“A really heartfelt, safe experience where I was guided to explore deeper among a group of beautiful souls and the holding land. I would certainly recommend this experience to anyone who feels they need to reconnect and take some time” — 2025 participant
Pilgrimage of Soul
Journey into Your Depths
Are you ready for a more meaningful life?
…To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift for others…
~David Whyte
Traveling toward Living a Soulful Life
As we grow up we develop not only physically, but also psychologically. When we are babies we have a certain basic psychology, which gets more complex as we enter early childhood. Next we enter our early teens and become adolescents. Psychologically we are trying to work out how to balance a healthy social self with being authentic and be true to ourselves. I’m sure you have noticed that many physical adults never grow psychologically past this point, as people continue to constantly measure their life by comparing themselves to their neighbours and friends. This is not our fault. Our whole culture is based on keeping people that was as good consumers and producers. But what can happen next is very mysterious. What is the shift from adolescent to adult? Is it just graduating from high school or university? Does that make you an adult?
Let’s turn to a metaphor from the natural world. Caterpillars, like immature humans, are very good consumers. The ecosystem is able to take the depletion of leaves from caterpillars because the net effect of the relationship is that the system needs the butterflies to pollinate flowers. Little consumer humans keep taking from society until they grow up to the point where they get old enough to give back and support the next generation. But what if humans never grow up and never stop taking? Never turn from caterpillars into butterflies? You get a climate and biodiversity crisis!
So what really is this step from human adolescence to adulthood? As well as being biological, it must be psychological. What does it take to make that shift from being a taker, to being a net contributor? Lets have a look at what happens in the second part of adolescence.
Have you ever noticed a longing for something more deeply true in your life?
You know there is something hiding in the depths of you, waiting to be is covered. You can sense its presence. Something doesn’t feel right inside, something is missing. You don’t know what it is, but it feels like it can’t be far away. Or maybe it feels like it could be hundreds of miles away and you have to go searching for it. But you don’t know what it is, or exactly how to find it. You just start wandering, in your heart, and in the world.
Pilgrimage of Soul participants discuss their experience in the group.
I remember for me it first happened when I was 17 years old. I was visiting family in the USA and I was happy with life at home. I told my aunt of a dream to move to the USA at some point, and she said, just like that, “why don’t you just stay here with me?” And I never went home. I just knew I had to do it.
Many of us will feel this pull much later though, once we have lived the life society offers us, career, kids, mortgage, a “normal” life as presented to us by family and culture. Or we have been through all sorts of difficulty trying to do so, and feeling bad about not managing that so called success. Another thing that happens is we rebel against all the expectations and go under the radar of social expectations, drop out as a form of rebelling against the shallow rules we’re offered. This last one was me throughout my 20’s, traveling the world, a perpetual student, an understanding of the madness of our suicidal and ecocidal culture, but equally not deeply engaging with making a change while I avoided real life.
Do you hear the call?
In some way we will eventually hear a call to something else, a call to meaning and purpose. Sometimes it is precipitated by a big change, job loss, a breakup, a big move, a bereavement. Nothing looks the same again, and you have to start looking for something deeper. And sometimes this change just happens gradually and one day you just wake up knowing something’s not right. There is a sense that life is too short to keep playing this game, I’d better get on with something that is truly important.
People have talked of this journey in stories throughout the ages. In recent times it has been depicted though characters like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit, where the would be heroes are forced out of the comfort of their home to find a new, but eventually a deeper and more meaningful life.
Are you ready for a more meaningful life?
On our Pilgrimage of Soul programmes, including our weekends, you are invited to step outside the comfort of your usual way of being in a well held space. Here you will have the chance to explore deeply into the mysteries of your own psyche in the natural world, and with a small group of committed seekers like yourself.
The goal of Soul work is more fully inhabit the life you were meant to lead. This is be definition the life of a true adult, someone who gives more than they receive.
I slept and dreamt life was joy,
I awoke and saw that life was service,
I acted and behold, service was joy.
Throughout our work we seek inner sight, a vision to live into. Our
destiny to offer our small puzzle piece to the big web of wholesome
life in the world.
A task without a vision is just a job
A vision without a task is just a dream
A vision with a task can change the world.
But there are no promises. We can show you the door, but it is up to
you to approach and decide, ” Is it my time to go through?”
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
by Adrienne Rich
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.