Seasonal Alchemy

At Autumn Equinox I attended the final workshop of a year long process called Seasonal Alchemy. The weekend included nature connection, meditation, ritual, breathwork, dance and teaching about the Wheel of the Year. I was already familiar with most of these aspects but I was struck by how they were woven together. I was also reminded of the richness of the Wheel of the Year. I’ve been working with the seasonal Wheel for many years but had forgotten its depth and power: I’ve found it hard to hold onto my practice without the support of community.

Seasonal Alchemy brings together several of the embodied pathways of connection and I’m delighted to bring you this interview with the team who create it: Lydia Campbell, Hamish Mackay-Lewis anf Jed Hamilton-Shaw.


Hamish Mackay-Lewis is a nature guide, leadership coach and facilitator, eternally committed to the wisdom and gift of the moment-to-moment experience. He has a varied and international background having served in the armed forces before going into the field of human development.
A perennial student of personal transformation, for the past 12 years he has guided groups and individuals to bring a spirit of adventure into their lives, to look inwardly and honestly and to experience the mutually restorative relationship between land and people.
At the heart of his work are the practices of presence, nature connection and breathwork.
www.hamishmackaylewis.com

Lydia Campbell is a teacher, mediator, leadership consultant, coach and mother. She has been immersed in the fertile edge of transformational leadership and healing for the past 20 years in her own life firstly, and externally in delivering retreats across Africa, India and Europe for thousands of attendees.
Her work rests on three main pillars: ancient wisdom and shamanic healing arts, facilitation and modern leadership approaches, and a healthy dose of heartful, no-bs, real life grit.
www.lydia.ie

Jed Hamilton-Shaw is a Ritualist, Facilitator, Coach and DJ. He began his nature connection journey in 2021, when the pandemic highlighted a profound need for entering into a deeper relationship with the wild world.
He has trained for a number of years with WildWise, a Devon based hub for outdoor education and has worked on the Woods for Wellness project at Dartington Hall as a nature connection facilitator and with Journeyman, a UK charity, mentoring school age boys to help them transition to a generative masculinity. 

He is also a magical practitioner, DJ and space holder: working in these ways as part of a wider transition to cultural rewilding of this land.
You can find him on the paths and ancient byways across his beloved Somerset and beyond.

More information about Seasonal Alchemy:
https://www.seasonalalchemy.space

Transcript

Adrian:

Welcome to the Embodied Pathways podcast. This particular episode is unusual because I'm speaking to three people. Lydia Campbell, Hamish McKay Lewis and Jed Hamilton Shaw. Between them, they've created something called Seasonal Alchemy, which is a year long journey to connect with the self, purpose and the wisdom of these Celtic lands, which we all live in. We're recording this episode on the morning after Samhain, the Celtic festival of the dead, that's more popularly known as Halloween. Next month, many of us will be celebrating Winter Solstice, one of the pivot points of the year, when the days begin to get longer. So there are eight festivals like these spaced throughout the year, marking the cycles of the seasons. They have Celtic origins, and the cycle altogether is called the Wheel of the Year. Seasonal Alchemy provides an opportunity to celebrate this cycle, and I think possibly uniquely brings together breathwork, nature connection, community and ritual and weaves them together into this cycle of celebration. 

I was lucky enough to attend the Seasonal Alchemy Autumn Equinox weekend and was inspired by that to invite the team to talk about the project on Embodied Pathways. Previous episodes have focused on some of the aspects Seasonal Alchemy offer, but I'd like to explore the magic of what happens when different pathways of connection are woven together. We're going to explore all the different aspects of Seasonal Alchemy, but to begin with, it'd be good to get a sense of what each of you see as the purpose of this project. So I'm happy to introduce Lydia, who is the Celtic weaver together of the Wheel of the Year and taught us on the workshop about the different cycles and how they all fit together. Hamish, who led the breathwork - we'll be hearing more about that later, and also has a long background in nature connection, which is a key part of the whole project. And Jed, who very much was involved with co-creating the ceremony there and did some lovely dancing with us. So, turning to you guys, how do you see the purpose of this whole project?

