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Sārāh is a research informed artist & ancestral lineage healer [rejuvenation activist]*, visioning in re-member-ship of relational kinship practice, as life-giving, reclaiming templates of collective gaze.
Through process-led co-emergence [reciprocity], held in ceremony, sound, sensation, image, writing and live arts, we constellate intrapsychic ecologies for decentralising, deconditioning, decolonising, in an embrace of a transpersonal, incubative darkness.
Sārāh’s analytic psycho spirituality centralises elemental earth, and opens communication to mediate modern system-machine and transpersonal Spirit realm. She writes on darkness, transformation, contradiction, revolution and intersectional shadow integrations.
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action, activist*
[ ”activist”, in place of the word: “healer”, as at the core, all healing is self-healing, allowing oneself to bloom from within. We heal ourselves in the presence of being mirrored in our wholeness. ]
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In constellating, we practice dreamwork, animist, instinctual, element-based ritual, [particularly inclusive of water and earth], embodied alchemy [qi, somatics, sensing awareness], and orphic incantation [sound, authentic voicework, polyrhythm, echo] articulated by research into relational non-linearity, non-dual philosophy and narrative [symbol, poetics, archetype, myth, taboo, the absurd].
Inner-experience is product, holding concurrent metaphysical space and paradox, acknowledging of darkness as vital incubation, protection and initiation, intuition-technology, synchronicity; influenced by aktionist, neo-concretism, radical transformability and abject art.
The practice situates itself between transcendence of the intellectual and the merging, dissapearance, and immanence of process informed practice.
We recognise wholeness within multiplicities, personal and essential identity, context within systemic balances, and the claiming of agency towards liberation.
POSITIONALITY
As descendant of both migrating Sri Lankan diaspora and British/Irish settling colonies, Sārāh came into being on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of Woiwurrung language group, in Kulin Nation; who are the traditional custodians of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, who still exist without a treaty, nor proper recognition from the settling colony and subsequent colonial government.
Sārāh’s Lineages are woven through fabrics of South & West Asia, North & West Europe, outwards/inwards, reconciling in rivers of reparation, remembrance/forgetting.
Through Sri Lanka her ancestry is Sinhalese [ Hela / South Asian / Malaysian / Indo-Aryan / Dutch / Indo-Portuguese / or Malay, from Java, Surat and Bengal ] *.* Based on research found through Nira Wickramasinghe, a historian of modern Sri Lanka and professor of Modern South Asian Studies.
Sārāh’s connection with Spirit, Taoism, Wu, and Ancient Sumeria came whispering through her passions and affinities, to which she chose to belong to.
Sārāh’s position of a de-conditioning gaze is expressed in a queer, (re)claiming BIPoC, sometimes-white-passing, cis-AFAB-female body. She sees identity as both an expression of essential Soul, and a personal preference, in conversation & collaboration within greater relational networks - in interplay between fixed and mutuable pathways. Her chosen pronouns: she, they, or no-pronoun.
Sārāh is based in Berlin, Germany, a meeting place of dynamic creative energies and powerful undercurrent forces. She exists in conversation with an international queer diaspora, in contact with all kinds of migrationary stories and lineages, belief systems, worlds, elements, and natures.
Special interest into the energy of Inanna (Ancient Sumeria), Quan Yin (Roots to Ancient India), and the Wu (Ancient China), who were the first Shamanic Daoists, practicing energetic transmutation through dance. [Among many other practices]
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ANCESTRAL &
EARTH BELONGING PRAXIS...
Sārāh offers One on One sessions in the capacity of an intrasectional & diasporic ancestral belonging practitioner, with ritual and witness counsel for power rebalance.
This is energetic, psycho spiritual counselling, operating through attention, intention, felt & perceived experience, sound, movement, and natural elements in ritual.
Session work is of an anayltic nature, focused on shadow re-routing, de-conditioning, & de-colonising psyche, in relationship with greater systems of kinship, in the support of self-mercy. Our model of psyche & cosmology is an ecological-soul-interconnected, black-feminist, archetypal, kinship-model.
We do this through holding all emotion, including taboo, adjusting gaze to hold space that is wider than the personal, and reclaiming in a receptive way that is self-aware to dynamics of the collective.
Through praxis, we together map our ancestral poetics, embracing all experiences on our way towards anchoring a deep, rooted and compassionate belonging to earth, to an ever-cyclic humus.
Humus*
[ A rich, nutrient-filled earth-soil, also the root word for human, humility. ]
From this rootedness, we vision actions which alchemise within us the kind of stewardship our current & choosen-future world requires, towards balance & wholeness.
Through sensing and presence this praxis can provide consistent companionship, as we go through periods of major transition, loss, or conflict.
