Category Archives: Workshops

Workshops

Decolonial Action

Decolonial Action – Radical Community Building and Recovering the Self

with Carnelian

Unlock decolonial wisdom! 10-week course empowers you to break free from carceral capitalism and build radical community.

Do you want to make meaningful change in your community but have no idea where to start?

Do you feel passionately about decolonial struggle and liberation for all?

Do you feel overwhelmed with climate anxiety, rising fascism and poverty?

Do you feel an urgency to action trapped inside capitalist compliance?

Are you seeking to learn how to uncover your true self beyond the inherited societal and cultural conditioning of these times?

This course will enlighten how colonialism affects every area of our lives and how to begin the work of decolonising the self and our environment, becoming reconnected with ourselves, our communities and our world.

The atrocity of colonisation lies at the heart of all oppressive systems on our planet, from the genocide of the P@L3$t1an people to Climate crisis, to growing Fascist power across the globe. Not only in how it has shaped our global infrastructure of consumption, but in its core wound of stripping every corner of the planet from its indigenous culture, equating the values of living with honour and reverence in connection to our own land, as to savagery. We are imprisoned by its legacy, dependent on the systems of globalised capitalism to provide us with food, clothes and goods from tens of thousands of miles away, decimating the land and poisoning our once biodiverse landscapes. These methods leave the world and ourselves bare and barren.

And how can we use our energy to resist when we are working beyond exhaustion, forcing the endless loop of convenience consumption to compensate for the weariness of our wage slavery. The rising cost of living is imprisoning so many of us in poverty that we are chained to working longer and harder than at any previous point in human history. The coloniser never lost their slaves, they only built a system that renders the whip invisible.

The work of repairing ourselves, the structure of our communities and the planet lies in the decolonisation of who we are and our collective home: Earth. It is only through true decolonial practice, adhering to the wisdom of our pre-colonial lineage to retrieve our power from the clutches of carceral capitalism. From the return of land to rightful indigenous ownership to unpicking of our day to day enmeshment to imperialist power, the work of decolonisation is urgent for all our survival.

But How do we do it?

What does it truly mean to “decolonise” and where do we start?

How do we learn from pre-colonial cultures without appropriation?

How do we build different kinds of communities?

What practices can we use to connect to our pre-colonial past in order to build a decolonial future?

How do we free ourselves and our communities from the cycles of carceral capitalism?

This 10 week online course breaks down the process. As we explore practical strategies for decolonial community building, breaking free from carceral capitalism and recovering the self, we will learn how to:

Recognise how colonial legacy functions and how to reorient from individualism to communal ownership

Understand the difference between liberal, appropriative politics and true decolonial repair

Reconnect with the land through pre-colonial community permacultural practices to feed ourselves, work less, rest more, and fight fascism.

Develop practical community building skills to redistribute community labour & resources

Decolonise our relationships with healthier boundaries, non-violent communication & sustainable systems of community care

Build anti-carceral systems of justice within our communities that nourish community strength

Divest from reliance of capitalist infrastructure in health, food, clothes and resources whilst centering accessibility to the most marginalised

Rest, recover and resist!

With live Zoom classes, 1-1 sessions, practical materials in both audio and written form; this course is designed to arm you with deep theoretical understanding and practical tools to continue to develop independently and become a seed of change in your own community.

This course is run on a donation basis. In order to provide fair accessibility, we operate a NOTAFLOF policy (No One Turned Away For Lack Of Funds). The suggested donation for the full course of 10 weeks is €200 for those who are financially stable. If you are blessed with affluence and are able to pay it forward by donating extra, we encourage you to do so as this supports wider access to this integral work and helps dismantle one of the colonisers ideals of financial privilege.

Please join us, heal yourself and help turn the tides towards nurturing the growth of our world.

SIGN UP HERE: @carnelianseville | Linktree

Personal Stories, Workshops

My Name Is Joseph And I Am A Pagan Priest.

(Joe recently connected with the London Rad Faeries at a drum circle and offers us this introduction to his work…)

My name is Jospeh and I am a Pagan priest. I am also a Queer person.

What is a Pagan Priest you might ask? Well, in essence, it’s a choice to dedicate a life, at least in part, to be of service to my community by bringing an opportunity to connect with self, the natural world and the Divine to those who are so inclined. “Priest” is just another word. Many people who do what I do, do not choose that particular label. I did spend a couple of years training as a Priest within a Pagan community, but this is not the only route to this path. More about that later.

I started on my journey with spirituality at about 15, I am now 35. At the time, being a Baby-Witch gave me a sense of empowerment, purpose and strength. As a queer teen I had the usual experience of many queerlings, a sense of being different, having to find myself in a world that tells me to conform, navigating fear and bullying and also, the joy of discovery. Identifying as a Witch meant I had to come out of two closets, the queer closet and the broom closet. Truly, I believe that rather than complicate the matter of finding myself and expressing that to the world, the intersection of my queerness and my paganness supported and strengthened these two complementary parts of who I am. Queerness can correspond to encountering challenges, especially at a young age, but to believe I could overcome anything with just the right combination of crystals, herbs and words certainly gave me courage.