Hamish:
Well, I can step in. This is Hamish. The purpose I see is supporting people to recognise that land and people are medicine for each other. Supporting people to recognise that they are the wild self deep down that they yearn for, that they're already it, they're already everything that they're looking for. And it's to support people who are on the path of purpose to be more resilient in that path, and to support people to have community with like-minded souls and minds, and to support people who aren't quite on purpose to find their deeper soul purpose.

Lydia:
And then just following on from what you said there, Hamish, and then it's when we find our purpose and when we come into interconnectivity with all things, what then? What does that mean for a culture? What does that mean for a system when we show up with a deep understanding that I am because of you? that we share one quantum field, energetic field, relational field, mycelium, visible and invisible. What would it be for a world where we move through it and we create relationships, transactions, contracts, decisions, businesses, society from a place of interconnection? So there's a personal piece that Seasonal Alchemy awakens and serves, and then there's also a larger systemic cultural piece that we're holding also. And woven into that are the Elements, so the Elements being such a deep part of the Celtic wisdom work, of land-based work, of nature connection, of Indigenous reconnection. And then if we apply how we relate to the Elements to, you know, major crises in the world today, what would it be to to create climate understanding and conversations from a place that we have fire and water moving through our bodies, that we are the air, that the bones inside us are also the mountainside. How do we live from that place?


Jed
I think for me, there's three layers, personal, societal, and the transpersonal. And the process kind of operates on all of them. So my favorite frame for the personal journey that people can go on on this process is around transition. There's these times of great transition that we all face and that seemingly we have coiled within our DNA and understanding of that reflected back to us in the in the seasonal changes that we witness every year and finding the mirror of nature as well as support from nature in those transition times is kind of key. I think the societal, there's a phrase that I like to use around cultural rewilding that I think is so important for this time in this world that we need to find our wildness and a relationship to wilderness in a new way that makes sense and that's to do with being re-enchanted And then, you know, on the transpersonal level, we work a lot with a very broad, very wide church, if you like, which is allowing us to be contained in something sacred, whether that land, that really frames everything. For me, it's those three layers.


Adrian:
Wonderful. Thank you. That's a very rich evocation of the core purpose of it. And there's a few key themes that really struck me. One of them is this notion of indigeneity, this sense that we in the Celtic lands are indigenous to this place. I think really embracing that is very helpful. And all this sense that we are actually already OK at some level. It's just a matter of recognizing that and finding that within. When I was attending the workshop with you and hearing the stories of other people who've been on the journey with you already, because I came in as the final one of the year, what really struck me was how powerful the philosophy of cycles had been for people. There's lots of other people running workshops on combinations of breathwork and ritual meditation, nature connection. But I think bringing those together within the bigger structure of the Wheel of the Year was particularly impactful, and that really struck me. So I'm wondering, Lydia, if you could speak a little bit to your sense of why is it that this cyclical Wheel of the Year is so powerful for people?


