I love holding retreats. I never really planned to hold them; it’s just organically happened as a natural unfolding. I feel rather like a tree that has been battered by inner and outer weather much of its life, incapable of bearing particularly good fruit until recently because the conditions just weren’t right for that to happen. Yet the survival instinct has been strong & my 25 year old dance practice has taught me to ride the waves of weather in a way that doesn’t break me ~ but instead makes me increasingly able to seek out the light that makes me grow. I’m only now coming to fully realize that decades of relentless struggle building both my inner and outer home have been so very worth it. This work has given me an inner & outer home to teach from that is uniquely shaped from many years of seeking light in the darkness, from fixing difficulties, from re-parenting myself whole again. What I’m doing cannot be learned from reading a book or doing a course and it’s for that reason that I’ll probably never develop a training. I’ve trained in countless modalities but for me the real training has always been the grit of life itself. My prayers for this year are that the roots of my inner home will continue to deepen & that my outer home will begin to stretch out its arms to include sweet Sambogaya, our Glastonbury project. It’s taking a long time to birth & at times it’s felt like just another struggle, but birthing a home for good work is no easy task when it’s me who is doing it. Yet I feel the inclusion of Glastonbury in my trajectory will ultimately lighten the load for me, my beloveds and the many who will come to visit & drink up the beauty and amazing work that will abound there. The mysteries there whisper to me, soften my heart & widen my eyes. And perhaps Glastonbury’s uber spirituality could do with some of my Yorkshire grit. Life for me is the art of bridging the spiritual with the material & coming to realize that they are identical. I’m here to find stillness within the movement, formlessness within the form & true freedom within the suffering. So as 2023 beds in, I reluctantly yet fully open my arms in reverence for the mad wonder of life itself in all its guises as it continues to shape my dance through time & space; I appeal to sweet courage to keep playing a strong role & above all I hope that friendship and love will continue to grow & give me the regular reminder that, as my beloved teacher Gabrielle Roth would say, there’s only ever been one of us here 
