The Celtic Tantra Workshops

Imbolc is the season of beginnings -- in the natural world, the season of womb-cleaning in preparation for new life to come.  This workshop is about attuning to the energy of Imbolc, and preparing ourselves to experience that inner awakening in ourselves,  to celebrate and support it in each other.

The Spring Equinox is traditionally celebrated as a cosmic enactment of Rebirth after the journey through the underworld. John Hawken invites us to reconnect with the older Shamanic tradition that underlies the Christian myth of the Resurrection.

Hazel Hill wood is carpeted in bluebells.  Sexual, generative energy is in full flow, and the invitation is to combine opening to the natural energy represented in the Celtic tradition by the Goddess and the Green Man with connecting with our own expanded male and female energies, the God and the Goddess within.  This is a three day workshop, including Bank Holiday Monday.

This unique summer workshop celebrates the theme of connectedness, on both the physical and spiritual planes, at a time of year when it is possible to be genuinely close to the natural world. Working with the tools of Tantric ritual, Shamanic meditation and ritual enactment we will go deeply into the process of healing the separation between ourselves and the world around us.

Lammas stands at the midpoint between the summer Solstice and the  Autumn Equinox, in what is sometimes called the "hush of summer" -- just on the edge of the beginning of the main harvest.  Lammas is about experiencing what is -- nothing less, nothing more.  The invitation is to allow the boundaries between inner and outer and self and other to dissolve, to experience the now of summer.  

At the point when night and day again fall into balance, we explore the balance between man and woman, both in our separate circles and in many joinings.  

Samhain (Halloween) stands at the threshold of the dark part of the year.   In tribal society, this was the time of in-gathering and recollection.  It marks the end of absorption in the outer, momentary present,  the beginning of the time of inner journeying, of re-connection with ancestral voices, and the awakening of the voices of prophecy.  In the wood, it is the time when the energy of the trees withdraws below ground, the time when next year's seeds lie dormant.  In Tantra, it is time to move inward, to go deeper, finding in our core energy the fuel for personal transformation.

Energetically, Winter is the season of contraction -- of inner journeying, and inner healing.  In the modern world this time of year is often one of frantic external activity, when we lose touch with the energy of the season, and feel only a sense of exhaustion and depletion.  In this group, we shall journey into the dark, warming ourselves at our inner fires, preparing ourselves for transformation.  Our tools will include meditation, movement, chakra and shamanic work.  This is a time of true celebration, rejoicing in the energy of the heart, of connectedness, of intimacy, of the fire within all of us. 

Led by John Hawken