Lydia:
Hmm. Thanks, Adrian. I can still remember in my body the experience of sitting in my first Celtic wisdom circle, and it was Samhain 2011. I had just embarked on a major relationship with the man that would be the father of my son. I remember I was really premenstrual. and there was like a heavy weight in my belly and I remember sitting there it was a women's circle and I had been on the sort of the edges of this Celtic spirituality for a couple of years but this was the first circle that I sat in and the woman leading it who was to become my teacher and still is beautiful woman, Karen Ward of Schleon Cree in Ireland. Herself and her husband, John Cantwell, are some of the leading shamanic teachers in Ireland and have been for decades, like really doing the work a long time. The grandparents of the current generation of this work. And as she began, as she brought me through the Celtic wheel of the year, all of the eight seasons, I remember my belly just went, oh, There was a knowingness in me of home, of I have always been this way. For about a decade, I had always gotten depressed over winter. And what the Celtic wheel began to give me was a frame for what actually happens to our soul and to our body in this part of the world at this time of winter, which is that it winters. It wants to go into the darkness. It wants to let go and shed anything that is no longer of service. It wants to cross through and to engage with the other worlds for renewal and for shedding. And so what that gave me, what that frame of like, and more meaning behind Samhain, and I can go into, you know, the brief intros into each of the seasons, if you wish. But what the framing of Samhain gave me as a woman in my early 30s was permission. And so that's what I see is the biggest impact that learning about the Wheel of the Year gives people is permission to be their full selves at any time. So the Buddhists speak about the second arrow, right? The first arrow is, let's say, the depression that I that I was feeling over winter. The second arrow is the judgment on the layer of shame and misjudged expectation that we apply to ourselves for having the experience in the first place. And so what the Celtic Wheel of the Year gave me was it dissolved that second arrow. It located my experience of chaos, depression, death, retreating from the world. It located it within a larger frame that was entirely contrary to the modern Western frame, which says basically you have to be in high summer all the time or you're not productive. You're not of value to society. You're not earning. You're not contributing. So you're not valuable. So you're exiled to the edge. You can go off there, do your therapy one-on-one, and then come back to the center of the marketplace where you're a value again. But if you show up imperfect in the center of the culture, in the center of the marketplace, with anything less than high productivity and youthfulness and vibrancy and productivity, you're somehow dysfunctional. And so the Celtic Wheel of the Year gives everyone who I have been and I've been teaching it for five years now and sitting with it for 13, this lifetime that I'm consciously aware of, though it flows through my bones. The biggest power that I see it has is this sort of it's permission. And then it's this quietening of shame around the messiness of being human. And what happens when that shame goes quiet is actually like a deep empowerment of I am like what if I'm whole already and what if I have all the eccentricities and the challenges of what I carry in this life have a place and have a purpose. And it doesn't mean we don't need to like skill up on, you know, communicating better and all the transpersonal piece that Jed spoke to. And we have to do our trauma work. Absolutely. We do our embodiment practices and dismantling the systems of oppression that live within us and live within our society. But as a human being, I'm essentially whole. I'm essentially in union with nature already. And the trees don't get it wrong. What if we don't get it wrong either? It's just this layer of expectation and judgment that our modern culture has sort of applied. And so what I see and what we've seen throughout this year as people journey through, in essence, the cycle, the life cycle, the creativity cycle, the theory of change that the Celtic Wheel brings us is this journey through death and stillness and seeding and intention setting into springtime. And we do shadow work at the equinoxes because we're so well served by the equal day and night. And we come into high flourishing and we're able to just go for it in summertime because we trust the work that we've done over winter has created energetic foundations for us to thrive. And we move through into harvest and into the stillness of autumn equinox and the celebration and the honoring of the journey that we've traveled before we go back into sowing to do it all again. So what journey through that cycle I see has given everyone this year and I see this every year is an opening into a more multi-dimensional visceral experience of life and a quietening of the noise of the sort of existential fear that there's something wrong with what we're experiencing and anything can happen in that.

Adrian:
Lovely. What I'm really hearing is it brings permission for us to truly be human and to get back to our embodied selves as beings that we are in harmony with the world that we are part of.

Lydia:
Absolutely.

Adrian:
When I think about the Wheel of the Year, there's two themes that come up for me especially strongly. One of them is the cycles of nature, which you've touched on there. And the other one is the power of ritual. I know they're both absolutely fundamental to to Seasonal Alchemy and they're tightly interwoven. But just for the sake of this discussion, it's going to be worth us delving into each one of those in turn. So I want to turn next to Nature Connection and bring Hamish in and get a sense of how How do you feel your nature connection work feeds into the whole process that is Seasonal Alchemy?


