in turning compassionately towards it. This is the alchemical path of somatic awareness.
There, in the seat of the body, in the deep, velvet undertow of our shame, grief, rage, and abandonment, we can also discover states of being that both resolve and point beyond it. This must be experienced to be understood: that In the heart of an inner part that feels unlovable, we might unlock a vast, molten, maternal love within which our pain melts away. Or tenderly holding a part that feels small and broken, we might quicken a deep, indomitable Will that feels clean and clear and powerful. This understanding draws deeply on the contemporary teachings of A. H. Almaas and the Diamond Approach, a school of embodied spirituality.
“Beyond all polarities, let the judgements and opinions of the mind, be judgements and opinions of the mind… you exist beyond that”
— Ram Dass
A whole-of-person approach to self-healing
MIND: spanning both conscious and unconscious mind, the school offers tools to tend both the stories and wounds you’re aware of, together with ways to illuminate the deeper, unconscious programs that lie hidden. This includes contemporary shadow work, which helps you call home the facets of yourself that you have yet to identify with and which represent keys to greater wholeness.
BODY: Often overlooked in traditional therapy, the School teaches two powerful somatic modalities, Somatic Focusing and the Kiloby Emotional Repression Method. These help you access both conscious and unconscious programs stored in the body; programs that are intimately tied up in the stories you believe about yourself and that drive issues such as addiction, attachment wounding, anxiety, depression and chronic pain
SOUL: Describing a person’s ultimate place and purpose in the web of life; soul work teaches you to uncover the deep code from which you are wrought. This work teaches a contemporary and specific understanding of soul, drawing deep on the Life Myth work of Arnie Mindell and other soulcraft practises.
SPIRIT: severance from our spiritual nature lies at the root of much of our suffering. Inspired by the contemporary work of A. H. Almaas, the school points to the deeper, ontological dimensions of your spiritual nature that lie beneath, within and beyond all that ails you. This is accessed through careful somatic work that leverages the alchemical power of awareness to transmute or metabolise your inner wounds, revealing an underlying non-dual or spiritual reality that is itself medicinal.
EARTH: Not conventionally considered a part of the person, our sense of separation from the earth represents a very real form of trauma. This yields deep, sometimes unrecognised feelings of separation, severance, disconnection and dispossession, all of which are writ large in the unfolding environmental catastrophe. The school teaches Focusing in Nature: a practical and tangible way to remember what was always the case: our intextricable, embodied connection to the earth.
“As I contemplate the blue of the sky…I abandon myself to it, and plunge into this mystery. It ‘thinks itself within me,’ I am the sky itself, as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue”
— Merleau-Ponty