What's This Course All About?

Creative, Somatic & Ritual Practices for Re-homing the Sacred in the Sensate

An intimate group practice-based program, facilitated by artist / wild clay-smith, Holly Dawes and somatic educator /artist /coach, Rachel Blackman. A course for supporting you to re-kindle your relationship with the wild, sensuous invitations of the living world around you.

Using clay as our teacher and guide this course has been built for folks who have a thirst to rekindle their relationship with the realm of the sensuous and the tactile. It is also build to support a more living, vital and exchange based relationship with the land on which you walk each day to remember it's everyday sacredness.

We will do this via guided online exploratory workshops and curated outdoor experiments all centred around getting your hands involved with the physicality and sensuous properties of the world around you. Through guided creative practice, ritual processes, somatic explorations as well as your own experiments, you will make discoveries about how to be in creative and dynamic conversation with it all again.

*please note this is not a pottery course... (but you are free to enjoy making some if you want!!) *

Practicalities, Timings & What You'll Need

Live Workshops
Fridays - 4pm to 5:30pm UK / 5pm to 6:30pm CEST / 11am to 12:30pm NY
Zoom room open from 10 minutes prior to the workshop.
This is an intimate group, so you will be invited to keep your camera on as if we are sharing a room together
We are holding a relaxed and easeful space where pets, partners, food and drink are all very welcome.

Recordings
Recordings of the live workshops will be available within 48 hours. These will be available as an audio & video to revisit with life-time access (or as long as this platform exists!!)

What You'll Need
° A private space with a good internet connection.
° A surface to play on that you are happy to get messy.
° Some wax paper, foil or film to wrap your clay in between classes.
° A clump of earth from some local land near where you live and some way of storing it.
° Access to some local land.
° Journaling, art and capturing materials for documenting.

A Video From Rachel

More About The Course & A Taster Experience

What Will I Get Out Of It?

* A more intimate relationship with the land where you live and walk.

* More literacy and sensitivity with touch as a key portal for intimate connection.

* More openness and receptivity to how the more-than-human folk around you are in conversation and doing their living.

* A more refined discernement of where you are choosing to invest your Reverence.

* A more direct, experiential and practical relationship with the world around you as a Living Being

* Re-centering creativity at the heart of living.

* Accessible pathways for re-homing the Sacred in the Sensory Realm.

* A deeper sense of the weave of interconnection.

* Life time access to the course recordings for revisiting as many times as you want.

A Video from Holly

River, Clay & Sensory Exploration

Course curriculum

    1. What you Need to Bring and Finding Your Way Around

    2. Introduce Yourself!

    1. Introductions & Arrivings

    2. Meeting your Clay & Getting Messy - Play, Adventure & The Sensory Realm

    1. What is the Earth like where you are?

    2. Feeling the Thingness of Things.

    1. Touch Literacy - What is the Kind of Contact that Enlivens?

    2. Self Contact / Clay Contact

    1. Offline Experiment - Making a Place Sacred

    1. Creation in Collaboration with the World around you

    2. Think Like a Stone - Letting the Material Speak

About this course

  • An online course combining live, practice based workshops with curated outdoor explorations, for Re-homing the Sacred in the Sensate
  • 7 x Live 90 min experiential workshops + 2 x Outdoor ritual explorations
  • Life time access to the recordings

Why This Course Now?

This painting is called 'Our Lives Are In the Land', by Métis First Nations artist, Christi Belcourt (apihtâwikosisâniskwêw / mânitow sâkahikanihk).

She writes: 'All Indigenous art traditions come from an understanding of, and connection with, the land and its spirits. So that knowledge is encoded in the work or art. When you look at Indigenous art around the world, there is always that direct connection to the land.'

These days, in the post industrial world we live in, few of us have much direct connection to the land. Maybe sometimes in a functional way - if we are digging for some reason or going for a recreational walk - we might scrape mud off our boots before we go inside for example - but beyond this transactional kind of relationship, we very little cause for interraction. If you are fortunate enough to have an allotment or a garden, this may be different for you. Lucky you! For many of us, this direct, sensorial relationship with land, is a very distant memory.