Hamish:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we're going to talk about nature connection. We need to understand what that really is. You know, what does that even mean? How do we get ourselves into a place and a state where we can actually connect and be in reciprocity and respect and reverence for the natural world and align ourselves with its rhythms and receive her wisdom and then go and apply that out into the world? I'm reminded of the connection sequence, which my teacher, John Milton, who started an organization called Way of Nature, he talks about the connection sequence, which I've slightly amended. But essentially, I mean, this happened on my walk this morning. I think many of us, including me, when I started my walk this morning, I was disconnected. I wasn't really in nature, I was in my mind, I was thinking about my to do list and all the things I needed to do. But physically, I was out in the fields. And the way I would describe this is at some point, we need to recognise we're disconnected, and we can go out and have an intention to connect. And then we might move into a place which I would call the observer. where our attention is on the natural world. But there's still a separation in that nature's out there, and I'm here, I'm observing, I'm paying attention, I see the tree, I see the river, I might smell something, but there's a degree of separation. It's a bit like, if we're looking, we go to the theatre, we're in the audience seat, but the play is happening on the stage, right? But we're in the audience, we're not really participating. And so quite easily and very naturally for all of us, we can step into a participant of the natural world. We come to our senses, we slow down, we start paying attention in a more embodied, full embodied way. You know, I can feel the leaves cracking underneath my feet. I can feel the wind against my skin. The bird that's just flown away from me is flying away from me because I'm in, I'm in the fabric of the land. You know, I'm participating. I'm part of this thing. I'm not separate. And then if we get still enough and with a little bit more time and still very quite naturally and easily, we might realize that actually this play that we're in is kind of like a family reunion. And we recognise that the beings around us are not just what's, they're who's. You know, the tree is a who, the sparrow is a who, the path that goes in front of me is a who's. We recognise the who-ness of everything. Things are no longer an object, but they're subject, and there's a conversation, perhaps the oldest conversation, perhaps the most ancient conversation language that's ever had, that we've ever had, right, which is the language of soul. And what I'm talking about really here is an animistic experience and it's communion and it's very heartfelt and meaning is dripping from every leaf and every blade of grass. And if we move more with more time and more intention down the sequence, we might experience union and that sort of speaking more into the kind of non-dual space. But that's one way of describing what nature connection really is. And so, of course, at any time, on any day, that's entirely different. But the degree of separation, our perception of ourselves as separate, begins to dissolve very naturally. And anyone can do this. It's in our bones. And with more practice, and with more time, it becomes more of a daily experience. And so when we move through the flow of the seasons, each season has its gifts and its wisdom. We can more readily experience those gifts and that wisdom.

Adrian:
Wonderful. Thank you. I think bringing in each of the seasons, because it's not a one off, it's a real tendency. Somebody says, oh, yeah, I did this Nature Connection workshop. Oh, yeah, it was great. But then they kind of lose it. And with this process, there's a coming back, a revisiting different season, the process is there, but there's a shift in the dynamic of the whole thing and it builds up over a period of time and becomes really embodied. I think that's very valuable.

Hamish:
Absolutely. Yeah. And of course, this, you know, the year is whole because it's a cycle that comes in a circle. And so we need to experience it as a whole. And if you think about how much changes in your life and how much happens in terms of opportunities and challenges across a year of your life, to be able to come back to the same container, the same community, the same practices, and the consistency of those practices, when there is so much change, is extraordinarily valuable. You know, I've had the privilege of going into nature for extended periods of time, but in modern society, very few of us have that opportunity. And yet, if we do it consistently over a whole year, we can go very deep and the transformation runs really deep because of the length of time and because of the consistency of the practices and because of the strength and trust of the container that we provide.

Adrian:
Part of what creates that container is ritual. And ritual is a key ingredient in this alchemy that you're creating. I wonder, Jed, could you talk a little bit about the role of ritual in what you're doing?

