Using the practices of guided meditations and stream-of-consciousness writing, we will enter into presence with the more-than-human world and bring back other — and ancient — ways of knowing. This transformative altered state learning state comes when we open ourselves, with humility, care and wonder, to the animate world.

Co-becoming is a term from the book Songspirals by the Gay’wu group of women. “Country has awareness, it is not just backdrop. It knows and is part of us. It is home and land, but it is more than that. Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become, the way we emerge together and will always emerge together.” I use this term with permission from the Gay’wu group, and in gratitude for their profound work and so generously sharing their knowledge, this workshop is also a fundraiser for the Yolgnu community where they live and work.

I share knowledge and techniques gained in my Creative Writing PhD investigations of somatic and shamanistic metaphysics, where I studied the sensing of an animate world in European and Australian Aboriginal traditions, a world sometime known as the Imaginal Realm.

The work we do together goes deep – it penetrates below the surface of thought and into the hidden world of complex ecological connections. It reveals how this complexity and aliveness creates what we think of as human – creates soul, magic, power, pleasure, and poetry. It can be surprising, resonant and sometimes strange, and also very funny – the animate world has a delicious sense of humour!

What course participants are saying about this work:

Where the human hearts and more-than-human world come together, there is a place of deep prayer that can contribute to the healing of our world. Maya shares practices, wisdom and insight that gently lead to a deeper communion than you might imagine. Not simply a writing workshop but a way of being that can be remembered and shared so simply. Pure magic. — Sieta

I feel a profound stillness and calm after a delightfully dislocating and delicious dip in the more-than-human waters. The deft facilitation, warm safe container and wonderful surrounds have allowed me to traverse some truly paradigm-splitting and enmeshment-propagating new territories. This work speaks through you with such zest and humility that it becomes easily infectious in a kind of reverse disease that produces a de-centering thought for something far greater and more splendid indeed. — Andy