More info on sessions is listed on the PRAXIS PAGE page or flow over to the BLOG to discover more.
ABOUT RESEARCH CEREMONIES...
Online or in-person research ceremonies [as workshop or ceremony] are made for studio groups or research teams interested in ritual, relation of the body, and psychic processual art.
Sarah has interest in supporting artists in developing new, future-focused authentic ceremonial research practices.
Sārāh grows an ongoing research & sharing container : INTRA RHYTHMS online community space on discord, which you are welcome to access as a new client in the praxis.
She also shares a Gardening Project as ‘Space of Psychic Belonging’ with local community.
ETHICS & EQUITY...
In choosing to refocus kinship practices within existential style anaysis, as a non-indigenous body, the most important aspect and in constant development are ethics.
Sārāh is only working with wisdom self divined, or shared with consent and is always enquiring deeper into the practicing of decoloniality, and the forming of decolonial templates, reparations and equity building.
None of this is to disrgard - she is also fallible, and will always be in process of de-conditioning. The systemic issues we live within will take longer than her lifetime to unwind. She too is a part of the issue, privilege being always what we don't 'have' to know about.
She is a beleiver that all systems in contact with kinship practices need to realistically benefit the existences, of the bodies who shape the practice and the people who hold the original wisdom in their bodies.
This approach to Energy & Ritual Practition, aims towards accumulating cross cultural exchanges, redirecting equity towards original sources of wisdom, via collection, open source reference (sharing on), recognition, and re-routing economic overflow.
We ultimately work towards reparation of intuitional ways of being, as building blocks for future-present knowledge and more ethical future systems.
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Portrait Image with thanks to Mathilda Bernmark.
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MODALITIES...
This praxis works in search of holding psyhic images, unaltered, not reduced - understanding these exist trans-subjectively and as passed intra-pyschically.
We work cyclicly, in repetitions of ritual, informed by imaginistic process, to be able to hold images of beauty as rebirth of the sensate and the sensual, as delivered from Objective psyche, holding them as ‘complete’.
Through this we practice to beome a clear mouthpiece for prophecies and oracles of The Unseen, favouring Water Wisdoms for their deep listening and holding capacities of tenderness, Grief, Yin, and knowing the magical power of animal, nature beings and silence in allowing new voices to be heard.
Sārāh works with generating Mercy and Courage, Non Binary Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara ‘Looking down, upon sound, at the portal between worlds’ ,‘Guan Yin of Courage & Mercy, and a large Spirit Council dedicated to conscious Law, in connection with earth chakra.
Under the terms ‘Ancestral Belonging & Liberation’, ‘Earth Medicine’ and ‘Re-Orbit Praxis’ (Decolonialist Shadow Work) an understanding of ‘decoloniality’ within the work, honouring immanence as a co-emergent becoming ‘space of four’, past the transcendent ‘third’ (additions/expansions), and the integrative ‘dual’ (comparative, centralising).
The power of beauty and the power of image, imago.
‘’POWER’’ (A Medium)
We work analytically and technically with intentionalising Power, in order to bring in Balance.
Power is experienced in motion as Qi subtle body energies, is catalysed by integrative images, associative emotions, states of being/non-being, dreaming, world inter-relations and transient phenonema.
Power is both personal and transpersonal, as an individual is in a dialogue with the collective. Power is more-than-human, non-anthropocentric.
Within power-over systems we are aware how the ’crunch’ of an extraction fault line, responds to group dynamics of attention and intention and often ends up expressing itself within spaces of intimacy, in proximity to the empathic, or resting hidden within the mutable spaces of the psycho somatic, the dreaming, or felt experience. When the mutable starts to refuse this provides a ‘symptom’ for us to deep listen into.
‘‘PSYCHIC’’ (A Location)
The core axis of this practice is psychic.
What is ‘psychic’ occurs within the Self, and the liminal, betwixt-between realms.
The relations of interior worlds, the metaphysical, form a basis of relation with exterior worlds, created through relational image.
We transfer images into eachother, through eachother and, when in kinship: with eachother, opening a container wide and deep enough within our sessions to hold and incubate radical transformations.
Through recognition we call Soul back into the somatic vessel, bridging and re-weaving connection between spaces of dissociation, into spaces of holding.
The focus into rejuvenation holds a relationship with holistic rhythms of the un-manifested, exploring being and non-being, identity, embodiment, intuition, toxicity/purity, poisons, curse/cure, failure, glitch, taboo, emanciption, salvation, as intitiating and balancing phenonema.
All of your experiences are welcome here.
