Past event — This event ended 8 days ago.
Living in the Field of Beauty
About the event
Learn a powerful practice of beauty that you can return to, especially in difficult times.
Tuesdays 22 + 29 Sept, 6 + 13 + 20 Oct 2026 on Zoom 7pm-8:30pm SAST/ 12pm EST/ 9am PST/ 5pm UK R2995 (International rate approx $180 USD) or R1995 (for South Africans)
"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" Mary Oliver
[Book your spot.](https://www.anelh.com/living-in-the-field-of-beauty)
An Invitation You get up. Make the coffee. Outside, the sky shakes out its wings and unfolds in all its morning splendour. You peer through the window, grateful it matches the weather report. You join the daily choreography, swiping and nodding. You say things like "Sure, sounds good!" with the calm authority of someone fluent in the performance. You pick up the kids and realise you can't even recall the drive. A rainbow appears.
"Look, kids, a rainbow!" you say, pointing to the sky. How nice. But it doesn't really touch you. It's more like a background screensaver, something to wade through on your way to your next meeting. Sometimes you think back to your childhood, a time when the world felt stranger, more alive. That was a long time ago though. Rain is precipitation. Trees are oxygen machines. We've stopped seeing the world we actually live in. We've become very well-informed zombies.
Beauty has been repackaged as something to purchase rather than perceive. It has been flattened into prettiness or perfection, leaving us hungry for something unnamed and largely forgotten. The soul needs beauty as the body needs food. Without it, we stop engaging with life and begin merely enduring it. We become numb. Some people refer to this disconnection from beauty as 'disenchantment'. More than a century ago Max Weber described this feeling. As rationality and science became the dominant lens through which we view the world, the texture and quality of our experiences dulled. The philosopher Charles Taylor calls it the buffered self. It's as if by naming and explaining things in good and practical ways, we wrapped ourselves up in intellectual cling film and safely sealed ourselves off from the real world. What is the 'Field of Beauty'? There are two distinctly different ways of being in the world. I think of them as the transactional mode, and grace mode. Grace mode gets is what gets us into the field of beauty, that magical space where we perceive the world for what it really is: a free gift. The core practices I will share in this course allow you to access grace mode, which in turn opens you to a deeper availability to the beauty that was there all along. To live in the field of beauty is to have learned a way of seeing that finds the world alive, addresses it, and is addressed in return. It's what happens when you stop trying to extract something from what's in front of you and start being genuinely available to it. This course teaches you that practice. Over five weeks you'll learn a way of noticing that pulls you out of your head and into real contact with what's here.
Who This Is For
• Artists, writers, and makers who've lost a sense of inspiration or aliveness in their work • Anyone feeling tired, uninspired, or overcome by the grind of daily life • People who have lost a sense of hope for the future • Anyone seeking a deeper, more creative and nourishing orientation to the world
Please Note: This is not a course in aesthetics or art appreciation. Nor is it an intellectual breakdown of classical philosophy, though we will weave in some of these concepts as part of the practice itself.
Who Twenty-five years ago I was initiated as a sangoma in Botswana. That initiation introduced me to an older, deeper way of being in and relating to the world. It taught me that beauty isn't decorative or optional. It's relational. It's what happens when aliveness meets aliveness. It's how we know we're home.
For the past two decades I've woven together ritual, contemplative practice and creative work to help…
