Highlights
A private invitation
to the annual healing dance festival under the
August full moon in the Kalahari Desert for all
the San clans from throughout southern Africa. This
awe-inspiring festival celebrates the Healing
and Entertainment dances of the San from Namibia,
Botswana and South Africa. By night we
witness the healing dances and by day the superb
entertainment dances – including the hunters,
the maidens and the delightful children. The
event was described by Simon Buxton of The Sacred
Trust as the rarest of opportunities to experience
and imbibe the richness of the indigenous spirit.
Four days and
nights camping in isolation and privacy in the
Kalahari Desert with a San clan of the Nharo
tribe. We share fires, food and friendships
as we explore their culture at a deeply meaningful
level. The main focus shall be on the healing
tradition of the San. We will be full participants
in healing dances, learning the complex rhythms
of clapping and polyphonic singing that have
evolved since the dawn of human kind. We
will receive healing from the San shamans and
share our own healing methods and ways with them.
By day we will
walk with the San into the desert, gathering
herbs and edible foods and sharing their astonishing
knowledge of this wilderness. They will
demonstrate their simple survival skills including
making fire by hand, making rope and share with
us their skill in creating their beautiful ostrich
egg shell jewelry.
We will spend
a day with the San community at the D’Kar
settlement where we will visit a San diviner
and herbalist, an old man greatly respected in
this community for his power to heal. We
will witness his work and receive a divination
from him for our journey forward. We will
also come face to face with the contemporary
life of the San people visiting historic sites
in the settlement.
After saying
farewell to our San clan we will take a two day
break on the spectacular Okavango panhandle,
gateway to one of the Earth’s wildest and
most beautiful natural landscapes. We will
cruise the river at sundown and relax with good
local food by night. We will also visit
the local charities working on behalf of the
San people in their fight for their rights to
their land, resources and dignity. You
will be direct stakeholders as 5% of your fee
will be used to support the San at this critical
juncture in the history of these people.
We then embark
on the high-point of the pilgrimage, a two night
vigil to the remote Tsodilo Hills, known by the
San to be their mythical place of their birth
and their most sacred place of power. Tsodilo
is a little-known World Heritage Site, carrying
a profound spiritual significance, mirrored by
over 4,000 rock art paintings that were drawn
by the shaman-artists who have lived here over
the past 100,000 years. If the spirits
are willing, we shall also visit the remote Cave
of the Mountain Serpent, a sacred - and secret
- site where an astonishing 70,000 year old,
Serpent Petroglyph resides (see here). We
shall also be guided by a San elder into the
hills where we will receive initiation at the
Sacred Spring, drinking from the bosom of the
mother of the San. Finally we will participate
in the visioning, blessing, and birthing ceremony
on a moonless night in the womb cave in the heart
of the Mother mountain.
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