-
'Roll river, roll river roll
Let it take me, free and unchain me
Ancient lady cold
Keep on rolling, roll on forever.'– Richard Hawley
[From his song Roll River Roll]
-
'I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.'– Rainer Maria Rilke
[From his poem The Man Watching]
-
'In the shambles of love, they kill only the best,
none of the weak and deformed.
Don't run away from this dying.
Whoever's not killed for love is dead meat.'– Rumi
[From his poem Four Quatrains]
-
'We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.'– T.S. Eliot
[From his poem Little Gidding]
-
'Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.'– W.B. Yeats
[From his poem The Second Coming]
‘You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you travelled every road to do so; such is the depth of its meaning.’
– Heraclitus
Sacred River endeavours to be a centre where we cultivate no less than a revolution in our innermost beings. Rippling out into living erotically and meaningfully in our world, and deeply involved with others.
This transformation is fostered through immersion in diverse fields of learning and practices that nourish psychological, spiritual and physical wholeness. Ultimately arriving where we live a deeply meaningful life, feeling truly alive.
The roots of the work we do here are deep. The dimension of depth is a central calling. Echoing that simple truth our world has mostly forgotten: the dimension of soul is depth.
Psychologically, our roots are in the tradition of Imaginal Psychology, which prioritises the cultivation of imagination, poetic awareness and artful living as central concerns. For us this encapsulates the meaning of ‘living consciously’. Formally, the foundations of this Psychology are James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology and Carl Jung’s Analytical Psychology.
At the same time, we honour as necessary for a soulful life, connection to and awareness of the realms of spirit. Although soul and spirit are not the same, we honour the principle that cultivating our awareness, our beings, to be permeated with both, is required for wholeness.
Perhaps the most challenging dimension of this opus, this ‘work of art’, is arriving at embodying our awareness in ‘a place’ beyond preoccupation with and primary concern with, ‘self’.
We embrace the immense wisdom as received via several traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, the I Ching, Sacred sexuality, the Kabbalah, Alchemy, Shamanism and Astrology.