Connecting with nature spirits

It’s been a while since my last post and in between then and now I went to the Bhakti chanting festival that I really enjoyed and have discovered chanting as another form of sound meditation. Then went back to Gaunts house to volunteer at the summer gathering to re-connect with my new friends and also met lots of other interesting folk. In between working in the information tent dealing with stressed workshop leaders and parents who’d lost their children I was able to attend a few workshops. Highlights for me where connecting with nature spirits, which I will be experiencing more of up at Findhorn in a couple of weeks time, healing relationships using inner child work and understanding dreams for spiritual intelligence. It was great to spend time and share experiences with like-minded souls who are on their own journeys.

Strawberry vinegar and other delights

But before all this happened I had another wwoofing placement at Harpsbridge House, a permaculture smallholding a few miles from Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast where I learnt lots of top permaculture tips.  My hosts Nick and Sara Vowles have been living a sustainable lifestyle there for about 10 years guided by pemaculture ethics and principles. The hard work they’ve put into their home and way of life was reflected in their fantastically productive smallholding and their community work. It was great to spend time with people who have been doing it a lot longer than me and to hear about the ups and downs of their learning journey.  They were also very understanding when I had my tiredness meltdown (see previous post) and had to leave a bit earlier than I planned but despite that I had a great time there and really appreciated the warm welcome I received especially after my Old Hall experience.

It was a shame I was so tired because it’s only now on reflection that I see how much I learnt and how much effort Nick and Sara put into making their helpers stay such a positive experience. There was bread (chilli and coriander seed was the best), cheese and fruit vinegar making, jamming both eating the fruit kind and making music, interesting conversations about sustainability, helping out on a school community garden, bush craft skills, plant identification walks at the nearby nature reserve and I even got an opportunity to teach the permaculture design process for a PDC course Nicks been running this year for some local secondary school teachers who want to teach permaculture to their pupils, an important priority for the next generation.

Teaching the permaculture design process to secondary school teachers 

Experimenting is good 

The most inspiring aspect of my time in the garden was seeing Nick’s experimental approach to growing, a fan of polycultures rather than companion planting his philosophy is to work with nature as much as possible so if nature in her wisdom decides to grow a plant in the middle of a designed bed it will be left there unless it’s getting in the way of his intention. I really liked his experimental approach of just trying things out rather than worrying too much if it will work as even if it doesn’t you will learn a lot during the process. Triage weeding was another example of low maintenance gardening and is possible with a well mulched plot as you can be selective about removing plants that are in competition with the ones you desire to grow. Just choosing to pull out weeds that are about to go to seed ensures you don’t get loads more growing in a place you’d rather they weren’t in residence rather than the Gaunts House approach of five hours hoeing beds to remove all weeds, what a waste of people energy! There were many examples of the design principles and features in action including a shelterbelt around the plot to block the prevailing wind, an apple orchard with geese, a herb bed watered using ‘grey water’, polycultures, stacking, a wormery, water capture and pumping, chickens, geese, bees, mushroom growing, scything, rocket stove cooking and seed saving to name a few. Other things that spring to mind where leaving the cabbage roots in the ground so you can have cut and come again cabbage leaves, using grass as a mulch, the huge variety of delicious jams, pickles, chutneys and vinegars (including the aforementioned strawberry flavoured one) you can make with your produce, using wilted comfrey to feed slugs so they don’t attack your plants, planting phacelia under your blackcurrants to provide bee food and stop birds eating your currants. Most evenings we walked to the nature reserve,  a wild unspoilt coastline very similar to the north Norfolk coast I’ve visited many times but here it was even less inhabited apart from the grey seals that like to bob about close to the shore for us to wave at.

'Cut and come again' cabbage

Grass mulching the polytunnel

Singing to the seals

On my last visit to the beach for some reason I started singing to the seals, they didn’t sing back but one of them did hang around for quite a while and I felt like we shared a moment together before I walked back up the beach and he swam off into the depths of the vast ocean probably to tell his family about the strange warbling two legged creature it had seen on the beach that day… thanks to the Vowles family for a great time.

