Deep Earth Dreaming

Skye was raised on (and by) a farm on the edge of a wildlife reserve in South Africa. Her early childhood was spent wandering barefoot and immersed in the imaginal worlds that emerged between her senses and the touch of lion’s roar, river song and rolling thunderstorms across the bushveld. Her teen years were spent hand-raising and rehabilitating wildlife and later, led her to qualify as a wilderness guide. She then went on to train in traditional Taoist healing practices for three years and qualified as a yoga instructor before travelling to the Peruvian Amazon to undergo an in-depth apprenticeship in Amazonian curanderismo (the regional word for shaman/plant spirit healer). Helm also grew up close to nature but attempted to ‘civilise’ himself through higher education and a few years as a corporate lawyer. Through the good fortune of an existential crisis, he wound up in the jungle, where he met Skye and remembered what it felt like to belong to the world. Along the way, he trained as a counsellor, psycho-therapeutic journey practitioner, breath worker and in bodywork. Together, in Peru, we underwent a full-time 5year apprenticeship with Shipibo curanderos from the Mahua-Lopez lineage- simultaneously facilitating healing and transformational retreats for hundreds of people from all over the world. In the years since then, we have studied the sickness of modern industrial growth culture, and to the deep ecological movement arising in response, including the work of John Seed and Joanna Macy (The Work that Reconnects). We see our path as one which traverses the jagged terrain of separation, towards a culture of ‘interbeing’. To this end, we now apprentice themselves to the wild multi-form sentience of the land. To the humans that remember what it is to belong. To the old growth.