Jed:
So Adrian, I think your idea of the container is right. And so often ritual is a vessel for essentially working on our stuff, or that's one aspect of it. And I was taken with Francis Weller description in The Wild Edge of Sorrow recently around how he views ritual. And he does talk in these terms. It's the way that we have the pestle and mortar of our own personal meaning and suffering. We can use ritual as a language that speaks to the deepest layers of the human being. which I think is how one of his teachers describes it. All of that is around depth and Hamish's point around soul is really important here. Very complex word with great momentum behind it, if you like, but it is there in the mortar of this thing that we call ritual. I guess that speaks to the embodiment of meaning. We act out ritual. And I think Aristotle talks about the origins of this being a kind of animal faculty that we have to embody our meaning. And that's really, really central to how I see the power of ritual. We embody the meaning that we need to orientate ourselves in the world. And in that sense, rituals are being done all the time. There's not this separate realm. We have this thing that we call ritual space, which is highly important, but there are secular rituals, there are many different auras and rituals. I was reading Joseph Campbell recently, and he talks about the putting on of a uniform being such a central modern ritual, whether that's a soldier or whether that's a policeman. This is an embodiment of a meaning that is nested in society, and we can't separate that from it being a ritual act. But I think on our course on Seasonal Alchemy, it speaks to the animism part of ourselves, our own understanding, our cosmology. We want to open up a way of seeing that speaks to everything being alive. and everything being able to talk to us and communicate with us. And that's what ritual at its core kind of offers. One of the keynotes for us is a democratic participation in that. And as you know, we co-create the ritual with the group. So there's a layer of participation that is not always there in some other sort of religious and spiritual rituals.

Adrian:
Thank you.

Lydia:
Weaving it back to what you were saying earlier, Adrian, about what is it to be indigenous of these lands and the democratization of ritual that Jed was saying there? Like, what is it to consciously and responsibly rediscover what it is to be Euro indigenous? And in the absence of cultural norms, you know, in terms of like indigenous cultural norms, in the absence of The old ways, being present all the time, like I get so sad that I have to. pay to learn my native ways, that I have to go off to the hedges to find my teachers, that it's not woven into our daily lives. And so a sort of a subtle theme that we have running through this work is the democratization of ritual. So how do we not perpetuate indigenous spirituality of these lands How do we not perpetuate the hierarchical oppressive dominant ways of learning indigenous wisdom? So absolutely, there are hierarchies in terms of roles and like years of training and there's roles of teachers and the shaman and the server. So everybody has a role. But it doesn't mean you're better than or higher than. And so how do you run a program where people rediscover and reclaim their own connection with nature that dissolves the differentiating energies between them and the trees and them and spirit. How do you hold a space where people can reclaim their own indigeneity without ascribing what that has to look like or without ascribing structures that make them eligible or ineligible? without saying indigenous wisdom is this and not this for you? How do we hold a transformational container where people can activate and awaken their own indigeneity without doing it in a colonial way? And that's an ongoing inquiry that we're with. And part of it is we co-create ritual. Part of it is we share the behind the scenes of how we hold the space. Part of it is Hamish's guidance into the nature connection, mapping out all the different ways that we can relate to the natural world. So we try to balance, and this is a sort of a larger inquiry of like I guess, cultural rewilding today. How do we create environments for people to access their own wisdom and come into a wider, wilder relationship with spirituality, but not do it in a way that is just like another academic institution or not another church, right? Like not another church.

Adrian:
I'm really hearing this theme of, as human beings, we are not broken.

Lydia:
Yeah.

Adrian:
You don't need to have some expert to come in and fix you. You've got it within you. But if you have someone who can facilitate you to find your own wholeness, then it just emerges naturally.

Lydia:
Yeah. And being indigenous is not about having a library of knowledge. It's about how we relate to each other or ourselves and the world and the land that we are a part of. And from that place, absolutely comes myth and herbalism and song and all the coloring in. But the framework is one of interconnectivity and mystery and soul.

Adrian:
One of the pathways to this coming home to ourselves is breathwork. And I first experienced some online breathwork, I think it was last year, and was really struck by how powerful it was. And the lovely thing when I came on the workshop with you was the opportunity to actually experience hands-on one-to-one breathwork with Hamish. I'm fascinated as to how this particular piece fits in to the bigger picture of the Seasonal Alchemy work. So, Hamish, could you talk a little bit about what breathwork is and what role it plays within the Seasonal Alchemy process?

