Notice: Booking will open on or by 17th May 2025

Date: Friday 22nd August 2025 - Sunday 24th August 2025 Location: Lord Street, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire EN11 8SG
Start time: 2:00pm End time: 2:00pm Type: Conference & Webinar Refreshments: Residential, all Meals Provided

Dancing with God – Striving for Wholeness: Reflections of Archetypal Patterns in the African Psyche

The significance for Jung of his travels in Africa is strongly expressed in his autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Upon glimpsing a distant figure standing motionless, leaning on a long spear and looking down at the train he was on, he thought:

“I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated from me only by distance in time. It was as if I were this moment returning to the land of my youth, and as if I knew that dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for five thousand years”

The Alchemy of the African Healer
with Lynne Radomsky

These talks circumambulate the archetypal phenomena in the cosmology of the African healer with amplification through the stages of the alchemical opus and the psychology of C.G. Jung. These phenomena arise when there is a serious attempt to engage with the autonomous psyche. This in turn, suggests a return, with consciousness, to the instincts, to an inner numinosity, to the tension of opposites, of psyche and matter, and spirit in nature. The talks are accompanied by a number of images as well as video footage.

Love Song of a Tamarisk Tree
with Maxim Ilyashenko

I am convinced that the word “Allah” is a call in itself… and expresses a deep longing…It is eros and feeling…Allah is a cry in the desert, under an endless sky. It is a call to a Being which is omnipresent, like the wind that one senses everywhere

I will share my recent experience of an alchemical silent retreat in the Sahara Desert guided by a Sufi. Though Jung didn’t write much about Islamic tradition, he encountered it in his active imagination, dreams, and while visiting North Africa. I will explore the meaning of an inner desert and the necessity of a vast and still space, as Henry Corbin says, “in order to be encountered, taken, known, that they may speak, otherwise you are alone”. I have been taken myself by a tamarisk tree and the desert which taught me not only about ‘the lost speech’ and love but also about ‘a dark face of divinity’.

African Drums and their influence on the Drum Set and popular Rhythms of Today
with Robert Mark

Most of the African countries have their own distinct treasure of drums and rhythms. Through Slave trade many instruments and rhythms have taken long journeys to the Caribbean, South America and the US, where they influenced the development of a whole new world of rhythms and music. This talk explores the examples of Afro Caribbean and Afro Brazilian rhythms and the amalgamation of these rhythms and how these rhythms can be played in a group context.

Participation by everybody, and is usually held in a Drum circle format, starting to use our hands and feet by walking and clapping, further on ideally using Djembe, Conga or Bongo drums, bells, shakers and other small percussion instruments. We Begin with simple basic rhythmic concepts and coordination between the hands and the feet. We will then explore some easy to develop African and Afro-Cuban rhythms. The final goal would be to play a short arrangement with focus on the common groove of the piece, a few breaks and a solid finish to the piece.