A beautiful 'sand tree forest' on the beach, the intelligence of nature is awe inspiring 

The importance of people care

I’ve been feeling a bit derailed from my new path over the last few weeks as I began to feel very tired and realised that arranging new volunteering placements every few weeks turned out to be a bit of a punishing schedule. Having to move every week or so and meet new people, learn new information and being on your best behaviour 24/7 eventually takes it toll. In my enthusiasm to create a new life for myself I’ve found it’s easy to fall into old habits of ignoring my need to have breaks. I had set out as the hare and forgotten the tortoise wins in the end. On any journey it is always best to rest from time to time so you can admire the view and most importantly check your bearings to makes sure you’re still heading in the right direction.

Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
Whilst at my last host home a feeling of fatigue hit me that I recognised from previous times of change in my life when I’d stepped out of my comfort zone, it’s not like busy day tiredness but a tiredness of the brain caused by it having to try and keep up with lots of new stuff. My hosts reminded me of the relevance of ‘people care’ one of the guiding ethics of permaculture and also ‘zone 00’ (Zones are a design tool to help you design human energy efficiency into your system) and ‘Zone 00’ represents you at the centre of any system. The 12 design principles devised by David Holmgren http://www.permaculture.org.uk/knowledge-base/principles also offer wisdom for self guidance and this was an opportunity to use design principle number 4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback. The feedback of tiredness being the sign I needed to take a break!

Small and slow solutions 

In my hurry to find opportunities to get hands on experience and ‘fast track’ myself to a new way of life I had forgotten to apply principle number 9. Small and slow solutions to myself so I don’t repeat my old pattern of focusing all my energy on one area to the point of burning myself out as I have done previously. Even with the best intentions I still have to be careful not to repeat unhelpful patterns of behaviour by recognising the warning signs. This experience served as a reminder that permaculture is fundamentally a new way of thinking about how to be in the world by taking time to observe, trying solutions out and learning from them, a very different approach to the industrial growth mindset of ‘no time to waste’ I’d been conditioned to follow. It was good to recognise this attitude had started to creep in so I could stop, take a break and get my bearings before I set out on the road again. 

Old Hall

I just left Old Hall early (I was meant to stay for two weeks) because I wasn’t enjoying it there. When I arrived last Friday the residents were all really busy getting ready for a ‘friends and family’ summer party. They were so busy in fact they didn’t have time to introduce them selves to the new ‘wwoofer’ or show me around the place. It was not a great welcome and as a result I felt completely ungrounded, it made me miss the friends I made at Gaunts even more than I was already. Kate and Wolf also arrived on the same day to volunteer so I did have someone to talk to, we decided to give the community residents the benefit of the doubt and put their lack of effort with the newbies down to the fact they were busy with their party. As the weekend progressed I began wishing they had told me about their plan as I would have chosen to come on the Sunday, if you’ve ever been invited to a party where you don’t know anyone you’ll know how awkward it feels. I did meet one lovely woman who was a friend of a resident and we had a chat about her edible garden in Wales and energy healing. She was the one person in the whole week I felt a connection with unfortunately she was only staying for the weekend. She sent me the Celestine Prophecy to read which my ex-boyfriend had leant me some years before but I hadn’t been drawn to read it at that time. It’s a book that describes a process for spiritual evolution interwoven with a standard adventure story. I’m only half way through but I really like the way it describes our connection with nature on an energetic level and reflects some of the experiences I’ve been having.

