The pathway to a more holistic knowing, a place of untapped creativity and of new perspectives leads us via our bodies and our embodied imagination back into connection with the intelligence of life itself.

In animist cultures, we find deep respect for the idea that our physical bodies and our imagination together connect us to the wisdom of Mystery, Soul, Life itself. In our dominant culture, however, we have mostly lost this connection to the animate world around us and to non-conventional ways of knowing. This loss is clear when we look at the state of the world and our struggle to find meaningful responses and solutions to the big personal and collective challenges of our time.

However, there are processes and practices can help us to reconnect and regain a kind of knowing that is not mind-based insight but opens us up to a much larger perspective.

This way of looking at things from a different vantage point is common to most indigenous cultures and is sometimes referred to as harnessing our second attention. It’s an awareness of the non-ordinary world beyond our day to day mental perception. You could also think of it as the place where your intuition lives and where your own deep inner wisdom meets the mystery and wisdom of the outer world.

In the Other Ways of Knowing workshops we practice shifting from our first attention- our day to day awareness where a lot gets filtered out, dismissed as irrelevant or irrational, to our second attention where we stay alive to all that is happening in and around us.

We pick up on the more subtle, inexplicable aspects of life, beyond what we expect to see and what we think of as important. Moving away from linear thinking towards field thinking and relational knowledge, we work with bringing more of our different channels for receiving information and knowing online. We enter a kind of altered state (without substances, just via the wondrous means of our own bodies, simple yet deep practices and the power of intention) and allow our perception to widen so that we can take in afresh what is happening around us, recognizing the aliveness of the world around us and gleaning wisdom for healing and change.