Some visions arrive quietly, asking to be lived, not just imagined.
Here are my reflections from our recent journey to the Amazon rainforest, on dance, dreaming, alliance, responsibility and life.
This year’s journey to the Amazon was deeply special for me. I have learned so much there over the years, and this time a whole new layer revealed itself.
Before I speak about that, I want to honour the extraordinary group of dancers, mainly from the Movement Medicine community, who made the profound commitment to travel with us on this Fundación Pachamama journey. This is beyond eco-tourism. It is a choice to go not simply as guests, but as people actively wishing to become allies to the Indigenous peoples of the forest, who are, and have always been, its ancestral protectors.
With these remarkable individuals, many of whom we already knew, entirely new landscapes of shared experience, respect, and understanding opened up. The connection deepened immeasurably between us, and between us all and the forest.
As always, it was a joy to make this journey with Ya’Acov, my beloved husband, co-creator, and soul companion. This time his medicine was shining with particular clarity, humility, and heart. To witness his healing work being increasingly honoured by the Achuar and Sápara shamans felt both completely natural and quietly extraordinary. These incredible shamans are among the last of the old-school traditional healers, raised and trained before significant contact with the modern world. They bring such strength, knowledge, power and at the same time, are so gentle. They are connected through generations upon generations of intensive practice and training. It is a profound privilege to meet them and to receive from them.
For me personally, this journey marked a gentle but profound consolidation of a change that began last year, when I was invited to work alongside the shamans of the communities we visited, together with Ya’Acov, who has held this position for many years. This is very unusual. Traditionally, a shaman works alone within healing ceremonies. To work alongside another shaman is rare. To work alongside a non-Indigenous healer is unique. And to work side by side with two, one of whom is a woman, is simply completely new.
I feel both the honour and the responsibility of this role. I was acutely aware that Achuar women and girls were seeing me in a position they do not see their own women elders occupy. There is no neutral way to be present in such a context. We do not go as observers, but as engaged allies, together with the people, and through the alliance they have formed with Fundación Pachamama, participating in a process of cultural evolution.
This is a gentle, slow, careful and yet unpredictable process that allows consciously chosen change while preserving traditional dignity, self-respect, and wisdom. Everyone involved is doing their best to support the people of the forest to flourish, maintaining their role as custodians of biodiversity, while participating in the modern world from within their deep wilderness.
I was happy to be told that the novel sight of a woman healer side by side with Ya'Acov and their own shaman had created positive and welcome ripples. This is in keeping with the gentle and yet profound women's empowerment of the Fundacion Pachamama's "Ikiama Nukuri" programme initiated by the Achuar, when they recognised they were loosing too many women and babies in childbirth.
Perhaps the biggest teaching of all which I received this time was learning more about the central power, in the Achuar culture, that is granted to dreams and visions
These are not dreams that arise from the thinking, wanting, planning mind, but visions that come from Arútam, the spirit of the forest; unforseen, uncontrollable, often received in ceremony or in solitude in nature. Once received, the task is not to analyse them, but to follow them. To work for them. To work towards them for as long as it takes; months, years, decades, or even lifetimes.
As this theme arose repeatedly in conversations with different Achuar people, I suddenly saw anew the vision that first led me to dance as central to my healing path.
In 1988, during a women’s medicine workshop with Donna Talking Leaves and Heather Moon Owl at Hazelwood House by the River Dart, where we got married a year later.
I received a vision that surprised me deeply. Heather guided us through substantial letting-go work, releasing old stuff and creating space for the new. And then she led us in how to open ourselves and welcome in consciousness of our sacred dream, what I now call the "soul compass" of my life.
We were asked to set our intention and then, without thinking or pre-deciding, to physically create something that would represent that dream. We were told not to try to understand it, but simply to follow our hands. I remember the relief of not needing to know, of trusting the mysterious guiding sense moving through my fingers. Just like the dance. We arrive not through thought, but through something much larger speaking through the moving, creating body.
For hours we worked in a shared hum of quiet focus; gathering, sewing, tying, nailing, painting, crafting. As dusk fell, we placed our three-dimensional “somethings” in a pile in the centre of the room.
Mine was a curving branch of wood, naturally twisted and spiralled, adorned with ribbons of many colours. I liked it, but still had absolutely no idea what it meant.
Heather blessed the objects, and one by one we were invited to hold our creation and let its essence speak through us, giving voice to the realised dream it carried.
By the time it was my turn, it was nearly 2am, and only Heather and I were still awake, I took the object in my hands and suddenly saw, with great clarity:
A vast snake of people, humanity in all its diversity, singing and dancing through the Amazon rainforest. People of all nations, cultures, and ages, moving with the forest, celebrating all life on Earth.
I knew this vision resonated deeply with what mattered most to me, but I had no idea how to move towards it. I hoped and trusted the path would reveal itself. One of the first recognisable steps was discovering and training with Gabrielle Roth, founder of the '5 Rhythms' practice. Gabrielle became my teacher, and ours, for eighteen profound years.
Only now, in the context of these Amazonian teachings about vision, do I fully recognise this as my life dream, one that is still evolving, and one I am still following and discovering, step by tiny step.
After this journey to the Amazon, I see even more clearly how dance becomes a way for humans to acknowledge, celebrate, and strengthen our relationship as an interwoven, interdependent part of life itself. I also understand more deeply that our ongoing commitment and collaboration with people in the Amazon matters to them as much as it does to me and to us. Our annual fundraiser at the Summer Long Dance in the regenerative forest of Hillyfield is intimately part of this dream too, offering both spiritual and economic support to Fundación Pachamama.
There is so much more I could share, but I will pause here, with gratitude for this journey over so many decades and for all those who have contributed to it, especially: Heather Moon Owl, Gabrielle Roth, Bernadette Ryder, Sarah Patterson, David Tucker, Lynne and Bill Twist, Manari Ushigua, Belén Páez, Raphael Taisch, Entsakwa Ukunyar, Mukutsawa Shanti Ashanga, Chumpi Ramiro Vargas, Cristina Serrano, Estafania Paez, Marco Mukuink (follow this link for last years' article about Marco's teachings about dreams, and his tapir, Fabiola) everyone at Fundación Pachamama, and my beloved co-dreamer, Ya’Acov. And to Arutam, the spirit of the forest, that allows and supports all this in ways I cannot begin to fathom, but I feel.
There are many ways to connect with the spirit of the forest and the request which emerged from the Achuar in the early 1990's for a global alliance to stand with life and with the forest. The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium. You can support "The Fundacion Pachamama". We will be leading our next journeys to the forest with them in April 2027: info out soon. And you can come to the Long Dance (July 11-17 2026, in Devon).
If any of this resonates with you, we sincerely and warmly invite you to come and dance the Long Dance with us this year, where are so very happy to welcome Chumpi Ramiro Vargas, Manari Ushigua and Belen Paez to the Hilly Field once more.
with love and gratitude and the very best wishes for following what your soul dreams,
Susannah
