This is a deep and powerful journey into ancestor connection and masculine energies to depths not covered anywhere else.  As with our other Rites weekend, I cannot tell you anything about ‘what we do.’

But I can tell you about ‘where we will do it’.  We journey to the chasm known as Luds’ Church. A place steeped in legend and mystery, a chasm appearing out of nowhere, and perhaps taking as many lives as it has saved over the millenia.

This is a deep journey into body, emotion, and into the psyche of the male mind and being. Most especially of the ‘westernised man’, who this event is primarily for.

We combine the natural opportunities of the location with our cutting edge methods and approach to bring you a unique event in ‘mens work.’

One which brings a true opportunity for landing to the westernised male: a homecoming, both to his body and his masculinity, but also to the land. each other and our ancestors in accessible and palpable ways.

This is not just about levelling up our skills and embodiment – you can get that anywhere – but levelling up everything about us, as any true Rite should.

You can expect your practical and embodied skills, relationships, self worth, self awareness, insight into your own maleness, motivation and capacity to change….possibly even transform completely.

But that is only half the story..it’s the surface half, the ‘everyday ‘mens work/mens retreat invite’ stuff….

The other half, you really can’t get anywhere else, and you shouldn’t come unless you want it… the other half is not glamorous, but it is powerful…magical, by everyday terms…and it is the key to the profoundly changing nature of our events.

This is a place that can tap deep wells of insight, resource and connection if approached in the right way. Not only deep healing and skill gaining, but lasting empowerment and leaps of awareness are possible here.

The other half is connecting you, in mind, emotion and body to the reality of your native and natural connection to the masculine and feminine forces within, to the ‘ancestral field’, within and around you and the implications, to help you return to your more native way of experiencing and living with masculinity and being male in the world.

This is really for western trained men to rediscover their Nativeness. If you refer to native or indigenous people without referring to yourself, then this is most definitely for you…. But we don’t do this through adopting some other native cultures stories and ways, but by using effective bridges to rediscovering our own.

The European man was colonised so effectively, he has forgotten his own nativeness, but it is in his blood, his genes, his internal life story, and the ancestral fields of the land itself.

It is no wonder men of such lands walk around Collared, Cuffed and Tied, even their most powerful elected leaders.

The unique weaving of my approach with the skills and story my co facilitator, Mark Taylor, brings offers opportunity for a bridging of those disconnections in such a way that one can find resources, capacity and connections that simply cannot be referred to, only experienced…. and then shared only by deep and knowing gazes exchanged with others who peer back from the same place.

This is both the opportunity for ‘the kind of level up you expect from a mens thing’ as well as the opportunity for something radically different – a whole new way of understanding, approaching and expressing modern maleness for the westernised man.

Fees are £795 for the week and includes full board at a 4* base camp farmhouse and mill.

The above is the prosaic invite…typically verbose, as i can be,…but this is because I still stand somewhat shy of what my own Native Tongue wants to say, but here’s my other invite, from the world my other foot is in…

here’s a story from the land that caused me to be drawn to Listen here, and come back year on year with offerings, seeking to glean why I was drawn and had a sense something could be possible with men here (now, 6 years on, we are ready to return again, having proven ‘something most certainly is’)

The Ancestral Approach to Luds

People speak of the abundant and welcoming earth as they walk through loamy forests or abundant fruiting regions. But what they are speaking of is not ‘the earth’.

The soil, all of it…is not ‘the earth’. The soil is exactly what we call it : soil: it is dead bodies, faeces, decaying matter and space dust. It is all, with the exception of the space debris, something that once lived, or its products.

It is ALL ‘the ancestral field’, quite literally and actually. The Earth is what all that ancestral residue rests upon. It is the Rock beneath all that we inhabit, as inhospitable to us as trying to live in Water, Air or Fire. The rock, the Earth, is the foundation of all, including our longest period of living (the ‘stone age’). Luds aka The Green Chapel is an ancient place of power because it, like other places of it’s ilk, is a place where the ancestral layer is peeled back completely to reveal a bridge to what lies beneath, and it is not accidental.

It is a place for becoming aware of what it ours, and what is not. It is a place for connection to and far beyond the human and mammal ancestral layers to the foundational Elemental Ancestors that are fused within all life we know of.

Here is our opportunity to meet the forces of the (k)Night – within and without.

The Man of Steel, the ‘super-man,’ is a fantasy from another planet.

The Man of Rock is a reality that lies deep within every living male of this one.

Our Native Hardness surfacing only occasionally, when driven to the surface by some Charged force or another, but here, we seek to come home to that foundation: The Living Stone: The Golem : The Immoveable One : a mineral core within us, lubricated by blood and plasmas and leveraged with sinew and muscle… Only by stripping back all other layers can we find that core, within and without.

This is a good place for that as we journey to the Chasm of The Living Stones without, to find the Living Stone within.

Why would one want this? Why would anyone but a fool pursue such?

For Rock; Stone; the true Earth is the only thing which can temper and contain its peer, the Fire within, without which one is at risk of erupting or exploding without integrity or measure.

It is the only thing that can contain the Waters of emotion and sexuality within, which, left unbanked, would quash our Fire and destroy our relationships.

It is the only true thing we can stand on within, and, through not being at home in this most ancient, most silent, foundational Ancestor, we do the only other thing we can do – we ‘freeze our waters’ to give us something to ‘stand on,’ to help us feel like we have SOME ‘hard, reliable, thing’ about us….we harden feeling when it should be fluid and free, and ignore our true potential for hardness, fearful of its seemingly cold touch.

How can any man expect to temper and contain his Fire, or bound well the flow of his Waters if he has not found the hardy and reliable foundations of the True Earth within him, especially when so blinded and confused by the noise of the unresolved, undigested, unskilled ancestral field within him and around him, rushing past the doorways that could take him home to himself.

Come to the Green Chapel with us. Come to the Edge. Come to the (k)Night. Come, face the Unknown, Mystery and Yourself.