SoulRiver Anahata Giri

18/06/2025

Dusk then night river walk under the full moon.

I used to be scared of the dark (even as an adult, until about 50 years old). Now I love it.

I love the way in the dark sounds are amplifed. My aging ears are suddenly bionic. Layers and layers of river water sounds: the swooshes of swirling rapids, delicate trickles and lapping sounds at the edges where the river runs smoothly, plonks and plishes, shooshes and swishes.

When the path dips away from moonlight into darker dark, feet wake up to feel each step, testing then landing, testing then landing. Slow and slower.

Walking back, moonlight bright like stagelight, fading the stars and lighting up the night.

❣️ Anahata

18/06/2025

The thing I love about the medicine of stories is that each listener will hear the unique medicine that is right for them. No single story has the same medicine for everyone because the story interacts with our unique life and psyche, in this moment. This means the medicine of stories is exquisitely unique for each listener. This means story medicine is soul medicine.

I love the way archetypes, plot, symbols from a fairy tale or myth can reverberate in my psyche with fiery or gentle truth, expanding or shifting the story I am currently walking.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes' warm voice, humour and wisdom makes her a divine story teller - any of her audio books are highly recommended and her book Women Who Run With the Wolves is a story gold mine. If you flip through the stories, you might just find one that resonates so much it changes your life...

Last night I shared the Bone Woman story with a group online. As participants shared their responses to the story I could feel the field deepening between us, a field of mystery, searching, longing, questions and knowing.

Every month I go to Remembering Story Medicine a night of story telling with and guests, held in Kangaroo Ground/Melbourne. Warmth, community, food and some damn good story telling, you will leave feeling profoundly nourished.

Praise be to the medicine and magic of myth!

❣️ Anahata

18/06/2025

The river Birrarung living up to its name, the river of mists.

19/05/2025

"There is only one question: how to love this world."
- Mary Oliver

There are 6 places left in this deep dive into the wild craft of soul, heart and nature practice.

NEW START DATE: Tuesday 3 June 2025.

This online circle offers sacred space and kind-hearted community to give us support and inspiration, to move from outgrown ways of being, to step into the wild knowing of the soul-self.

This is for you if you long to know your place of belonging and meaning in the world or you want to develop an authentic and ongoing relationship with your own soul or you feel stuck in the survival dance and long to live the sacred dance, following your soul's calling and purpose.

I encourage all participants to read Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin and/or Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. If you love these books, this group is an opportunity to dive into experiential soul practice.

SALE PRICE: just $600 for 12 x 2.25 hour evocatively themed and facilitated group sessions, over 6 months, with 60+ practices, reading and mentoring in a group format.

"So let up pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars."
- Padraig O'Tuama

If you are new to soul work or to working with me, you are welcome to have a free zoom chat to see if this work resonates. You can also read my blog to learn more about my approach. See links in my bio.

May we all bring our soul gifts to this wondrous yet turmoiled world that we love so much.

This will be a small (8-12 people) group, a sacred space for sharing from the heart, to empower us with the knowing of our wild soul-self, so we can show up in the world. This is a confidential space. All invitations are optional and adaptable to your unique emergent experience.

Sessions are every 2-3 weeks online, Tuesday nights, June - November 2025.

See link in bio for details.

♥️ Anahata

24/04/2025

This was my office today: the banks of the Birrarung River at Warrandyte. I met with one of the participants of the Wild Soul Immersion for our session, sitting on rocks with our feet in the flowing, cold water. Blue wrens and kookaburras and other imaginal beings joined the conversation.

Usually I offer these one to one sessions online, and participants do their practice between sessions, but I am always happiest to have these sessions in wild places, an option for anyone who lives in Melbourne. I am happy to travel to wild places, near you or come to Warrandyte.

The Wild Soul Immersion is an online soul deep dive to explore the underneath of life where deeper questions beckon.

In the one to one version, you begin any time and go at the pace that suits you, with one to one mentoring. The group version is the same immersion of 60+ practices, with the support of an online group, done over six months from May to November 2025.

❣️ Anahata

18/04/2025

What do you bow down to?

It is a powerful gesture, ritual really, to bring our head below the heart, in servitude to the heart, to touch the earth with our forehead, to bow down and surrender, not as in giving up, but giving over, to something beyond ourselves. What is sacred to you? What do you bow down to?

Bowing is part of my practice. I love bringing my forehead to moss, grass, bark of a tree, river, rock, earth. I bow down to Sacred Life, to Love and to Mystery.

I love the soft hands in this photo of these three yogis. I am in the middle. This was when I used to run a yoga studio and I wanted images to convey the inner experience, the heart of yoga, within the form. Moving can be a prayer to what we hold most dear.

Although I do not run weekly yoga classes any more, it feels special to run two deep immersive yoga retreats a year, where we explore the ground, the grace, the gratitude underlying our practice.

"Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

- RUMI

❣️ Anahata

16/04/2025

Echidna, Birrarung River and me.

❣️ Anahata

10/04/2025

Again and again I come to the Birrarung. It has been a sacred practice these last years to slowly deepen my relationship with this wondrous river. This relationship has deepened through the language of being, sensing, feeling, intuiting, imagining, dreaming, listening, grieving, praising.

I was amazed to learn recently that the Birrarung now has legal status as a "living entity" recognised by the Yarra River Protection Act 2017. This is the first Australian legislation to recognise a river as a "living entity". It was brought about by the hard work of indigenous and non-indigenous folk who care for the river. The Act established the Birrarung Council, a statutory advisory body, to nourish the living relationship with the Birrarung River as a living and integrated natural entity from source to sea.

Many of us know that the land, the rivers, all the wild ones are living, intelligent and sacred. Many of us have our ways to experience this, through praise, grief, longing, listening, through returning again and again to "be with". To have the the river as a living entity enshrined in law may not mean much to many of us, and is maybe only a small step, but maybe legal status is the language that some need in our modern culture.

I go back to the Woiworrung language of the Wurundjeri people. The word "Birrarung" means "river of mists" or "ever flowing". Indigenous culture has an intimate relationship with the Birrarung, a relationship that ever flows.

May we all deepen our relationship with the Birrarung river as a living being, as Life itself.

❣️ Anahata

06/04/2025

05/04/2025

❣️ Anahata