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 run-amok 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.

Discover Your Path to Healing and Growth

RECONNECT WITH YOURSELF

Our healing and wholing programs focus on reconnecting you with your body, mind, and spirit. Through somatic practices and nature-connection techniques, you will learn to listen to your inner voice, understand your needs, and unlock your potential for self-healing and growth.

RECONNECT WITH THE EARTH

Our teachings empower people to feel connected to the earth and to feel an embodied sense of belonging again. From forest bathing and inner parts work on the land to the bounty of earth based-listening, our practises help cultivate deeper reciprocity with the earth.

RECONNECT WITH THE SACRED

Through the doorway of the body, we teach processes that naturally connect 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. It is a radical school for unprecedented times. One that offers unwavering and compassionate space, teaching you cutting edge tools that you can use to alleviate suffering and heal yourself, finding the kind of freedom that is your birthright. Right there, in the thick of a busy, modern life, no matter what you are going through or who you take yourself to be. 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 relying solely on them.

For you. All of you.

The school teaches powerful awareness-based somatic tools to do your own inner work and metabolise the deep programs that keep you in cycles of suffering. Perhaps you have hit a wall with traditional talk therapy or are looking 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.

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 and, radically, represents the very doorway into the healing you seek.

If you are reading this, you belong here. No matter the patterns that bind you, the things others project on to you or who you’ve taken yourself to be.

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 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. Quite literally, as quantum physics now shows, awareness changes that which is observed and is capable of precipitating healing out of the felt experience of the wound itself. So 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. 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 towards it.

There, in the seat of the body, in the deep, velvet undertow of our shame, grief, rage, and abandonment, we can discover statues of being that both resolve and point beyond it. This must be experienced to be understood. There, 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 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’s and the Diamond Approach, which is a school of embodied spirituality.

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.

What would you like to learn?

Trauma & Dysregulation 101

Drawing on polyvagal theory, learn to map and regulate your nervous system so you can self-care when triggered in daily life: fight, flight, freeze and fawn.

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Mindfulness & Self Awareness

Learn how to build a regular meditation or mindfulness practise to cultivate more calm, perspective, presence and connection to the sacred

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Self Love & Inner Relationship

Learn the art of inner relationship focusing to cultivate a healing relationship with your inner wounded parts and relentless critics

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Belonging & Earth Connection

Learn Deep Ecology and Focusing in Nature to cultivate a more embodied relationship with the animate earth

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“Beyond all polarities, let the judgements and opinions of the mind, be judgements and opinions of the mind… you exist beyond that”

— Ram Dass

Tailor your own learning

Online. Modular. Flexible

Flagship Courses

Slowness & the Art of Presence

We live in the age of speed. Squeezing more stuff into narrower windows of time, fuelled by convergent technology and the relentless drum beat of predatory capitalism. Seemingly without space or pause to take a breath. To take stock. To turn inwards or to cast our gaze outwards, beyond the caustic glare of screens, to the wide open horizons of the earth.
Bayo Akomolafe writes that these are urgent times, let us slow down. And time in nature is an invitation to slowness. Time enough to pause, feel our feet connected to the ground again. To come out of the stratosphere of the mind and all its rushing urgency, into the seat of the body, held by the body of the earth.
Cultivating slowness and presence in nature is a deep foundation for all other healing work. Without it, we so often remain stuck in cycles of nervous system dysregulation, desensitised to the complex interplay of wounded parts and inner resources that lie on the path to greater freedom.
Internal Family & Inner Relationship Healing

Through skilful nature-based practise and self-designed ceremony we can re-attune ourselves to the many parts and places within us. Wounded, orphaned, disavowed and lost, they roam the night time recesses of the body and unconscious mind waiting for us to call them home again into a deep sense of wellbeing and wholeness.
In this work, nature serves as medicine, mirror and beloved, reflecting back to us the fullness of our wounded experience together with the bounty of all that is wild, unbroken and radiant in us.
Inner relationship work on the land also affords us access to the deep archetypes within us that represent the unbroken facets of our wholeness. Connecting to and cultivating these, we find ourselves powerfully resourced to hold and to heal our wounded parts.
Belonging, Deep Ecology & Wild Communion

Our sense of being disconnected and separate from the earth and the more than human world is arguably one of the great traumas of our time. Cocooned in the glittery trappings of urban life, many of us feel empty and dispossessed, seemingly without place or purpose. We have forgotten how to cultivate our relationship with the animate earth; how to be in embodied connection and conversation with the more than human world.
As a teacher of Focusing, I am co-developing ways to cultivate a palpable sense of communion with the natural world. To remember in our bones that we belong to the earth. To palpably sense into the places we inhabit and wander, that we do not treat nature as an inanimate ‘other’, but as a living, breathing, sentient organism of which we are an inseparable part.
This work represents a form of environmental activism, equipping us to navigate prevailing eco-anxiety whilst also liberating an innate love and responsibility for the earth that is in crisis.
Transpersonal Journey: Soul & Spirit

As human beings, we are not only a mind and body, but transpersonal beings cut from a far vaster cloth. One wrought of soul, spirit and earth. Each of these dimensions represents sacred ground, and each, in my experience, can be connected to through the portal of the body and the inner well of the deep imagination.
SOUL: drawing on contemporary soulcraft practises and the deep life-myth work of Arnie Mindell, it is possible to tune into the deep code from which we are patterned. What poet David Whyte describes as the truth at the centre of the image we were born with. This describes our deepest place and purpose in the web of life, and also shows up as the pilot wave shaping much of our conscious reality, from our sacred wounds to our deepest gifts.
SPIRIT: Leveraging deep somatic inquiry practises we discover that the doorways into sacred dimensions of being can be found deep in the body, right there beneath our everyday, ordinary experiences. Nothing outside ourselves is needed; we need only ever turn inwards, quietly tending our direct experience with kindness, curiosity, and an attuned awareness to liberate the living, ontological fabric of our deepest Nature. This yields a spirituality that is eminently practical, palpably real and deliciously embodied.