‘’GAZE’’ (A Tool)
The gaze we grow in this praxis operates on cyclic actions of decentralised witness and multiplicity: every subjective ‘I’ stretches towards an objective ‘we’, perhaps with moments of glimsping the numinous.
In glimpsing the numinous, we understand that to actually be amongst objective psyche or source, would demolish our self-capacity of containment and thus we do not have access to ‘karmic sight’, even if channeling. This keeps the gaze grounded, shadow working, and self relfective.
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POTENCIES...
Soul & psyche re-claiming, The practice turns ancestral resiliences into protection, through opening to beauty.
The psychic potency Sarah brings in to a session is flavoured by Neptune, Saturn, Venus and Pluto all in her 12th House, bringing access to the collective unconscious, compassion for the oppressed, awakening, liberation, and authority behind the veil; assisting wide and sincere vessel holding through grief, loss, radical transformations; brigding through Spirit, death, dying and the beyond.
She is a Neptunian Alien Instrument, with capacity to promote amplification of psychic energies in others, absorbing toxicities, and promoting healing. Aquarian Sun, Gemini Moon, and Capricorn rising. Though astrology does not form the basis of our exchange it is a good way to explain to you the energy you are encountering - most of the spirits she works with are very private, and wont be shared until we are in ceremony together.
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INITIATIONS...
At around 7 years old, Sārāh was visited and watched over by a floating, spectacular and illuminated Angel figure, which she saw out of her childhood bedroom window in the middle of the night. She has been holding this image for 30 years and is still receiving information within it, currently understanding the holding of this image as a figure similar or related to Guan Yin, as The Moon. In her Moon form, Guan Yin represents waters of compassion.
Sārāh began being initiated through existentially awakening dreaming in 2014. She went through a 7+ year passage of complete existential rearrangements: Dismemberments & Rememberments.
Radically altered by the force of the intuition and collective unconscious/objective psyche, displayed in inner and outer lives, through the lense of Archetypal Symbolism, she attemped - within a communion of jungian psychoanalysis, ancestral and core shamanic practices, to hold a connection to roots, and to Soul-making.
She shed mask after mask, body after body, traversing through red rock wastelands, merging with animal power, eventually encountering transformative numen spirit, as GrandMother Cosmos, within the dreaming.
She continued this practice repeatedly, in service, becoming an ally of Spirit, on a pathway of learning Mercy, ackonwlegding sacrifice in the exchange of expanded psychic gifts.
She experienced through the dreaming, spirit visitations as brain surgeries & rearrangements. She was initiated through synchronicity, dreaming and urge within Yin Lineages of Inanna Avalokitesvara & Quan Yin, through the years 2017-2020.
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FRAMEWORK...
In 2015 Sārāh began studying and practicing, alongside Dreaming, a modality of Core Shamanism, with the Foundation For Shamanic Studies in Europe. Through 2015 - 2020 she practiced advanced seminars Dreamworking, Divination, Power Extraction, Soul Retrieval & Psychopomp (Death, Dying & Beyond). Between 2015 - 2022 she was involved in the circle culture of the EU and U.S Foundations, also having presented art and research within this context.
During this time she also become proficient in numerous oracular systems of divination, numerology, astrology, multiple forms of tarot, qi gong, joining taoist, zazen & tonglen buddhist community in metta mediation, seeking international dialogues and identity recognising, diaporic & queer embodiments of practice. She trained in psychotherapeutic models as healing-psychology-practitioner (HPP) through 2017-2018, but chose not to practice within the framework of the psychological system in order to focus fully on a complex trauma informed ancestral gaze.
In 2020 she opened her own Witness Praxis with a publicly accessible session format, out of necessity for expansion into a relational-feedback-based wisdom, with a focus on complex trauma aware golden yin shadow constellation, inner wellspring, and rejuvenation.
2019 through 2024, Sārāh developed her awareness of psychic architectures through practices in emergent strategy, pleasure activism, black feminist liberation, ecologies of care, abolitionist decolonial transformation, looking deeper into the revolutionary spirit of resistance & revolution; honing her specificity in 2024 towards ‘Belonging & Liberation’, with special focus for protection and blessing for LGBTQIA+, BIPoC and Diasporic Identities.
She practices into mortality, proximity, decentralisation, researching dismantling and divestment from current power-hoarding systemic grids. Sarah is deep-listening to wisdoms of blackness, transness & non binaryism.
Through this work we open to drop into acessing a deeper grid or matrices of Dreaming Kin.
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RESEARCH...
Sarah is currently researching Infrastructures of Psyche, Kinship Systems, Matrices, Gaze, Consent, Psychic Boundaries, Circle Culture, Water, Soil/Earth, Indigenous Cosmologies, Law Making & Mediation, Mapping through Story/Song, Qi Gong & Meridian, Roots, Personal & Essential Identity, Abstraction & Trance Poetry, Karma & The Yugas (Planetary Ages), Non-Duality, Geo-politics, Liberation Modalities, Freedom Work & Abolitionism.
