ANIMAL BODY - A guide for prospective Participants
A Year-Long Mythic & Embodied Container
Six seasonal weekends + a 4-day retreat | March 2026 – March 2027
An Orientation for Those Considering This Work
This page is not here to persuade you, it exists to support discernment. Animal Body is a year-long commitment. It asks for time, presence, and a willingness to listen. This guide is offered so you can feel into whether this work is right for you , not just intellectually, but somatically.
As you read, go slowly. Pause when something stirs. Notice where your body softens or tightens. Notice when you want to keep reading and when you want to stop.
You are not being asked to decide quickly, you are not being asked to prove readiness.
Your body already knows how to orient.
What Animal Body Is
Animal Body is a year-long, land-based container devoted to embodied remembering.
It is a slow descent into instinct, sensation, and animal intelligence , guided by ritual, somatic practice, myth, tracking, and deep listening.
We gather every two months for a weekend immersion, crossing six archetypal thresholds together. The journey culminates in a final four-day retreat , a rite of integration, witnessing, and return.
This work is seasonal, relational, and paced to honour the nervous system.
It is not a training.
It is not a performance.
It is not a quick transformation.
It is a remembering of how to belong inside your own skin.
What This Work Is Not
Animal Body is not New Age spirituality. It does not teach transcendence, ascension, manifestation, or leaving the body behind. This is not a path of rising upward toward light, perfection, or disembodied awakening.
It is a path of descent.
Here, we do not seek truth externally, through ideals, visions, teachers, or spiritual hierarchies. We listen inward and downward to breath, sensation, instinct, pattern, and response. The body is not something to overcome or purify here.
It is the source of knowing.
Rather than transcending fear, grief, desire, or power, we enter relationship with them. Rather than bypassing the animal self, we reclaim it as intelligent, sacred, and trustworthy.
Nothing is forced.
Nothing is extracted.
Nothing is performed.
The body leads.
The land responds.
The group bears witness.
Braided Ecology & Belonging
Animal Body is held within a braided ecology.
This is an understanding that all bodies exist in relationship, human and more-than-human, ancestral and personal, nervous and ecological. All bodies are shaped by land, lineage, culture, trauma, adaptation, and survival. All bodies carry intelligence.
This is a space that honours difference without hierarchy.
People of all genders, sexualities, races, sizes, ages, neurotypes, and lived experiences are welcome , not as identities to be performed, but as living ecologies shaped by different conditions.
There is no single way a body should move, feel, or awaken.
Belonging here does not require sameness. It requires right relationship.
Care, Support & Nervous System Awareness
Animal Body is held with deep respect for the nervous system.
This work is slow, invitational, and choice-led.
You will never be asked to:
override your body’s signals
disclose personal material publicly
push beyond your capacity
perform emotion, vulnerability, or expression
All practices are offered as invitations.
Opting out, resting, observing, or modifying a practice is always welcome.
We work with:
clear ritual containers and transitions
grounding and orienting practices throughout
consent-based touch and proximity
spacious pacing and time for integration
This is not a crisis-support space, but it is trauma-aware. Participants are encouraged to have external support if they are working with acute or ongoing trauma.
Care here is not about fixing or managing you.
It is about creating the conditions where your body can feel safe enough to listen.
When This May Not Be the Right Container
Animal Body is not designed for everyone, and that is intentional.
This work may not be the right fit for you at this time if:
you are seeking a quick breakthrough, peak experience, or dramatic catharsis
you want clear outcomes, certifications, or linear progress markers
you are looking for a teacher to tell you who you are, what to do, or how to be
you feel uncomfortable with slowness, ambiguity, or not knowing
you are currently in acute crisis without external support in place
you are drawn to intensity as a substitute for safety or pacing
Animal Body does not offer answers to follow or states to achieve.
It offers a space to listen, to track, and to take responsibility for your own care and timing.
This is not self-improvement work.
It is not therapy.
It is not spiritual performance.
Saying no to this container is not a failure.
It is discernment.
There are many right paths. This is one of them, but only if your body agrees.
The Shape of the Year
Each gathering begins on Friday evening with ceremonial arrival , grounding, dream-seeding, and descent.
Across the weekend, we move through:
somatic practice
ritual and ceremony
deep imagery and mythic exploration
tracking and land-based awareness
grief-tending and integration
Across the year, participants also craft a ritual mask , not as performance, but as revelation.
This mask emerges slowly through dream, gesture, shadow, and body memory.
You will breathe with it, move with it, and eventually be witnessed wearing it in sacred space.
The Six Archetypal Thresholds
Root & Remember - Grounding the nervous system, animal dreaming, ancestral threads
Wild Descent - Shedding cultural skins, grief ritual, reclaiming instinctual voice
Predator & Prey - Boundaries, power, survival dances, relational knowing
Shadow & Eros - Shame alchemy, sensuality, reclaiming the wild erotic
The Masked Ones - Embodied archetypes, mask ritual, communal witnessing
Homecoming - Integration, myth-weaving, devotion to the Wild Law
Final 4-Day Retreat - A rite of return, completion, and re-membering
The Philosophical Spine
The following three essays form the ethical, somatic, and ecological ground of Animal Body.
They are offered not as theory, but as orientation.
Read them slowly. Let them land where they land.
I. Tracking the Body: The Quiet Return of the Oracle
For a long time, I lived at a distance from my own flesh. From the living ecology of blood and marrow, From the pulse that rises and falls beneath thought. From the quiet intelligence that lives in muscle, fascia, breath, and bone.
