Musings Behind The Scenes

Musings Behind The Scenes of Murmurations
My Six Month Apprenticing Earth Mentoring Programme

It’s been a week of interesting conversations.

A big thank you to the beautifully articulate Rachel Blackman for instigating my reflections around the concept of synthesis during a lovely shared cuppa tea earlier this week. Synthesis has its roots in the Greek word Suntithenai which means simply ‘to place together’.

Aged 38 I had the most amazing dyslexia support tutor (Tim Stephens) and every so often he would try and articulate how my mind works so that I could better write my thesis for the understanding of the reader, “Your mind works like a high flying bird who can survey different fields at the same time and make new links between them,” he would say. “Now spell those links out to the readers.”

Speaking with Rachel prompted this memory and the sense that my dyslexia is at the root of my ability and enjoyment in synthesising seemingly separate territories.

“You are a Jack of all trades and a master of what binds them”

The reason I am telling you this is that through facilitating my Murmurations Mentoring programme for the last three cohorts I’ve experienced a surprisingly natural synthesis of my backgrounds in Somatics, Wilderness guiding, a decade of tracking my own mytho-poetic threads and my Buddhist practice.

The first three areas were already blending together well but the Buddhist bit has been a bit late to the synthesising party and slower to integrate. Besides the natural fit with presence and interconnection I’ve been realising there’s more specific buddhist practices that are seriously helpful for vision questing.

What’s curious to me is that latest synthesising (which is still in process) came in quite effortlessly - after a longer period of years where I often sat with a perplexed curiosity around particular connections. For example, the meeting place between Buddhist practice and rites of passage, or our modern conditioning and animist world views.

t takes a lot of ongoing effort to articulate these crossovers and guide people through them experientially. I must sheepishly admit I do feel protective of the specific practices I've developed, as they focus more on the 'How to' than the 'What to do'.

There is plenty of information available about the 'What to do' in nature-based practices, but very little on the vital 'How to' engage with them experientially—which is where, I believe, the true aliveness happens. This focus on the 'How to' is the core of the Murmurations Mentoring program.

By bridging these territories, the purpose is to help people go deeper into their own experience. Hopefully, this brings greater depth and nuance to engaging with the traditional practices that have been central to ancestral human nature throughout history.

Clearly connecting with nature through myth and ritual, forest and fire, with the earth as our bed and the stars as our blanket is not of my own making. Our ancestors lived as kin amongst kin for vast swathes of time. But as modern beings bought up in a materialistic world view it takes ‘a something’ to experientially recover an attitude or way of being that perceives the natural world as deeply alive.

Tuning in… listening in for the conversation between 'life-ing as me' and 'life-ing as natural world' - a conversation imbued with embodied wisdom from goat-speak, rock-speak, horizon-speak, snake-speak and more. Entering into this great participation, a soulful practice of reciprocity, of following our soul-threads, listening to the wild tongues from within and all around…

Something in me is curious about my seemingly selfish longing for ‘authorship recognition’ for this body of bridging practices. I wonder if it is because I haven’t gotten around to writing that bl**dy book about my work. I wonder whether it’s because we do love to quote the same celebrity facilitators over and over but rarely cite the people we actually know who also may be wise and have something to say. But that’s another conversation…

Anyhow to the point:

I have new dates on my website for the 2026 Murmurations Programme.

Come! and if you can’t come please do share about it with others who you think might like to come.

With Murmurations I offer an unfolding process that is about the individuals in the group and their specific unfolding journeys - it is personal and participatory by nature.

Like many, I have a certain amount of zoom fatigue but I have realised that if my presence counts this isn’t an issue for me. This is why I keep my group numbers so small. It is deliberate - not for my bank balance - but for the intimacy and involvement factor.