Hamish:
We use a technique called the Conscious Connected Breath, which is breathing purposefully in a certain way that brings about state change and helps people to release mental, emotional, energetic blockages, release trauma, find insight into the underlying truth of their situation. You know, breathwork is a really ancient practice, and there are thousands out there. Conscious connected breath is a more modern practice. And it's quite holistic, really, because you were talking about hands on, Adrian, you know, we live in a very touch deprived society. And so touch is a really important part of it. And we work with music, and we work with toning, which is making certain noises to bring about certain vibrational frequencies in different parts of the body. And we work with movement, So when we breathe in a certain way, it impacts the autonomic nervous system, it regulates the autonomic nervous system, it regulates cortisol levels and blood pressure. Basically, it helps us to be more ourselves. It gives us access to more of ourselves, to more wholeness. And if we go back to nature connection, the double doorway I see into nature connection is relaxation and presence. If we're not relaxed, we can be very present, we can be quite tense, we don't really receive the benefits of nature. And likewise, if we're very relaxed, but we're not present, we're kind of falling asleep. But there's an alchemy that happens when relaxation and presence come together, then all the benefits of nature arrive. And breathwork is a really beautiful practice to support relaxation and presence, to bring more embodied awareness, so that we can let go of what needs to be let go of, and really arrive and be present. So yeah, we do that, we do that together. And, you know, people have some powerful experiences. And that's all held within within the container of the group and, and integrated. And, you know, people then tend to go out onto the land alone, with the wisdom that they receive from the breath work with the felt embodied experience of themselves. And that's another practice that we have - solitude with nature, going out with the purity of a particular intention, and coming back and sharing if that makes if that feels good for people to share that wisdom back in the circle.

Adrian:
You can see the way it all weaves together. It's quite nice to having experienced it, to then speak to you and get a richer sense of why my experience was as powerful as it was.

Hamish:
It's really interesting, the breath as well, because it's one of the few things that we do, which is both voluntary and involuntary. Blinking is another thing. So it's an extraordinary tool to get into the unconscious and to get into the deeper parts of ourselves. So I sometimes encourage people to go out onto the land afterwards and just receive the breath, not take the breath, but just have the experience of surrendering to being breathed. And it's one of the most powerful practices I know to bring about a genuine embodied sense of trust.

Lydia:
So gorgeous.

Hamish:
Yeah, just trust that we're, you know, we're supported, that we, you know, moment to moment, we are being supported, we are, we are being lived. Our spleen spleens, and our breath breathes, and it's all happening, you know, we can get out of the way, and trust life. And because we do it so many times a day, the breath is just extraordinary tool to do that. But more than that, it's each person comes away with a particular practice because we pick up breathing dysfunctions. Some of us breathe up into our chest, but not our belly or our belly, not our chest, or we hold our breath or whatever it is. So I'm really looking at each person and seeing what their particular breathing dysfunction is, and then giving them practices to take away a daily practice to start ironing out those dysfunctions and breathing more fully and functionally, because it's our primary source of nourishment. we hold ourselves back, we perpetuate the same stress response in the way that we breathe. So it's really important for us to understand what's our stress response, what's the way that we breathe that perpetuates that, and then how can we practice to breathe more fully and functionally. And that might sound daft, Adrian, but My teacher, Nicola Price, she's been doing this for 12 years and she's still refining her breath pattern. You know, before I did breath work, I was like, what do you mean? I know how to breathe. Of course I know how to breathe. But I wasn't breathing up into my chest in certain positions. So it's a wonderful practice and it's important.

Lydia:
What I love about what you were saying there as well, Hamish, about the receptivity and receiving the breath and then taking that out into the land. We get an embodied practice of being in receptivity, which is like if we again just like weaving in the Celtic wheel of the year. half, the whole dark half of the year from Samhain to Bealtaine is the dark half is when we're in the feminine is the receptivity. But it's not a it's not a way of being in the world that is supported and taught and valued. So we get through, yeah, through the breathwork and through the nature connection, as you described it there. We get this embodied practice on these on the weekends that we take into our life of actually what does it mean to be in receptivity in the world? What does it mean to to move from observer to participant, to receptor of the world around us, to let life's intelligence live us, to let our breath breathe us. So so it's all there. We get this, you know, seemingly isolated breathwork practice. But actually, it teaches us how to be human.

