Articles about Spirit Horse have appeared in:
| <No Image> | Bristol Spark 1997 - "Spirit Horse Nomadic Circle...Into The Wilder West!" |
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Sacred Hoop Issue 20 - "Spirit Horse Camps" (back issue available to purchase here.) |
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Kindred Spirit Issue 56\2001 - "Once we were wild" (back issue available to purchase here.) |
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Sacred Hoop Issue 51\2006 - "A place for growing" (back issue sold out - click link for pdf version.) |
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Kindred Spirit Issue 90\Jan-Feb 2008 - Coming Home: As a young woman Polly, wept for a place to call home. Read about her incredible discovery of a modern tribe that ended her search. |
Bristol Spark (1997)
Many journalists have come to experience Spirit Horse and report back to the world. This is the original version of the report of Catherine Stott, working for the Bristol Spark (published 1997)
Spirit Horse Nomadic Circle...Into The Wilder West!
I’m reluctant to tell you about my time at Spirit Horse Nomadic Circle for two reasons. First, to put the experience into cold, hard print, I have to blow my ‘Kate Adie of Positive Change’ cover and confess to being a damaged person trying to patch myself back together. Also, I don’t want you to book all the places on this year’s camps.
You see, Spirit Horse rekindled fires in me put out when I reached adolescence, threw away my hunting knife and Narnia books and tried really hard to believe in money, mortgages and traditional family values. But Spirit Horse showed me there was magic on 20th Century earth, if I opened myself to its daily spiritual, physical and mental challenge. When I went to the Spirit Horse Shamanic Contemplation camp in Wales, I’d been trying to find a spiritual path for a while. The combination of Buddhism and Shamanism seemed ideal, despite knowing little about either.
Hungarian healer Erika Indra, and Irish ceremonialist and storyteller Shivam O’Brien have exclusive use of a beautiful valley somewhere near Welshpool. Over the eight years they’ve been running courses they’ve built up a small settlement of carpet-lined yurts, tipis and benders dotted among trees and gorges and by streams. You can take your own tent, or stay in theirs. Or, do what I did, stay in several. I also ate like a horse and made friends like never before.
Shamanic contemplation turned out to be a spiritual group process. Bring together 20 strangers, led by two delightful, charismatic, respectful but challenging human beings experienced in the power of ritual and groups and, as Erika said ‘things start cooking’. They said we wouldn’t leave the same people and they weren’t kidding. Recurrent phrases were ‘seize opportunity by the forelock’ and ‘don’t wait until you’re ready to do it, just do it’.
Erika and Shivam made a great team: she seeing each of us, seeing though our defences and behaviours; he driving the group through the ceremonies, almost challenging us to do and be more than we thought we could.
At the time I needed some serious healing, love and a new hunger for my life. I didn’t know this and turned up wearing my cynical front. After three days I had no front left. I was a huge relief.
The midnight sweat lodge (a native American idea, ritual performed in the pitch black in a bender tent converted into a kind of sauna), alternately terrified and elated me. We spent the day building it and collecting old wood for the huge fire to heat the rocks in. Being naked inside a very hot, dark bender, knowing I couldn’t leave until the ritual was over was at first terrifying (actually most things on this camp scared the life out of me and I became increasingly angry at the way I let my fear hold me back). But I did two sessions out of three and was damn proud of myself.
The singing lesson struck terror in my heart. Years of shaming mean I don’t sing in front of anyone, buster. I said no and fell apart. But the group waited for me and that afternoon on the mountainside I discovered my voice was not so bad after all. And I got angry at the monsters of my youth who’d told me it was.
Several of us were in deep childhood pain, so Erika and Shivam introduced ceremonies to help us heal and grow up. Bear-hugging (I wept), chocolate giving (I wept), burying our parents (I grew up a bit). Walking through a medicine wheel (I came out silently triumphant). I even got a rocking – 18 people cradled me in their arms and sang to me, while others massaged my feet and head. I said it was the most beautiful experience of my life and I meant it.
One day I visited Erika, Stone Medicine Woman, in a cave by a waterfall. I’m not telling you what she told me about myself, but I left several inches taller. Most of the week I was either in bits or dying of self-consciousness. And always someone took care of me, such as one of the site crew, Bear, who won a place in my heart forever with his gentleness, instant lyrics and didgeridoo playing.
By the end I’d amazed myself several times by doing things I’d always thought I was incapable of. And was operating mostly with my extra senses, not my head for a change. I wanted to stay there the rest of the summer.
To sum up: Spirit Horse is a wild, fantastic, romantic, real, useful, inward bound and outward bound spiritual adventure. I got more out of that nine days than four years at university, and am now doing their year long course. Go if you want to confront some of your fears, destroy some of your illusions about yourself and grow. If you’d rather just relax, keep your denial system intact and your extra senses shut down, I’ve heard Butlins is very nice!
Catherine Stott
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