Fast forward twenty years and my Paganism now plays a different role in my life. It is now a tool for connection and healing. I would say I was called to take the leap from solitary Witch to ceremonial leader after encountering the dark night of the soul, otherwise known as a complete collapse in mental health. For a while, crippling anxiety and panic were everyday experiences. Obsessive existential fears controlled my life, and I was lost to depression. The only light at the end of the tunnel was my relationship with my spirituality. In a sense I had to die to be reborn. I had to face my darkest fears in order to overcome them. From that point on I was called to leap deeper into spirituality and discover what I could offer the world. So, this led me to train as a Priest as part of a community of Goddess worshippers in Glastonbury. This was not an easy ride and what began here was a discovery that diversity and inclusion were not a given in Pagan communities. One side of myself, my paganness was fulfilled, but the other, my queerness, was not. What I found was that some spiritual communities are plagued by the same fate that befall many organised religion. A hotbed of transphobia, queerphobia, a lack of basic understanding and essentially a community that could not meet the needs of LGBTQ Pagans, not to mention people of colour or my disabled kin.

I was then pulled towards a new path. A path where queer people were at its centre not the peripheral. Where the focus was on actively developing Pagan practice and ceremony that spoke to diverse people. The path of radical inclusion! We deserve to be able to look into the face of the Divine and see ourselves. To see God as a pregnant trans man. To see Goddess as a disabled woman of colour. To experience connection with a deity who was beyond the binary. And so, my journey has led me to where I am now. Working towards Pagan practice that is fully inclusive and to designing ceremony that celebrates the lives of queer people. And so Indigo Earth Ceremonies was born. I walk my own path, a path of my own creation. The path of Indigo Earth.

Joseph Atiase is Priest of Indigo Earth and can be found at www.indigoearthceremonies.com

He is offering a summer solstice ritual – details via link below:

Summer Solstice Ceremony by Indigo Earth Tickets, Sat 18 Jun 2022 at 18:00 | Eventbrite

Gathering, Workshops

Coming Home Healing Retreat Report

40 faeries gathered at the New Moon in Cancer for a week of healing retreat at Unstone Grange, a dedicated and beautiful ‘Centre for Personal and Creative Growth’ in Derbyshire, where we were lovingly welcomed by the centre’s smiling volunteers, the gentle and vibrant energies of the land and the baking July sunshine of Summer 2018.

There were no parties, no No Talent Shows, no auction. Instead there was a lot of tenderness, gentleness, sharing and SILENCE. Oh and we lived ‘inside out’ for a week – letting the element and energy of our moon selves take centre stage.

Each day we retreatants met in four groups according to the element of our moon signs. This produced small water and earth groups and large air and fire. We learnt that each moon group had its own way of processing emotionally. Earth moon people were laidback, didn’t feel the need to reveal much, and when emotions did come up didn’t necessarily feel the need to do much with them. Water moon people revelled in this chance to honour and explore emotional flow. Air moons talked a lot and took some time to find their focus, but became a faerie flock moving, singing and dancing as one as the days went by. Fire moons were the feisty ones, the group with shouting and arguing, walk outs and drama to the end. But also the fire people seemed to gain a lot from allowing the fire expression to happen. One fire moon faerie observed, “We all had our moments, got over them and moved forward. This was great as usually people hold onto things and keep grudges, I saw tempers flare, then become understanding and then friends, so wonderful and special.”

The retreat call invited us to gather for a time of “turning within together, a conscious journey into healing and transformation”, invoking “a supportive setting in which we practice letting go of the stimulating world of external objective intensity and wade into the cool deep waters of the inner being.” We got to be quiet together, to relax and enjoy some new moon calm space, and through doing so affirm the powerful and central healing qualities of our Albion Faerie tribe. We Albion Fae seem to have earned ourselves a reputation for knowing how to throw a good party, through this retreat space we affirmed that behind our sharing of good times lies a deep drive to embrace our nature as healers of the planet and the soul.

Photos by Loveable 

Here’s some feedback from participants:

” I felt more loved and more in family than I ever have in a group setting … exceptional love and harmony that I received in faeriespace. I feel that you all are something special and part of my life already.”

“Everyone involved should be mega proud – totally amazing! Reflecting on it, one of the things that really worked for me was the astrological theory underlying it – made it so much more coherent than your typical woo event and therefore I think more powerful in its magic.”

“… a wonderful experience. The Coming Home retreat at times was intense, even explosive, quiet, loud, but mainly fun and happy, with loads of laughter.”

“A week of connecting with magic, with the moon signs, with the heart, with the elements, with the land, with the fellow fairies…. I enjoyed the silence from the evening until lunch so much. The possibility to be „alone together“ felt natural and beautiful….. The connection beyond words is for me always stronger than the connection through words. And this quality was there.

“The significance of the moon sign to my life was a revelation for me. I knew about the influence of the the sun sign and the ascendant. But the moon sign was new to me…..The rituals we did were very powerful and connected me and everyone beautifully to the four elements and what they mean in life.

“Last not least the lovely grounds with old enchanted trees, readings at the pond, flowers, fruits, a hot outdoor bath tub, which hosted even three fairies at once (a bit of gymnastics needed there), a bliss pit to show and enhance joy and a shadow pit to bury unhelpful energies. And lovely food all week long, especially the marvellous breakfast treats created by sexual.”

A SECOND HEALING RETREAT AT UNSTONE GRANGE IS PLANNED FOR 25 FEBRUARY – 4 MARCH 2019