Welcome to the Focusers Guide to the Galaxy

Listening at the Edge of the World

Language, Land, and the Felt Sense of a Living Earth

A series of 7 lunchtime drop in sessions

This Galaxy guide offers an overarching theme, an exciting new initiative, to explore the great poets, philosophers, writers and leaders and the such like bringing their messages vividly alive through the lens of focusing.  

Listening at the Edge of the World

Language, Land, and the Felt Sense of a Living Earth

The Experience

Enjoy, share, and connect in community as we enter a series of embodied encounters with voices from across the world who speak from radically different ways of knowing the Earth.

This follow-on programme builds on Indigenous Wisdom Carriers and expands into a planetary field of listening, where language, land, grief, and becoming are not abstract ideas but lived processes we can sense directly in the body.

Each session engages original voices—teachings, writings, speeches, and stories—held in a Focusing-oriented space of pausing, sensing, reflection, and shared exploration.

We move slowly, attentively, and relationally—allowing meaning to arise from experience rather than interpretation.

Who is Welcome?

Focusing practitioners, NVC Practitioners, activists, facilitators, change-makers, and anyone seeking to live with greater integrity, presence, and ecological attunement.

Bring your questions, your uncertainties, and your longing to be in deeper relationship with the living world.

Core Themes

• Language as world-making, not description
• The shift from nouns (things) → verbs (processes)
• Earth as relative, not resource
• Land, water, and place as living participants
• Grief and praise as forms of ecological relationship
• Thresholds, uncertainty, and becoming
• Action as participation, not control

Session Titles and Dates

Listening at the Edge of the World Language, Land, and the Felt Sense of a Living Earth

A seven-session series of embodied encounters with voices who speak from radically different ways of knowing the Earth — allowing meaning to arise from experience rather than interpretation.

Week 1 — 10 June Language as World-Making: The Verb World of Lakota Thought 

Nick Estes Lakota language reveals a reality in which being is not fixed, but continually enacted. Instead of a world of separate things, reality is understood as ongoing relationship and movement. This shift changes not only how we speak, but how we exist.

Week 2 — 17 June The Earth Is Not a Resource, But a Relative 

Ailton Krenak challenges the separation between humanity and Earth, inviting a return to radical kinship. His voice disrupts modern assumptions of ownership and places life within a shared field of relation.

Week 3 — 24 June Speaking the Language of Living Beings

Robin Wall Kimmerer Kimmerer shows how grammar shapes perception, revealing how language can either objectify the world or restore it to aliveness. Through her work, the more-than-human world re-emerges as active presence.

Week 4 — 1 July The Land Remembers Us 

Winona LaDuke LaDuke brings attention to land as living relation — embedded in history, responsibility, and continuity. Her work grounds ecological thinking in place-based practice and Indigenous-led futures.

Week 5 — 8 July Grief, Praise, and the Memory of the World 

Martin Prechtel Prechtel offers a cosmology in which grief is not pathology but love in relationship, and praise is a way of sustaining the world. Forgetting the world is understood as a form of disconnection from reciprocal life.

Week 6 — 15 July Slowing Down at the Edge of Becoming 

Bayo Akomolafe Akomolafe invites us into a radical openness where urgency gives way to attunement. Rather than solving problems, we are asked to notice the unfolding of something new at the edges of certainty.

Week 7 — 22 July Planting the Future in the Ground Beneath Our Feet 

Wangari Maathai Maathai's work demonstrates how ecological regeneration, community resilience, and dignity arise through grounded, embodied action. Small, rooted acts become participation in long-term planetary healing.

Session Format

• Opening connection and centering attunement
• Open explorative plenaries
• Exploring the core teachings through the felt sense
• Paired practice and small group dialogue
• Identifying the depth relevance and meaning 
• Integration: How does this wisdom live in my life today?

Contribution and Sustainable based Pricing

(See 'Buy ticket' for actual costs, make sure you scroll all the way down).

These sessions require significant preparation, facilitation, and follow-through. Pay what feels true for your circumstances, honouring both your financial means whilst valuing this creation. Your honest self-assessment—supported by those who can contribute more—keeps this work available to all. I am of course delighted to receive what you give. My dog, Skye, and cat, Miss Pippin, will also wag their tails.

• Any Session: General Admission                      £15.00
• Any Session: Concession                                   £12.50
• Super-save on All 7 Sessions                            £70.00
• Per Session Financially Strapped                     £6.00
• Per Session Beyond Financially Strapped:      By Donation

(See 'Buy ticket' for actual costs, make sure you scroll all the way down).

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Meet Simon 'K2' McKibbin

Presence Guide, Mentor, Friend and Coach.

We are living in unprecedented times—both thrilling and unsettling with forces beyond our control at play on financial, global, environmental, and social levels. The lack of meaning in materialism has left our culture's social fabric empty, sowing confusion in our identities and a sense of lostness about what it means to feel secure, grounded in the natural order, and truly connected to others and the awe and mystery of the universe.

We live in a culture of atomization where technology promises connection yet alienates us further—moving from Cartesian "I am" to Apple "I-Phone," faces frozen and hypnotized by screens. The proliferation of information competes for our attention—it's hard to draw breath and sense our true identity as sovereign beings.

And yet... in every moment, the sun rises and stars offer their soft light. The ground remains ever faithful, lovingly supporting us. Birds continue to sing, trees remain rooted, oceans stay deep, and there is richness and beauty in every precious, tingling, vibrant moment. A silky breath slides into our bodies from the skies as the universe continues breathing through us, perfuming every cell with vibrancy and warmth. We are here now, alive—coming home to ourselves is the prayer of every star, every mote of dust. Something deep within knows how to return to its authentic original self—like a hidden gem stitched into a garment's lining, we had it all the time. Embodied Relational Presence offers a portal to true self-empowerment where we realize we are not foam buffeted by waves, but the ocean itself.

For over 34 years, I've supported individuals and communities toward greater personal and professional empowerment through Mindfulness, Nonviolent Communication, and Focusing—practices that unlock our capacity to live more fully, creatively, and courageously. My work bridges inner transformation with outer change, rooted in active commitment to ecological regeneration, social equity, and nonviolent living through grassroots organising and co-creation. I invite you into this portal of Embodied Relational Presence—where there is autonomous, sovereign, connected, and irrepressible life—to become both magician of your own wholeness and powerful ally for planetary regeneration and collective wellbeing.

Experience: CNVC Certified NVC Trainer | BFA Focusing Teacher | Breathworks Mindfulness Teacher | Associate Mindfulness Teacher, University of Cambridge (2017–2023) | Extinction Rebellion consultant, mediator & trainer | Møller Institute Cambridge University Executive Coaching Guest Lecturer | Mindfulness in Schools Project (MISP) teacher | Triratna Buddhist Order member | Samaritans volunteer

Contact Simon simon@living-presence.co.uk