Anyway back to Old Hall, I could spend time describing the history of the house and how it used to be a monastery that one of the nuns escaped from many years ago etc but I don’t want to focus on that. It is basically a farming community so if you want to see the geese, pigs, chickens and cows, the vegetable patches and orchards and learn how to make butter and cheese it is a great place for that. The food as you would expect is lovely, really excellent organic food that again I was reminded has sadly become something that only the privileged few have access to. They are nearly self sufficient in vegetables and meat and have 8 cows to milk twice a day and this requires a lot of work so many of the residents work part time to pay their way. It is also very expensive to buy into Old Hall as it’s run as a housing association and each of the units are priced in relation to the local housing market and Colchester is a desirable commuter belt so only those with capital need apply. Starting with the positive aspects of my experience I did get to try out some new things like throwing heavy bales of hay around to make a hay stack, churning cream to make butter and making cheese so that was good and as previously mentioned the food was great but the people I found with a few exceptions (Thank you to those who did make the effort) to be a very unfriendly bunch who didn’t seem to have even basic manners with people they invited into their community as volunteers and not surprisingly this really put me off. The person I had been emailing to arrange my visit who apparently was the ‘wwoof co-ordinator’ didn’t bother speaking to me until day 4 of my stay. I heard various excuses that they were so busy, that they didn’t know who was who because of the party weekend etc but for me there was something deeper going on here and unfortunately I think it was just a bad attitude towards wwoofers. For some reason at Old Hall volunteering your time to support people who are privileged to be able to have land in living self-sufficiently means you are seen as some kind of serf, an extra pair of hands to be squabbled over to help them do what they need to do. There didn’t seem to be any recognition that people wwoofing might be wanting to learn more about community living like the structure, group decision processes, finances and other aspects of running one or be scouting for potential places to join or even that they may have skills and experience to bring that the community might find useful. I was left with the feeling that they saw so many ‘wwoofers’ come through their door they couldn’t be bothered making the effort to get to know them as they were only staying for a short time. Although understandable this attitude is poor, volunteering is after all an energy exchange and it doesn’t work if the energy is given out and not received. The memory of a feeling of goodwill, a friendly smile and a heartfelt thank you last a lot longer than basic needs of bed and food being met. If we are to successfully move towards a self-sustaining society that is not completely reliant on people working purely for financial reward then these subtle qualities of human communication will become increasingly important. If you are lucky enough to have people choosing to offer their time to support your project then expressing gratitude is really important, however many people pass through your door. Right I’ve got that out my system and now I’m off to Norfolk to visit a friend for a week before I travel to my next place.

Making butter pats in the dairy

Kate up to her arms in curds and whey

Community Living

I’ve just finished my first experience of living ‘in community’ at Gaunts House near Wimborne and as with all the other places I have visited so far I found the expectations I had were different from the reality. ‘That’s life then’ I hear you say so from now on I’m trying not to have any expectations at all and be the detached observer as part of my mindfulness practice, this is easier said than done but something that I feel deserves perseverance.  Community after all is just a word used generally to describe groups of people living together but beneath that word you find many different forms of complex human systems powered by emotional dynamics that are not always acknowledged by the people involved.  My short stay was enough for me to see they can be places of great intensity where the combined emotions of the group are magnified so there can be difficult times to navigate but I think everyone’s experience of Gaunts is the right one for them with the inevitable challenges being opportunities for self-discovery and growth if you choose to see them in this way.  Having said all this my overall experience was very positive so much so that I decided to re-arrange my trip so I can go back to volunteer at their summer gathering in August.

Gaunts lawn with beautiful sky and tree views

Plant Dowsing

I didn’t get to do as much organic food growing at Gaunts as I was hoping as there was a bit too much ornamental type gardening for me, although it was lovely spending time in their victorian walled garden. However towards the end of my stay I met Barbara, a friend of a resident who wanted to start growing food in her garden and luckily for me was very interested in permaculture design. I spent an afternoon in her garden doing some observation, needs gathering and coming up with ideas for her design. Barbara is a reiki healer and so one of the ideas was that the garden could be used as a healing space as well as a food growing space and I really like the idea of multifunctional plants and trees that provide food but can also be used in healing therapies. She also taught me how to do pendulum dowsing and gave me a book about the different types of dowsing you can do so I’ve been practicing quite a lot. Apparently you can dowse plants to ask them what kind of soil they would like to be planted in, how much water they would like and whether they prefer a sunny or shady spot. I haven’t tried this yet but have dowsed plants and the pendulum always moves in a circle when it comes into contact with the plants energy field, proof that we live in an energetic universe not a clockwork one as many people believed for a few hundred years. Barbara took me to Wimborne church to see the 24 hour clock based on the Ptolemaic system with the earth at the centre. A great example of the self-importance of humans who at the time thought they were the centre of the universe before Copernicus discovered the earth moves around the sun although having this knowledge hasn’t changed the attitude of self-importance and feeling we have the right to put ourselves before all other species on the earth. 

