As mentioned in the first introductory video, I was originally asked to create an online course about mantras, chakras and the five elements: earth, water , fire, air and space. That was in November 2021. Earlier that year I had been doing gardening work five miles from Glastonbury.
Glastonbury is famous for many things and in my opinion the energy lines discovered by Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller, are one of the reasons why this part of the world feels so special. The energy lines which the aforementioned authors named Michael and Mary, wind up the famous tor , forming a coil. Close by the tor is the White Spring, part of which runs through what is now something like a water temple. The only lighting in this old building is candleflames. Not far from the White Spring is Chalice Well Gardens, a site owned by a Trust which was first recorded with the Charity Commission in 1949. The site was then sold to a school but was brought back under the ownership of the Trust in 1958. In Chalice Well is the Red Spring, whose water is tinged red by its iron content. Involved with the history of the Chalice Well were two people who featured in a wonderful book called 'The Avalonians', by Patrick Benham. Alice Buckton lived in what is now Chalice Well Trust property, it was her home for many years. Her passions were many; she wrote and directed plays and helped children to observe the rhythms of nature. One of the people who secured the future of the Trust was the great Wellesley Tudor Pole. To all appearances, a successful soldier, administrator and later businessman, Wellesley also had spiritual gifts, including what would now be called remote viewing. A theme running through the first half of the book by Patrick Benham is that of a holy vessel found in Italy and brought to Glastonbury where it was deliberately hidden in a sluice. The tale of the cup includes very specific messages from spirit, as to when the cup should be moved, hidden and who was destined to find it. The emphasis from start to finish, even though some of the major players were men, was about female spirituality and of course , water. The famous cup is now in the keeping of Chalice Well Trust. Even though I am writing about the tor, the springs and the town, words cannot convey the change I undergo when I am in Glastonbury, especially on the tor or in the small but powerful Goddess temple, just off the High Street. Obviously the tor stands out, being high ground visible from many miles away. Yet it attracts spiritually minded people from all over the world. I will finish by talking about a mantra session I did in Stafford, England in the autumn of 2022. This session lasted around four hours. Sometimes when I chant mantra, I visualise myself in a certain place. On this occasion I imagined that I was on Glastonbury tor. The session featured mostly Devi mantras from the Sanatan Dharma tradition but also included one to Tara whose name is invoked in many parts of the East. The next day nearly all my normal thought patterns were either gone or had far less of a pull on my mind. Of course many of the habitual thought patterns returned the following day, but within a month of that four hour mantra session I decided to see if my voice would cope with chanting mantra at least twenty hours a week. From December 1st 2022 until June 1st 2023, twenty hours mantra recitation out loud a week was my average, with more than ten of those hours per week used in practising and composing combinations of seed sounds for the chakras. That amount of chanting has had an impact on my whole being. People talk about the light body, but are we not also a body of sound?