Her formula for research is an intuitive, non linear model, and consent-centric, where Spirits and Realm are recognised, asked permission and invited into the body of the process through session work and open ceremony.
One on one sessions add to a form of colletive consensual research where client’s spirit-worlds, lineages and ancestral maps also inform and guide Sarah’s worldview, map of healing, and ethics. What happens in session is largely unplanned and also develops the practices she shares onwards, with the personal stories of clients remaining confidential - ie: she does not share case studies as ‘specimen’ outside of having a practice-led medicine-bag-building focus. She is currently interested in participatory spaces of cultural abundance, as research ceremony and resonance with greater root-system networks.
The most recent development of research ceremony is expressed through ‘Roots To Freedom Ancestral Belonging Ceremony’ (2024).
Her research into digitalisation as portal, through online dream exchange (2015), residency & writing focus (2019-2021), research ceremony (2022) and continued live electronic sound sessions (2023-2024) holds the digital as a realm, a leverage for expanding into multi-perspectivism, transparencies & opacities of interior/exterior psychic fragments as unique blueprint for an expansive (trauma healing) grid.
This expanded into ‘Shadow Alchemy through Saya Soma: Shadow Body In Encoded System (2020-22)’, pending publication, post Body In Algorithms Residency 2023, Zero Corners - and was previously presented through sound, visuals and writing, with the Foundation of Shamanic Studies Europe (2019-2022) and as performance happening with CTM Festival Hacklab Berlin (2018).
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PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS,,,
Sārāh's work with performance, video, sound and image has been supported through recent colaborations appearing as; installation in Kreuzberg Pavillion (Berlin, 2024), KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin (Berlin, 2022) with Benjamin Busch, on tour with Sunni Leilani, with Jazz Equinox (Corsica, 2024), developmental residencies; Sternhagen Gut, supported by Music Board Berlin (2021), Body in Algorithms (2021), curated by Ashley Middleton and Georgia Perkins, and she’s exhibited internationally in institutions such as Screenspace (Melbourne, Australia) curated by Laura Castagnini, festivals such as At.tention festival (Lärz, Germany), Atrium Space (Melbourne, Australia) and fortyfivedownstairs (Melbourne) together with live art collaboration Spill Collective (2008 - 2011).
She has performed live electronic sound in open air, radio format, listening bar & club setting, Kosmos Festival (2024), Kwia (Berlin), OHM (Berlin), and has brought multimedia performance art (AV) into spaces such as about:blank (Slut Walk, Berlin, 2012) curated by Sylvia Sadzinski, embracing accessibility of live arts within Berlin’s underground club music scene.
Sārāh held a relational vessel, Consumer Refund, online and through sound performance. Between 2014 - 2022 individuals could integrate their subconscious matter (dreams) into her C-Refund archive via private experience, where the internet allows the fostering of a intimately personal, yet anonymous connection. She released electronic music under the name C-Refund on Patterns of Perception, (2022, Berlin).
Between 2016-2017, Sārāh founded and curated an independent art and music space: Aether (Berlin, Nuekölln), focusing on post-internet, conceptual art, ambient sound and noise.
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EXTERNAL PROJECTS ...
Sārāh is an active member and representative of feminist electronic music / digital arts network female:pressure, with a focus into inclusive mediation infrastructure, having received the KeyChange Eu Inspiration Award 2024, Tallinn Music Week, Estonia.
Since 2022 she offers grant application copy-writing services as volunteer, for individuals applying for indigenous fellowship grants. (Spread by word of mouth only - Please get in contact!)
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RE CLAIMING - HERITAGE & ANCESTRY
An issue with ‘having to re-claim’ is about our relationship with distances, dissapearances, and ‘needing’ to belong to the symbolic.
The re-claiming process is mediated, conscious of the inner spaces within us of constant becoming - especially for diaspora or trans-inter-queer identity -which also mediates the destructive mother: death.
In this case the portal of reclaiming is through acknowlegding destruction as a cyclic cause of coming into being, and centralises golden shadow work as the axis of this process.
Claiming all of our ancestry * - a be-longing to the earth and cosmos, to life force, also to death and destruction - is to be responsible for and with the experiences of these ancestors. Respons-ibility means also holding: accountability ‘with’, identification ‘with’, care ‘with’.
We do not seek belonging, we *are* belonging and thus, offer to those around us: a space with which to belong.
* Reference to Luisah Teish.
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Portrait Image with thanks to dear friend Mathilda Bernmark.