Wimborne church clock with earth the at the centre of the universe

My fellow wwoofers Alan & John re-building the greenhouse

Gong Bath

Gaunts has a lot of meditation and yoga courses running through the year but during the time I was there a ten day Gong master course to teach people sound healing with gongs was happening. Sound healing is a therapeutic practice that uses sound frequencies to bring people to a state of harmony and health. The college of sound healing who run the course use the analogy of a piano to explain how it works saying if a part of our body is out of balance we can retune it like tuning a piano with sound. If a piano is out of tune do we rip out the offending key or piano wire? but this is what we do to the human body with surgery. You can find out more if you’re interested www.collegeofsoundhealing.co.uk. So every night the whole community where invited to a ‘gong bath’ in the theatre where we would all lie on the floor and be immersed in a soundscape created by gongs, Tibetan singing bowls, shruti boxes and other instruments for 45 minutes. I found my first one was very relaxing and I drifted in and out of consciousness but other times I felt hot, itchy and restless so it didn’t feel quite so pleasant, though I was assured by the gong experts this was a good response as it meant I was releasing emotions. I really liked the gong group as they were so friendly and inclusive especially a Greek man called George who was always smiling. It’s amazing how such a simple thing can have such a positive effect on people. We were also taught the universal greeting which I really liked and have learnt the words to. There are also hand gestures to accompany each phrase but I’m still learning them, it serves as a timely reminder that beyond religion, race, politics and gender we are all one.  

Universal greeting

I offer you peace

I offer you friendship

I offer you love

I hear your needs

I see your beauty

All wisdom flows from the highest source

I honour that wisdom in you

Let us work together

For you are my own true self

In Lakesh Ela Kin “ I am another you”

The best thing about Gaunts for me, apart from the beautiful countryside the house is set in, was meeting others on their spiritual path who have also been drawn to this peaceful place. The small community of people living there full time is supplemented by a steady flow of wwoofers, employed staff and people coming for the various healing and spiritual courses held there through out the year plus the famous summer gathering which is the highlight of their events calendar. I met an eclectic mix of interesting people including someone channelling spirits to create paintings, an astrologist, a puppeteer and a harpist. It felt very good to be with my own kind (aka creative types) again after years in the corporate creative wilderness. All of this contributes to creating a unique atmosphere where people feel free to explore beyond the boundaries of their day-to-day lives in the company of like-minded souls.

Flow of life

When you’re not in flow with life you are in resistance, being in the flow is following your heart, forcing yourself down a path means resisting the natural life flow that carries us forward. Giving your energy to something you have inner resistance to but feel you ‘should’ be doing because of some conditioned belief is like putting your energy into a black hole, a life sucking empty void that once it has you in it’s grip can be very difficult to pull yourself out of.  I let the systems push me and accepted other people’s goals but each time I achieved them there was always the next one to aim for, eventually I realised the illusory nature of this, it was empty and completely unfulfilling to me.

Life is not meant to be a never ending struggle, the struggle comes when you resist the events and circumstances of your life, once you reach a place of acceptance of all that has gone before and is happening now you find freedom and a sense of peace in your heart that trust in life can grow from. When we live in fear of life our natural inquisitiveness and desire to discover new experiences diminishes, we create a safe place that we feel in control where we think nothing painful can disturb us but this is an illusion because we can’t escape pain forever. Closing our heart because of past hurt means we just have the pain of loneliness and longing to cope with instead. By creating a comfort zone that we control the borders of we may succeed in keeping pain out temporarily but we also block opportunities for life to bring the unexpected good things that would enrich our life and bring joy in our efforts to avoid the ‘bad’.

