I recently got back from Oxford and the Creative Bridges EUROTAS 2024 conference hosted by the Alef Trust. It was an inspiring, enlightening and very enjoyable event. One of the best I’ve attended, in fact, with so much wonderful spiritual, cultural and intellectual nourishment available.
I had the pleasure and honour of running a workshop, participating in a panel discussion, chairing a couple of sessions and also holding space at the Integration Station. It was a rich experience for me – of expansion and growth. I was lucky to have a platform to share my work, which is my great passion. I am a transpersonal researcher/practitioner – and have been working with ‘Sacred Sound’ since I first came across it, when I studied with Les Lancaster, back in 2007, during my Masters degree in Consciousness Studies and Transpersonal Psychology at LJMU. My workshop at the conference and the Integration Station were both rooted in this work, and involved creating Bridges to the Divine using Sacred Sound.
Since it was such a large conference meant that I was able to work with more participants than I usually do at home. This is because I live on a mountain in rural West Wales, and there are many more sheep here than people. Having access to a larger group meant that together we were able to create really powerful and beautiful sacred sounds, rich with harmonies and a wide variety of voices and energies, which enabled the bridge to the Divine to be a deep and beautiful experience.
One highlight of the conference for me was the wonderful film A Radical Guide Reality, produced in collaboration with the Alef Trust. The film shares new scientific understandings about the nature of reality and our place in it. It resonated as truth within me. It was gorgeous and I highly recommend watching it. The film made me think about how we see ourselves as children of the cosmos – the ultimate expression of the universe becoming conscious of itself through us.
This film, and the conference as a whole, has inspired me so much that I have further developed my eight-part sacred sound based course, so that I can access a wider audience and offer people an opportunity to explore for themselves, in a profound and beautiful way, the nature of their own relationship to the Universe. On my last course I had participants from India, Malaysia, Morocco, Spain and the UK. Working with an international group like this is amazing. We sit for three hours, twice a month and enter into sacred time and space together to expand into and explore the wider field of consciousness and how we can work with it to strengthen our relationships and enhance our lives. Knowing we are all connected around the world together to do this work makes it feel really special, like we are creating a global network of harmony and love.
I believe this work with sacred sound offers gentle and transformational ways of experiencing the potential that these relationships have with regards to our psycho-spiritual development. The structure of a medicine wheel, in which the four cardinal directions connect us with the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water) gives us a container for mapping and understanding our inner emotional, mental and spiritual landscapes and how we relate to our body-world. At a more transpersonal level we look at how we can connect and work with Father Sky, Mother Earth, the inner divine self and the outer community. This gives us eight focussed dimensions of relationship to explore in a holistic way. Together we journey into the truly deep and holy nature of our relationships with ourselves, our communities, Life and the Cosmos through the medium of Sacred Sound.
My response to the closing question of the conference – how do we move forward? – is to share this work more widely. I gave just a taste of this in my workshop at the conference and participants were able to experience the power of their own voices to act as a bridge connecting their hearts, that spark of divinity within, to the great Mystery, the source of all love, in which we have our being.
If you are interested in exploring this approach further, please email me at hara@amazinglyfe.com or visit my webiste at
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