What is Spirit Horse ?
Spirit Horse is a wild retreat centre, a village of Celtic roundhouses, yurts and tents, waterfalls, sacred fires and temples, cradled in 200 acres of Welsh forest returning to its wild nature.
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We gather at our mountain retreat in the summer times, becoming an evolving community of tribal ways, where the ancient soul has a place by the fire.
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Some come to experience our workshops and events.
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Some come to volunteer and support our vision.
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Some come to immerse themselves in nature and recharge.
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The gateway into the whole cultural experiment at Spirit Horse is through booking a course, choose one!
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rewilding people, land & culture
Spirit Horse is an off-grid retreat centre founded by Shivam O'Brien in 1990, supported by Erika Indra who is still an active force behind the scenes. Bringing spiritual retreats and ritual gatherings out onto the land, Spirit Horse is now a ceremonial village set amongst waterfalls, wild woods and nature in the raw.
From those early years, an unprecedented spiralling adventure in rewilding, self inquiry and community creation manifested. A fresh yet ancient way of growing, learning, dreaming and remembering; that is Spirit Horse.
Under Shivam's direction, ancient values, ritual, meditation, storytelling, tribal living, the performing arts, touching the earth and creative rebellion came to provide the backbone for an ongoing experiment in an anciently remembered way of being together.
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It became the remaking of culture: deeply rooted, emotionally authentic, earth loving and requiring spiritual precision both collectively and individually.
Why People Come Here
A place of pilgrimage on your personal journey, whether you yearn for adventure or to discover something fresh. It could be part of a deeply personal exploration that goes on for decades. You might just want to go offline for the weekend and get outdoors.
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We've worked with a diverse range of people for over 30 years, many of whom have found healing in the valley through facing a crisis creatively. It's not a promise we make, just an observation from over the years.
People come to participate in Enlightenment Intensives with one of the most experienced facilitators in the world.
They come to explore ritual, an ancient art of communion with spirit and all things, which renews the individual, the community and the land.
A community sprung up around the work we do over time, making Spirit Horse a melting pot of unbridled creativity and alternative ideas presented in a wild and natural way.
Over the years a great desire to re-vision community, with a collective experience of the sacred, has arisen. For many, a sense of being part of something beautiful, something greater than any one of us, becomes more precious than any personal gain or benefit. Our longing to truly participate in life and mystery with others yearns to find a home. Gratitude and gestures of nobility flow from that foundation.
What Is Spirit Horse About?
Getting back to the earth, being out on the land fully in your body.
Looking deeply onto who and what you are.
Enlightenment experiences and letting go into the unknown.
​Devotion to now and the real!
The lost culture of ritual.
True speaking.
​The beauty of tears and true grief.
​Emotional authenticity without therapy.
Breathing, bodywork, breakthrough, bravery; to feel without fixing.
Ancient indigenous sources.
Creating new anciently fed style of tribe, togetherness, community.
Something radical, brave, alive, musical, rooted, honouring our wildness, sassiness, playfulness and spiritual might.
​No pretence.
Real communication.
Beauty in speech and prayer and praise.
Fun.
Deep fun.
​Thoroughness in research.
​Wild land, wild people, rediscovering together what natural really is.
​Performance, the arts as sacred and inclusive and essential.
Being seen.
Speaking, walking, dancing, shouting, cooking, dressing, serving without apology with style.
​Sexuality with eternal values. Culture with eternal values
Woman time.
Man time.
Lodges for men and women's sacred time, secret time, medicine time and easy time.
Inviting your lost, shy, wounded, wild side to contribute with pride and trust in oneself.
Shaking what you got. Shedding the white man's pretence.
Learning how to look really cool again ( specially the blokes)
Dancing irresistibly way into the night to precision percussion.
Letting the children taste a little bit of the unfenced land.
Loving the inner child, our innocence, completely, totally, honestly.
Finding our true contribution, whatever it takes.
​Living happily ever after because it's the only proper way to live!
"If you have not lived your life as a lover then do not count your life as lived. On the day of judgement it will not be counted."
- RUMI
"Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a green field. I'll meet you there. When you lie down in that grass, Life is too full to talk about."
- RUMI
Ethos
Our connection to the earth, spirit, and community, to nature, family, society, and even food and water is materially less tangible and spiritually less founded than ever in the long, long history of humanity.
There are places deep in us that have not been addressed for a thousand years.
Once we moved amongst magnificent traditions of story, song, dance, dress, architecture and ceremony. Being together in a way of spirit. Aligned to our original source. At Spirit Horse we attempt to return to rooted natural old ways. Reclaiming our precious connection to source is serious, great fun and a demanding spiritual challenge.
Our ancestors walked this way long ago. Something got lost. Almost everything that could be called living culture.
In the old ways, a man or woman ritually initiated in their youth would know and live by the stories, songs and sacred knowledge of their people, inheriting a prayerful capacity to confer blessing and to address the gods from within a spiritual infinity lived as felt presence. Understanding individual uniqueness as a wild manifestation of spirit and a gift to community. Overcoming our isolation allows us to contribute with heroism and honour to our troubled world.
It is the authentic root we are attempting to reclaim.
Intellectually super-equipped, yet spiritually uninitiated and ritually unskilled, living in great comfort, but removed from the source of life, we in our time can appreciate the need to redress our situation dealing with what is in front of us ad recognising there is no more time left to wreck the earth any further. We have lost our way. If old people don't know what to do - let us find a way to bless the young who must and who are called to it.
At our summer workshops and retreats we re-create an "ancient yet new tribal village", temporarily at least, where these issues can be addressed at a deep and personal level. We offer experiential workshops ranging from fun workshops to intensive, deep-end experiences for those seeking radical growth, change and understanding.
Going Deeper
More talks and videos on our Youtube channel...