Immrama Immersions
The Hedge School is an Irish drumbeat with a global resonance. Rooted in Ireland we curate immersive cultural experiences inviting people to explore our shared humanity and resource our possibility as local and global citizens in uncertain times.
The Hedge School is a call for greater kinship and reciprocity with ourselves, each other and the living world. We weave culture, creativity, language and indigenous wisdom with individual, social and ecological wellbeing.
Our work is inspired by many ways of knowing from the wisdom of our native traditions to leading edge science and depth psychology. It connects inner transformation with outer change. In 2021 we developed a potent blend of listening experiences inspired by the ancient Irish tradition of the Immram or wonder-voyage. These immersive immramas connect culture with consciousness and are sweet medicine for the soul.
“In the ancient Irish myth cycles, the wonder-voyage of discovery is called an immram (iomramh). Our immersive immramas navigate the terrain of mind, body and spirit to find the way home”
We have commissioned composer Brian Crosby to score an immersive ambient soundtrack to enhance the experience of this ancient culture and language in a unique embodied way.
Brian is an Irish piano player, composer and performer who releases his own piano & ambient music and collaborates with film makers & artists on a variety of audio visual & installation projects. For these soundtracks, Brian has produced a library of field recordings in the Irish countryside, from the sounds of streams, rivers and the Irish Sea to rainfall and birdsong in the native Irish woodlands and combined these soundscapes with an ambient musical score, inspired by the cultural motifs and images in the meditations, so that the listener will feel transported to an ancient Irish landscape set in time out of time. You can find out more about Brian here
“The immrama immersions blend the realms of psyche and soma with science and spirit to nurture individual and collective resilience.”
In Ireland, the ancients were rooted in the seasons of the Earth and aligned with the cycles of the Cosmos. They marked these gateways with ritual and ceremony and bequeathed us with a calendar map - the Medicine Wheel of the Year. This map resonates with many indigenous ways of knowing and supports us to find our way home into right relationship with the more than human world.
There is a shared pattern of stories across many wisdom traditions that speak of vision quests and odysseys into other dimensions in search of soul medicine. In these journeys of transformation, the hero or heroine accepts a call to adventure and sets out on an odyssey to the Otherworld. They face trials, dangers and challenges, and finally return home to share the tale of their adventures. In the ancient Irish myth cycles, the wonder-voyage of discovery is called an immram (iomramh).
Our immrama immersions are bilingual guided rituals infused with Irish cultural motifs, images, words and phrases and are activated through the power of collective imagination. They evoke the spirit of the land and evoke the mythos of place through symbols, sounds, smells and other sensate explorations.
“The immrama immersions are a bridge between ancient and emergent ways of knowing and connect culture with consciousness”
Research in the fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics shows that we can rewire our brains, create new synaptic connection and build capacity to store and consolidate new information. This increases our psychological functioning and in the process improves our overall sense of well-being.
The practices are somatically-informed and trauma sensitive and are specifically designed to create new experiential pathways that can promote healing from the inside out. They create coherence by inviting participants to connect to their own root systems and awaken their cellular memory of interconnection and interbeing. Just as our ancestors drew on these ancient technologies to access wisdom so can we as ancestors-in-training
“Codladh Sámh means restful sleep in the Irish language.When we participate in the immrama immersions we are invited to rest and reset in a way that our ancestors couldn’t.”
Rest is a radical act in today's oversaturated culture. The immrama immersions help us to drop into a sensory soulful place between wakefulness and sleeping. In this state of deep rest we downshift from beta to alpha to delta brain waves and access a state of relaxation that repairs and restores on the deepest, cellular level.
To integrate is "to render something whole, to bring together to complete; to renew or to restore”. These practices are designed to support us to bring all of the parts we find together, and integrate them into something whole. We are invited to come back into our bodies, return to our senses and harness a reciprocal relationship with the heart and soul of Irish culture, heritage and language along the way. The immrama immersions are a call to adventure within and without.
join us - bi in éineacht linn
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Immrama Immersions
