International Lifestyle Magazine Issue 57 | Page 37

‘you have the energy of the sun in your heart’. The understanding that we are all aspects of an interconnected whole, receivers and transmitters in a universal energy field, was given to Felix by his father, and he has devoted his life to the communication and transmission of this simple yet challenging idea! Felix practise includes yoga, martial arts, meditation, music, poetry and storytelling. He has been practising these forms in some way for his whole life. Currently he records music and poetry with a collective known as Triangulators, and also performs Rock’N’Roll and Country classics under the name Spirit of ‘68. The great Rock’n’Roll performer Charlie Gracie once told Felix that ‘Rock’n’Roll is life, people who love Rock’n’Roll stay young, healthy and vibrant’. We are both devoted to finding ways to connect with, nurture and encourage the living energy present in all beings. Whether it be through yoga, conversation, or Rock’n’Roll, these are all vehicles to communicate the essential truth, that we are life, and life is us! We met in 2010, drawn together by our shared interests and love of adventure. Only a short while after we had come together Felix was given an old College building in South Bristol to look after for a couple of years. He had been working with a group called Artspace Lifespace, and their sister company the Invisible Circus in Bristol. These groups took on old buildings and turned them into community art spaces, giving people studio and living space at low cost to support the creation of wonderful works. Together with a goup of 9 caretakers we transformed the old College from an abandoned building into a vibrant community hub, filled with life and activity, we opened a cafe, set up after school clubs for the local youth, created a vegetable garden and so many other things too numerous to list here. Alongside organising the College Project, Maya and some Yogi friends had initiated the creation of a Yoga and Massage Centre in Swindon. For two years this space provided a wonderful space for quiet, contemplation and Yogic practices for the people of the Swindon area. During this time we brought together our knowledge of Yoga, martial arts and the natural world to create a workshop called ‘Human Animal’. Merging elements of meditation, movement and theatre we created an experiential journey for people who attended, allowing them to physically and consciously experience the human journey from the void to self-aware consciousness in the space of an hour and a half. It is our hope that by encouraging human beings to recognise and better understand their simultaneous animal and human nature, they will be able to be more gentle with themselves, and more easily assimilate, channel and maybe even transcend the powerful biological drives which are active in all of us. When both of our projects (the Swindon Yoga Centre and the Bristol College Project) for a variety of reasons outside of our control, ended in 2012, we were unsure as to what to do next. The austerity measures in the UK meant the local Council were not able to support the community arts projects we were working on in the way they had in the past, and there were no opportunities locally to carry on the work we had been doing. Initially we thought of becoming a kind of mobile sustainable community support team, travelling around in our van offering energy and counsel to other projects doing similar work in the UK. However, when our friend offered us the land in the Alpujarras for us to experiment with creating an off-grid living environment, and a more permanent base for our activities, we jumped at the chance. We have so many dreams for this space, in time we hope to run a tea shop with herbs grown www.internationallifestylemagazine.com