I was not hostile to my body. I was simply absent from her.
I had learned, slowly, thoroughly, to mistrust what she knew.
Spirituality taught me that instinct was something to overcome. That her tightening was resistance, her silence meant I wasn’t open enough.
and that her overwhelm meant I was doing the work incorrectly.
My body became a problem to solve.
I watched her constantly, how she braced, withdrew and how sensation rose when it should have softened.
Each response became a clue, not to what was happening in my life, but to what was supposedly wrong with me.
If I felt fear, I wasn’t trusting enough.
If I felt anger, I wasn’t healed.
If I felt grief, I hadn’t let go.
If I couldn’t expand into light, or channel language that wasn’t mine, I believed I was blocked.
In these frameworks, the body is always behind.
Something to catch up.
Something to purify.
Something to transcend.
I did not know then that my body was speaking fluently. I understand now that I had been taught to read my body the way someone unfamiliar with land tries to read tracks - too quickly, out of context and looking for confirmation of a story already decided.
When I am following deer, I do not rush. I watch where thorns have been freshly nibbled, the torn edge of a leaf still wet. I notice where bracken has been parted, not broken. I look for the soft, heart-shaped imprint of a hoof pressed into mud. I smell the air for warmth, musk, disturbance. I listen for birds that have gone quiet. I feel for the subtle pull of direction rather than forcing a line.
Tracking is not certainty. It is relationship.
Spirituality trained me in vigilance rather than listening.
I scanned my body for faults - Too much. Too little. Too sensitive. Too slow.
This wasn’t vanity. It was surveillance.
A body watched without relationship becomes an object. And a object becomes a problem, and a problem must be fixed.
This is where dysmorphia quietly took root for me , not as hatred of appearance, but as dislocation.
Body dysmorphia does not always arrive through mirrors. Sometimes it arrives through ideology, through the suggestion that if your body were truly aligned, it would feel differently, move differently, respond differently.
A tracker who believes the land is lying will never find the animal.
My return did not come through transcendence, it came through tracking. When I began working with my therapist, we entered a slow, five-year descent into my inner worlds. There was no imposed map. No destination named in advance.
The map was my body.
I learned to ask different questions.
Not What’s wrong with me?
But What is happening here?
This was not catharsis, it was literacy.
The body does not shout its truth - It leaves tracks.
And when we learn to follow them, slowly, without forcing meaning , trust returns. Not as belief but as Skill
II. Is This Safe? — The First Question of the Animal Body
Before meaning, before story, before interpretation, there is a question the body asks first.
Is this safe?
Not safe as comfort, Not safe as certainty.
Safe as is there cover?, Safe as do I have choice?, Safe as can I leave if I need to?
This is not pathology, it is animal intelligence.
When I listen to my body now, the first thing I ask is this question.
And then I track.
I notice breath, weight, movement toward or away.
Sometimes the answer is yes , and my body softens into the unknown.
Sometimes the answer is no, and my body asks for space.
Neither answer is wrong, both are information.
Don’t bleed into the mouth of a shark.
Not every space can hold vulnerability, not every opening is an invitation, not every intensity is intimacy.
This is not fear, it is intelligence.
The body does not shout its truth.
It leaves tracks.
Safety is the first one.
III. Choice, Consent, and Pacing: The Sacred Technologies We Forgot
Long before consent became language, it was practice. Long before pacing was named in nervous system theory, it was how animals survived.
Choice, consent, and pacing are not modern ethics, they are ancient technologies.
In the wild, nothing is forced.
The deer pauses at the tree line.
The fox scans before emerging.
The bird tests the air before flight.
Choice is constant.
Consent is continuous.
Pacing is adaptive.
Many spiritual and healing systems taught us that growth requires override, that surrender means saying yes when the body says no. That initiation requires exposure without timing.
But pressure without choice is not transformation.
It is extraction.
In Animal Body, choice, consent, and pacing are not add-ons, they are the ground we stand upon.
Every practice is invitational, every movement can be modified or refused.
Every threshold is approached slowly enough for the body to arrive.
Listening is the work.
The body does not shout its truth.
It leaves tracks.
And some of them warn us clearly:
Don’t bleed into the mouth of a shark.
Is This the Right Time for You?
Before applying, you may wish to reflect:
How do I relate to slowness and long-term commitment?
What happens in me when choice and pacing are centred?
What support do I already have in my life?
Am I willing to listen rather than push?
There is no correct answer.
Discernment is part of the work.
Practical Details
Dates: March 2026 – March 2027
Six weekends (Friday 6pm – Sunday 1pm)
Plus a final four-day retreat
Location: Wild Ways, near Bridgnorth, Shropshire
Shared yurts or dorm accommodation
Organic meals included
Investment: £2750
Payment plans available
Your Guide
Louise is a ritualist, animist, and practitioner of ancestral craft.
Her work is rooted in land-based listening, somatic literacy, traditional craft, and years of walking her own long return to the body.
She does not teach a modality.
She walks a path, and invites others to walk beside her.
A Closing Note
Animal Body is not about becoming something new.
It is about remembering.
The body does not shout its truth.
It leaves tracks.
If something in you recognises this, you are welcome to take the next step , slowly.
If you would like a discovery call email at Hello@weavingwonderment.com, or if you ready to book head over to the ‘Book Now page’ where you can find options to pay in full or in installments.