Sunshine and shadows

It’s like wanting the sunshine without the shadow, that transient form that as long as the sun is shining is always with us. We cannot live wholly without overcoming fear of our shadow self and accepting the need to sit in it’s shade sometimes instead of always trying to be in the light of positive feelings in our safe comfort zone. Trusting in life means opening your heart to all experiences that flow through it, just accepting whatever comes without attaching any specific meaning allows you to expand your consciousness and to accept events that in the past you would continually interpret to reinforce self-limiting beliefs.

A natural consequence of letting go of the fear is that your heart opens so you are able to send love into the field of consciousness where it’s received by others and returned to you. It may come from a different place than where you sent it or in a different form than what you gave but you’re heart will always feel it when it comes from the heart of another.  

Somerset Sky

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been in the Gaunts house community more of which later but wanted to tell you about Vallis Veg in Somerset where I was 2 weeks ago. Chris and Cordelia own 18 acres of land with a market garden in the middle used to provide vegetables for their box scheme. This was my first experience of a commercial permaculture project and like all noble paths it’s a challenging one. Needless to say they’re not in it for the money but because they believe small holding farming is the best way to support sustainable communities. Chris has done a lot of research into energy inputs and yields of industrial farming and organic farming to show the value of permaculture and organic growing and if you’re interested you can find out more at www.vallisveg.co.uk. They have applied for temporary planning permission so they can live on the site as they feel this will help to their business grow and make it more resilient. Educational school visits where children learn about organic growing and running more Permaculture design courses are other aspects of their business they want to develop. They also have some small allotment plots that people living locally can use to grow their own.

Vallis Veg Market Garden

Phacelia as green manure

Market Garden
What they have achieved so far is very impressive given that neither of them had much experience before they started their business apart from some wwoofing in Canada and Vallis Veg is now a designated permaculture demonstration centre. Chris showed me around the many design features including shelterbelts, compost toilet, chicken coop, perennial plot, pig made pond, irrigation system, poly tunnels and many other familiar features. He’s been experimenting a lot with green manures that help soil retain moisture, protect it from erosion and add fertility when they are cut and mulched. I did a variety of jobs every day from tying tomatoes in the poly tunnel, making compost squares to plant seeds in, replanting wind damaged squashes to preparing beds with compost mulch and planting calabrese in them. On Thursdays they prepare the veg boxes for delivery and I picked 18.3 Kg of spinach to put in them, it took quite a while. Having seen the realities of running a market garden it’s not something I would want to do myself at this moment in time even though it is great they’re providing affordable organic vegetables to their local community. It’s a lot of hard work that isn’t made any easier by the current economic climate and the competition from supermarkets even though where taste and health is concerned there is no comparison with their lovely freshly picked organic produce.

Strawberries fresh from the patch

For me the sky is the most beautiful part of Somerset, it seems so big I felt I could reach up and touch the clouds. My other favourite thing was my host’s strawberry patch in their garden at home where I picked delicious strawberries from every morning, it reminded me of childhood strawberry picking outings where we ate as much as we collected whilst picking and my mums delicious strawberry jam spread on brown bread with butter…yum!  

Feniton

Last week I was volunteering with the Phil Foggitt in Feniton, a small village about an hour away from Totnes. I really appreciated the warm welcome I received as it can be a little daunting to stay in the home of people you don’t know but the way I’m choosing to approach this aspect of my journey is with well known quotation ‘strangers are friends you have yet to meet’ in mind.

Travelling around and staying with lots of different people is definitely a good way of stepping out of your comfort zone and practicing living with an open-mind and heart as this is an important part of what I wanted to gain from this experience.  Phil is what I would describe as a conscious eco-soul who has many years of organic gardening experience and setting up sustainable living projects such as Otter Rotters, a community recycling project that makes a number of recycled products including compost and mulch. We had some good chats about the challenges of trying to engage large organisations with new ideas and I admire the way he has carried on putting energy into trying to get projects started even though he's had many frustrations along the way. It’s not often I’ve met people who actually ‘walk the talk’ but Phil is one of them.  

