STORY-TELLING AND BREATHING EXERCISES

Facilitator: Shivam O'Brien

For 34 years Shivam O’Brien has pioneered a return to the wisdom of the Ancient, Wild and Natural through retreats, rituals and gatherings at Spirit Horse in Wales UK. Since the early 1990’s, he has been offering self-inquiry retreats and 10-day ritual explorations. The work of Spirit Horse has been to remake a culture that loves and reveres the original and natural. It’s about the Re-Wilding of People and Place. His mission includes the re-wilding of the 200 acres of wild wooded slopes, and this sacred place is slowly and gracefully and visibly returning to its original face.

Join this legendary Celtic bard, founder of Spirit Horse in Wales, UK, and bathe in these story waters, and rest and refresh and realign the spine! Who are we with these tales? Who are we without them? These enduring stories have remained relevant to humans over hundreds and thousands of years. They are in a way indestructible. Because they are “true“, Shivam has lived with these stories and their ramifications in the real world for decades; the land knows how to return to itself, but the people, it seems, do not. The weekend workshop will include music and song, and especially Shivam’s special guided holotropic breath invocation to contact our deep self.

“Most of us are in recovery from a culture that subdued us in our early years, and continues to damage us and devastate the natural world right before our eyes. In our original wild heroic hearts we would love and live truly deeply and honestly a life of connection and communion with all the colour and majesty between earth and sky. What holds us back? What ails us? What was lost? And how do we take our true place? These losses, this sense of brokenness, has always been there, but when the culture was deep it was addressed. It is time to learn to address those places in us that call forth our heroism, our leadership truth and wild edge. …”

July 4 to 7, 2025

Cost missing (Vegan & Gluten Free Lunch Provided)

To know more about Shivam and see everything he offers, you can visit his website by clicking the button below.

TO REGISTER

Please email [email protected].

Breathe work, breathing with the gods and the key to Life.

The fastest most dynamic way to approach your shadow, fears, jealousies, rage, hurt and so forth is to BREATHE into it.

Fully.

Not “ sort it out “ . Forget sorting your feelings out. Feel ‘em!

You ‘ll never sort all your hang ups out or understand them. Let them be. And let them move.

Pull the full weight of the experience, emotion, or whatever is coming up in any given hour directly to you.

Feel it MORE !

Not to deny it, push it off, reduce it, therapise it, escape it, dumb it down, handle it, or meditate it away; but to embrace it deeper. To go into it fully.

Do not push your wound away. Nor deny the pain. Nor the hurt child within you, nor the rejected or shamed one, nor your mistakes and failings. Rather face into them- turn directly to them – like the bison do when they stand head on to the snow storm.

Domesticated cattle turns their backs to the storm, the untamed bison stand firm, their horns to the blizzard.

The Big BREATHE; at least as we do it at Spirit Horse, involves pushing the breath until a fully tangible let go occurs – full and strong, unconstricted, unfettered- opening the body and psyche. The energy fields awaken. And tremble ! Awareness awakens fast. There is an entirely natural movement in this. Once you are moving you can go deeper. Control is relinquished. Sacred space is suddenly all over you – pervading.

Harness this dynamic capacity to your own willingness to feel what needs to be felt; to be with what is naturally arising, without resistance or forcing and you will find yourself in a state of profound acceptance. Which becomes embracing life fully if you let it.

Your trauma or pain is less dominant. You notice the wind, the leaves, the little things. Your own system percolates with a thousand little tremors. You can let it all happen and just be with it. A free fall natural order arises. You don’t have to DO everything.

This is true meditation. Surrender.

This acceptance turns out to be the key . An immaculate acceptance of the mistakes, the shame, the fear, the wrongness, the brokenness, the isolation, all of it. One piece at a time -you can’t do it all in one session or one year ! This acceptance can called love.

The vast store of energy contained in these “ negative “ emotions turns out to be just energy squandered in suppressing them.

They turn out to be the deepest part of your soul’s journey. Waiting to be accepted and allowed. Washed with tears and brought to glory through the depth and truth of your grief.

At this point, working alone or with a guide; you can start to make gestures of forgiveness to all that hurt has you. To let go and move onward. And allow others to. Even the small frightened wounded child in you can do this. If you hold her or his hand and allow it all to happen.

Vulnerability and strength are the same thing. The more you can open to one the more you embrace the other.

We are all wounded (well…. on this planet ! )

None of us have gone far. Yet the benefits of allowing everything to be as it is are immeasurable. Without this skill; we live in poverty.

When you are open to how it is, all that is, how the world actually is, how others actually are, how YOU actually are, right now, the freedom door opens. Freedom is. Peace is.

Those that walk through that portal see the incalculable beauty of life and come to know that everything has to happen just as it does.

In that place you will not find anything wrong; not with you; not with the world. Something utterly fresh is revealed.

Silence and peace come to those who turn their horns to the storm.

Breathe and be.

with all of it !

Welcome to Life.

And Love.

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Shivam has worked with this method for ten years, bringing it into the Enlightenment Intensive and ritual spaces he has been creating for 35 years.

He received this method naturally after a personal crisis and has not trained with anybody in this field. It arrived directly from breath and Source spontaneously.

He drives his group sessions with drumming and sarod, or string music and his own spontaneously arising poetry invocations and holy speech. Live in the moment, unrehearsed and of the moment.

He embodies a wild, natural and impassioned edge. A fierce gentleness. Honed over 35 summer seasons.

The Spirit Horse Tribe call it; well ….

The Big Breathe!