The map of wisdom, lineage, and transmissions that shape my path
My practice is fed by the teachings and relationships I’ve been gifted. These mentors, elders, and teachers have offered me guidance, initiation, and perspective and I carry their voices forward, weaving them into the land, art, ceremony, and living practice I now offer.
These teachers, elders, and mentors are not part of a hierarchy I aspire to surpass, but a lineage I stand within. I hold their transmissions with humility, devotion, and continuous learning, translating their guidance, adding my own voice, and returning it through ceremony, art, and land.
With gratitude, I would like to honour Arts Council England for their support through a Personal Development Grant, which allowed me to immerse more fully in my practice, study ancestral arts, and walk a new path.
Elders, Teachers & Mentors
Gail Burkett
My Elder Mentor, anchor and dear friend. Through her work with Nine Passages, ritual, and rites-of-passage training, Gail has guided me in holding thresholds, listening rites, and the architecture of deep ceremony.
Patrick McManaway & Brid Walsh
Teachers in Subtle Land Energies, with whom I completed Level 2 training. Their work sharpened my sensitivity to place, subtle fields, and energetic attunement in the land. The course was provided by Animate Earth.
Nabil Ali & Caroline Ross
Masters in botanical inks and earth pigments. From them I learned how to draw colour from soil, plant, and mineral, how matter itself can speak and become a bridge between land and art.
Sandra Ingerman, Deb Duwe & Willow
Guides in shamanic practice. Through their lineage and teachings, I’ve walked into journeying, soul retrieval, plant and spirit diplomacy, learning to move between worlds with reverence, integrity, and tenderness.
Caroline Tobin
Medium, Akashic Records Master, and coach. Caroline held me in the unseen realms, lineage retrieval, energetic cleansing, inner mapping, helping me remember and align to deeper thresholds in my being.
Saskia von Diest
Saskia works in nature communication, field clearings, intuitive dialogue with the more-than-human, and reviving the capacity for two-way communication with Nature. In her lineage, I explore how to hold communication with place and being, to ask, listen, and respond to what the nature beings ask of us.
Ruby Taylor
Artist-maker, educator, basketry & pottery teacher. Ruby’s work is deeply rooted in place, process, and reciprocity, harvesting plant fibres, wild clays, and materials from land in respectful, regenerative ways. She taught me how to let the land speak through shape, fibre, fire, and form.
Daniel Foor
Writer, ritualist and teacher of Practical Animism. I deeply grateful for their assistance in me being able to do the Practical Animism course way back, while I was on maternity leave. The Practical Animism course deeply influenced my understanding of how we relate to the living world and to ancestral/land memory and set me on this pathway.
Looby Macnamara
Looby has written many books, and I was able to visit her farm and take part in a Cultural Emergence camp which was enlightening and inspiring. With Jon Young, Looby works with the 8 shields. I use the 8 shields for my camps and workshops.
Inspirations
I do not have Indigenous lineage, and I was raised without traditions of land connection. I am a white British woman who is alchemising, designing, and imagining what I can from research, direct revelation with my own guides & elders, relationship with place, and lived experience of holding responsibility within family, community, and ecological contexts. I am not a teacher or guru and my work is not offered as instruction or authority.
My work has also been informed and influenced by many thinkers, practitioners, and traditions, without seeking to represent or speak for any one of them.
Apart from the above, here are my other primary influences:
- Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – for work on complexity, non-bypassing ethics, humility, and the limits of certainty in times of planetary crisis. Vanessa has been hugely influential on my desire to compost the worldview and culture that is so harmful..
- Nora Bateson – for relational ethics, contextual awareness, warm data, and attention to the consequences of action across nested systems.
- Indigenous and land-based traditions (encountered through teachers, practice, and place) – for understandings of reciprocity, consent, seasonal awareness, and relationship with land and more-than-human beings. My exploration here began and expanded via the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jamie Sams.
- Emma Kunz – She was a healer and research based in Switzerland who died in 1963. She dowsed for healing and would use her pendulum to create artworks based on Radiesthesia.
Friends and Collaborators
I would also like to thank, honour and acknowledge Gail Burkett, Ratna Shah, Bonnie Anderson, Emma Burtt, your ongoing support and collaboration is my anchor. I am forever grateful for our little island of coherence.
I would also like to thank Saskia Von Diest, Caroline Tobin, and Michelle Bernard for their influential conversations.