Adrian:
Yeah. Yeah. That leads quite nicely on to something which I think is very often missing from a lot of workshops like this or processes like this, which is community. And I was really struck by how you as a team nurtured community during the workshop I attended. Jed, this is something that's very close to your heart. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the role of community and how you nurture that within the Seasonal Alchemy process.

Jed:
Well, I don't mean this flippantly, but sometimes it's about having breakfast together and that being a central practice in one's life. The way that the word is used can be very expansive. We hear the word ‘community’ a lot and I think it's important to try and be a bit more precise when we use it and not have it as a generic placeholder. That then can bring in more power. So the breakfast example is a way of experiencing togetherness that is something that reminds me of when I lived in the Buddhist community. So I was lucky to live a couple of times in a Buddhist community and any kind of intentional community has some of this built into it, which is that simple act of sharing in the equal way - of time and oneself - is the thing that weaves it all together. And you can't achieve that. I mean, achieve is not the right word here. You can't allow that. without actually showing up as oneself, actually being oneself and the authenticity that comes with that. And really those intentional communities or spiritual communities, I think, have that at the heart, which is a way of supporting people to be themselves and noticing when we're hiding out or when we're not able to really show up as ourselves or we're wearing a mask game playing and that will happen because we're imperfect and that's okay but really the practice in those spaces is to notice and then try and come back into authenticity and it's only then that you can share experience in that meaningful way that really deserves the label. A big part of that is around recognition and it's a recognition in a deep sense that people are here and themselves I am showing up at me as as much as I can and you're showing up as you and we both matter in that in that relationship that way of entering into this layer of possibility called community. I think your experience is my experience on some level, is the pithy way to describe it. And that has lots of words in different spiritual traditions, sobernost or sangha. There are other words in other settings, some of which have very long traditions and spiritual communities around them. It's that recognition, your experience is my experience on some level. And when that certain flavour of relationship comes through, then you can have the container that we were talking about, the vessel that we were talking about, because ritual and community mirror each other. They're an equal force, if you like. They capture this sense of building something that contain our humanity, and that's done around having breakfast, being open to that as much as we can. I think sometimes as a facilitator, there's a temptation to go into facilitator mode. The real temptation is to obviously go for guru status or something, there are different layers, there are different options within that, but it is always going to be based on a kind of persona and I hope you experience that really the power of how Seasonal Alchemy works is showing up without that layer of wanting to be the ‘Big F’ facilitator or otherwise. I hope the three of us were accessible and human and that would be my ambition and that's how we, well I think we build community. So yeah, being oneself and having broken


Adrian:
Authenticity. And that was absolutely my experience of all three of you. That's key, isn't it? We need to turn up if there's going to be community and be everything that we are with everybody else and sharing that. So we've been exploring breathwork, nature connection, community, ritual and all within the context of the Wheel of the Year. And the magic of Seasonal Alchemy is the way you guys weave those all together. It's a bit of a tall order, really, for the last few minutes of this episode. But I'm just wondering, alchemy is about this wondrous combination and transformation. I just wonder, any thoughts on how it is that you bring these together?


