Join me in a truly stunning and rare piece of woodland – a DEFRA area of special designation that doesn’t even show up on local maps… no car park, no obvious signage.. you have to KNOW it’s there.

The place is Staverton Thicks – a truly ancient stand of oaks numbering in the hundreds.  I’ve travelled the world, and traversed this country, and can name many a magical wood to recommend a visit to, but there is nothing quite like Staverton Thicks. In it’s own way, it’s up there with Wistmans’ Wood in Dartmoor, and the Black Wood of Rannoch in Perthshire, but this has its own flavour and feel due to the way the oaks dominate the space – HUNDREDS of them.

We’ll meet up in a nearby carpark and share cars to get to the limited parking next to The Thicks.  We’ll enjoy an amble through this unique space until we find the spot that feels good and proceed!

This day will be exploring Sound and Character Development in and with nature – to see how nature responds to YOU, and to build our understanding and experience of how sound shifts our state and awareness, and the space around us, developing a magical part of self where mind, connection and embodiment come together in a way that is not replace or replicated in any other way.

This day will be a radical day of sound-reclaiming.  This is not ‘chanting’, this is not ‘singing’, this is a healing reclamation of our Native Sounds and how we can use them simply, and extravagantly, to create huge changes in our space, our state, and in the effectiveness of our communications.

We’ll look at the science (I mean ‘repeatable methods with repeatable results’ ) of HOW sound can do this, and then we’ll get into the Art of it all.

Join me on a journey of Character Development and deep sound sharing and connection – Sharing sound in particular ways is incredibly intimate and connecting, and the states achieved can be truly blissful, and even healing and revealing.

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The way I teach sound is different to others – I don’t approach it as singing or as chanting, but as a hidden natural use of voice and sound that is truly native to all of us – it doesn’t ‘belong’ to any culture or religion, and is a ‘common ancestor’ natural aspect of all ours humanity, and one of the native and natural tools for us to connect, express, be seen, felt, heard and experience genuinely shifted states of awareness and perception.

We work with the alphabet, which is like the ‘machine code’ in a computer, but as a level of mind.  Most of us when working with sound are operating at ‘application’ level, where we’re tied to language and words, not to the raw and embodied individual character sounds.  Working in this way, brings the mind into a truly different kind of alignment with sound – both the practice and nature of it, which allows new depths and heights to be achieved, both in the sounds themselves, and in our experience and sensations around it.

As I like to say, we’re all composing ourselves before we de-compose, and sounding together is a wonderful component of that process.