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Hippocampi

In partnership with Agora Imaginarium

With Naomi Lewis and Rachel Fleming

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Course Structure & Fees

A bi-monthly Class based in Devon in the UK.

Class

Interval: Bi-monthly on Wednesdays

Time: 7pm – 9pm

Dates: Starting March 2023

Location: TBC near Totnes in Devon UK

Fee: Class £18
Concessions are available at £12.

An Invitation

In Hippocampi, we invite you to join us in an imaginative engagement with nature, myth, knowledge, symbol and journey, as an endeavour towards finding freedom within the cycles of death and decay that currently headline our lives. In so doing we come to understand the fundamental processes of composting and decomposition that lay the terrain for new trajectories of experience and ways of living.

Our ally is the Hippocampus, a mythical creature summoned by intention, known through the mists of time for their benevolence, aquakinesis/fluidity, sensorial prowess, and weather magic. It is also an area of our brain concerned with emotion, memory and learning and considered to be part of the limbic system which when stimulated through meditation and other praxis can bring about dream-like imagery and a sense of well-being and connectedness.

In these mytho-poetic states, in the company of this shapeshifting creature – known as being both horse and serpent – and within liminal landscapes, we have the opportunity to acquire knowledge of a different order and see beyond the foreground of top down dominion towards a horizon of unity with all things.

The class consists of a series of both kinetic and stillness practices which unfurl fluidly from one to the next creating a holistic exploration, the parts and whole of which can be practiced at home.

Naomi Lewis
Rachel Fleming

Your Guides

The lead guides of the Animistic Arts Lab are Naomi Lewis and Rachel Fleming.

Naomi Lewis has been facilitating animistic practice for 20 years. She was Educational Director of The Sacred Trust for over a decade and now runs Agora, using Agora Imaginarium as the vessel for her teaching work. Working both in the UK and abroad she is committed to creating freedom-scapes for everyone and lab spaces for creatives, including actors, dancers, writers and directors seeking an Earth-based expansion in their work. Her ethic is centred around helping participants be in service to nature and the planet, stepping outside singularity into a collective experience, where we remember we are part of the art of the whole. She enjoys creating irreverently reverent spaces of deep exploration and journeying, punctuated by mindful foolishness and connection.
Rachel Fleming has worked with animist education for many years, designing and delivering educational programmes for Schumacher College, University of Wales Trinity St Davids and Embercombe, with a focus on the meeting place between human, spirit and nature, between ‘ecology’ and ‘spirituality’. She is co-founder and curator of the Contemporary Animism programmes and loves to convene conversations that explore the deepest depths of why we are here, the ways we find belonging to the world and how to be in service to soul. She has trained with The Sacred Trust for over 20 years and is committed to scholarship, word magic, creative imagination and the medicine of circles.