Lydia:
Well, originally, it was an invitation from the land. So I was in a I was in conversation with the guardians of the land where we run this program, and everything started to flow. They said, Will you come? Will you run one of your programs here? And I'm Irish in Ireland. And then I contacted Hamish in England. And this is the land on the edge of the Forest of Dean at the Asha Center. stunning place with a sacred well nearby, over a thousand varieties of rose in the garden. It's a multiple faith divination community. It's just gorgeous. So when the land calls, there's this beautiful thing that like we don't have to figure it all out. We just get to be in service. And coming back to what Jed said at the beginning in terms of the personal, the social and the transpersonal, when hosting any kind of a container, and I'll just speak for me and then lads fill in as you can, as you wish, as you want, it's always about like touching on all the dimensions, as many dimensions of our human experience as we can. So there is the spiritual aspect, there's the embodied aspect, There's the self, and then there's the land, and then there's the community. So what happens within us? So if we're touching on all of those, we've got, OK, connection with self and spirit. That's, you know, let's say prayer time. We've meditation every day for a whole host of reasons. Meditation connection, connection with the divine. Great. It's also one of the best integration tools I know. So like sit still for half an hour a day and you can just accelerate your development because it clears out all the energetic stuff that you're processing. Amazing. But we're in this human form. We're soul incarnate. And as long as we're here in this, in this mortal coil, this is absolutely working with the body is a huge part of any transformation or development process. You can't leave it out. And I'm from a very long established community of spiritual bypassing. I did a whole load of Advaita Vedanta stuff for the first half of my life. left out the whole body experience, no trauma work, no somatic work, maybe a bit of yoga. But like that was just about external movement, not the actual internal processing within the soma where the trauma lives in the cells and the joy lives in the cells. So we had to bring in the body. And that's where the breath, where the dance, the movement that Jed brings us through is so key. But then we also like we get to be part of this modern Western civilization, which has incredible advances in psychology and evolutionary theory and adult development. So we bring those in of like how does this ancient wisdom and bodily wisdom apply to our own internal mapping of how of who we are, of identity, of beliefs, core values. So we bring in some of that as well, like adult development psychology and evolutionary theory, sort of layering it onto what the Celtic wheel can look like in our own lives today. We get out onto the land for the nature connection. We imbibe and we nourish ourselves with delicious food that is seasonally prepared. The folks in the kitchen are woven in as part of the whole community piece that Jed spoke about, not just in breakfast, you know, lunch, dinner, all the things, afternoon tea, chocolate brownies. So, yeah, it's just it's really important when doing any of this work for me when we're holding a transformational container that it is as multidimensional as possible. so that integration happens so that it's responsible, that it's safe, but it's also really damn brave. I'm not interested in just safe spaces. I'm interested in brave spaces. And how can we help people move through whatever it is that they want to move through? So you really got to touch on that, you know, body, mind, heart, spirit, land.


Adrian:
Thank you. Anything to add from that overview of how it all weaves together?

Hamish:
I think Lydia just about covered it all for me. But go on Jed.

Jed:
Yeah. Alchemy, as you know, has a central maxim, which is mysterious, right? Solve a coagula. And the alchemy part of our identity for me is around this dissolution and reconstitution that that phrase speaks to, which is, I don't want to say literally here, but directly involves the elements that we experience in the seasons. So alchemy itself talks about the combination of elements and reconstitution. And through our experience of wind, rain, soil, sun, we reconstitute ourselves. We reconstitute ourselves in nature. And that seasonal process that changes all the time because the elements are imbalanced in different ways as we come into the wheel at different times. Yeah, somehow that is alchemy. That is the Seasonal Alchemy that is on offer. And it changes people.

Hamish:
I just want to add something about the inspiration. I was so inspired by the people that showed up. The right people come and they come because they have a longing and the vulnerability and the courage they show and the way that they show up is hugely inspiring. And that has an alchemy effect on everyone else.


Adrian:
Yeah. Which brings me to add that the new season of Season of Alchemy is kicking off quite soon.

Hamish:
The first weekend's on the 13th of December.

Adrian:
Yeah, that's good to have it in just before we finish off.

Hamish:
And registration closes on the 3rd of December.

Adrian:
Hey, maybe if you've been inspired by what you've heard, if you think you might be one of the brave souls who wants to join the next cycle, have a look at seasonalalchemy.space -  I will put that web link on the Embodied Pathways homepage. You can go there and find out more about the forthcoming offering to join this crew for the whole Wheel of the Year. 

I've got loads of thoughts about things like cultural rewilding and the transition process and the alchemy of it all, but we need to bring it to a close. So very rich. Thank you for all three of you for joining me and sharing your vision.

Lydia,Hamish and Jed:
Thanks, Adrian. Thanks, Adrian. Thanks, everybody.

Adrian:
OK, so until next time, I'll bring this episode to a close. Thanks for listening and goodbye.