I’m starting to appreciate the multitude of different approaches to Permaculture practice as opposed to learning the theory. Phil see’s it as a useful tool he employs when it suits him as opposed to taking it on board as a life philosophy. He does a lot of re-using and recycling local resources for mulching including cardboard from a photographic finishers, carpet tiles from an industrial estate and spent hops from the brewery he works for. He’s devised a clever way of using upturned palettes to make portable raised beds and created microclimates by building walls and painting them white to absorb light so lots of examples of design principles in action.  

'Eco Soul' Phil Foggitt

During the week I got to try out some new gardening skills including riddling compost, potting on seedlings, planting leeks, making a mulched bed, making bamboo cane supports for peas and beans and making bunches of herbs for drying. Phil has recently made some raised beds at the front of the house where he is creating a mini forest garden inspired by the work of Martin Crawford who runs the Agroforestry Research Trust mentioned in my last post. He’s planted lots of shade tolerant shrubs including Oregon grape, Goji berry and Ground Cover Raspberry to see how they get on. The front garden was also home to Womble the guinea pig who I never actually got to see but I like her name so she gets a mention :). I’m guessing she is thus named in homage to the famous recyclers of Wimbledon Common that were so ahead of their time. I feel a bit of nostalgic googling coming on...what a great song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcVMrJ1EVAQ

Planting Leeks

Riddling Compost

Garden Therapy

As well as helping out in Phil’s beautiful garden I also worked on a couple of other projects he’s involved with at Otter Brewery and Barnfield Farm. The latter is a care home for people with learning disabilities based in the picturesque village of Luppitt. I enjoyed this project the most because I’m very interested in the idea of therapeutic gardening although I think garden therapy could help everyone, not just people with learning difficulties. I feel like my time working in gardens and allotments has been very therapeutic for me, a combination of being outside in the fresh air, physical exercise, the mental satisfaction of completing whatever tasks need doing and the reward of eating fresh vegetables. I find there is something very rewarding in the simplicity of this, especially after years trying to tackle the confusing complexity of corporate structure and operations.

Phil & Jamie protect the cabbages

Cloud meditation

After a day in the garden sometimes I would lie on my bed and look at the clouds through the skylight window. As I watched the clouds float past like thoughts in my mind shapes would form, a face, animal or an object but they disappeared as quickly as they appeared, a reminder of the transient nature of thought and how much freer one is by not getting attached to them especially unhelpful ones. Recently I’ve been reading about sun gazing, an ancient method of healing that originated in India about 2600 years ago with the teaching of Lord Mahavir of Jain. It works because our eyes act as light receptors as we gaze at the sun, allowing our brain the light it needs to reset it self and integrate various hormones by energising the pineal gland. Of course looking directly at the sun can be dangerous but apparently gazing at white clouds has the same effect.

I feel a lot more energetic because I’m spending more time outside rather than stuck in an office under strip lights, perhaps this is partly to do with the positive effects of cloud gazing. Cloud meditation gives me a deep sense of well-being that radiates outwards from my soul as I connect with the eternal life force of the universe. It’s an ancient feeling that I believe is part of the collective unconscious of human experience beyond this lifetime..

Meditating on clouds

If you fancy trying a spot of cloud meditation here’s some music for you to listen to as you gaze at the clouds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL9HXNQmBIg&feature=BF&list=QL&index=5. Also check out The Cloud Appreciation Society they also have some relaxing cloud music http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

Knowing beyond the mind

Whilst meditating on the clouds I found myself processing something that happened to me in evening of the retreat silent day. I had what I would describe as a conscious experience of knowing beyond the mind. I was sat on a bench in the retreat garden and felt my consciousness expand out from the confines of my body to connect with all life around me, the sounds of the tree’s rustling in the breeze, the birds, the insects buzzing, the plants growing, there was a sudden movement to my left outside of my field of vision but it wasn’t just my eyes that registered this, it was beyond the five senses somehow I knew it was a bird before my mind named it. Finding the words to describe this is not easy as words are just symbols we use to communicate feelings and experiences to others, it didn’t feel separate from me but part of my consciousness. I recognise this is a knowing of the soul and I trust it above all else...