So how might it be to get curious about the soil where you live as material to play with? We may not have done that since we were kids. As adults we rarely care about cultivating a sensorial relationship the world around us, or interact with it in an way that is curious and exploratory.

In this course you will be invited to collect a clump of local earth from wherever you live and bring it to the workshop. You will also be sent a ball of wild clay from the cliffs in Sussex UK where artist Holly Dawes' sources the clay she works with. Then, we will begin to play...

Let's see what might be able to be rekindled and made reverent again!

'As a Zuñi elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the 'inert' letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless–as mysterious as a talking stone.'

- David Abrams (from The Spell of The Sensuous)

Pricing options

We are offering a scale on this program to allow accessibility. If you are working and can afford it, please select the regular price. The regular price pays us £10.00 each per live teaching hour and includes the cost of admin + sourcing & sending you a local clay ball.

The middle price works out at £8 per hour of live teaching + admin + clay ball.

The lowest price - £6.50 each per hour of live teaching + admin + your clay ball.

Please consider what feels fair in relation to your circumstances. If you'd like to join, but genuinely can't afford it, please get in touch.

We are capping numbers strictly at 16.

Please note that there might be an additional cost for posting the clay ball if you are joining from the Southern Hemisphere or the Americas.

Curious and want to know more?

We ran a free taster workshop and Q&A session for this course. If you'd like to see the recording from that session and have a go at the taster exercise, click the button below to enroll for free. You will need to create a login for the course hub in order to access the recording.

Meet Your Facilitators

Holly Dawes & Rachel Blackman

Holly and Rachel began dreaming this course up over a year ago and it has taken until now for it to feel fully its own shape and ready to offer to you.

It synthesises many of the practices and trainings that sit deep in the heart of what we care about and love doing the most.

We are both super excited to share it with you.

To read more about each of us, please scroll down further...

Holly Dawes

Holly is a visual artist working mainly with clay, frequently foraging clay, minerals, rocks, grasses, and seaweed from her local landscape. This tactile connection to place is a thread that runs through her work.

Working with clay is a collaboration between herself and the material. Her hands, responsive to the clay’s unique qualities, engage in a dance of touch, pressure, and intuition. There are moments of surrender, allowing the clay to guide the artistic process, dictating its own form and expression. As a facilitator rather than a sole creator, she witnesses the clay's inherent nature emerge and take shape.

With a studio in Hastings, Holly runs courses exploring the world of touch and creativity through the moulding of clay. She invites participants to explore their relationship to the world of matter/thingness/materiality through touch and creativity. Holly's approach fosters a deeper understanding of place and belonging, allowing her students to discover the stories within the materials they shape as well as fostering an intimate connection with the world around them.

You can follow Holly's work on Instagram @holly.dawes and @the.wonki.pot

Rachel Blackman

Rachel Blackman is a somatic coach, trainer and educator, mentor, theatre artist and Feldenkrais practitioner.

She is an Animist and and loves to hold spaces that weave together connections between the sacred, the embodied and our biosphere.

She trains coaches to work with embodied intelligence at The Somatic School. Themes that really bring her alive include creativity and the generative principle, biological intelligence and supporting change at the level of neuroplasticity.

Rachel works with people 1:1 and in groups, coaching and teaching embodied intelligence, Earth honouring ritual and creative practice. She is one half of The Aliveness Lab with Kate Daisy Grant, whose aim is making embodied practices that are normally only available in 1:1 contexts, more accessible.

In her life as an artist, you are most likely to have seen her as Charra in Matrix Revolutions. She is also an award winning theatre maker and has created 5 full length original plays. Her most recent one being a solo work called You Aren't Doing It Wrong If No One Knows What You Are Doing,

Rachel is down-lineage of - way back - European, Scandinavian, Scottish and English ancestry and more recently, a mixed bag of convicts and settler colonists to Australia, where her family now live mostly on the unceeded territory of the Bungalung and Yugambeh Nations. She is now based in Brighton UK where she lives with her husband Shad and bonus son Akash by the big wild Mama sea.

This photo is by Shad who is Holly's Dad and also Rachel's husband.

www.vibrantbody.co.uk

Still got questions?

Feel free to drop us an email

Click here to email Rachel