The earth studio is an earth- honouring building , a sacred space, a medicine place. Made from the earth, and for the earth.

Honouring the earth and her Indiginous custodians.

We acknowledge that this is Gunaikurnai land. We acknowledge the genocide and theft. We acknowledge country. We acknowledge the ancestors and the elders, the living and spirit tribe of those woven by bone into the land forever, and we acknowledge the Dreamtime, the sacred stories of the original people of this land.

The Building

The space you will be staying in is lovely and unique and has its own spiritual beauty and feel. It is a temple space, built with many hands, from the sacred dark beautiful earth, with much ceremony, relationship, community, prayer and healing, and these things out of which it was built are also its purpose.

In older and wiser cultures, a building's ceremonial and spiritual meanings were woven deeply into it and were just as important as its physical construction. In deeply wise cultures, a building could not be made without its soul and its medicine being birthed at the same time.

We have tried to make this building in this old wise and soulful way, of ritual, medicine and prayer.

The studio is made of super adobe, or earth bags, and was built by two main earth builders – Hayden Annable and Marc Eggleton, and a community of about twenty open hearted volunteers, friends and family. Everyone poured some of their spirit and healing into the building, especially in the making of the walls, where volunteers filled the earthbags with earth, one bucket at a time, in chains of co-operation and connection.

Ceremonies before, during, and after the build were performed, to ask permission of the ancestors, to bless the ones building, to bring the energies of the life-death-life cycle, and to consecrate the space for healing, for medicine and for tranformation.

The building is made of simple symbolic elements, natural to the soul. The floor is made of the earth element, just clay and sand. So when we sit on the floor of the building, we sit on the mother earth, the dark sacred place of transformation. The roof has a domed skylight, so when we look up we see the heavens, stars, blue sky, the radiant sun. This connects us to light, to spirit, to the masculine, transcendence, and the upward flight. The door is handmade from fallen Blackwood timber. It is beautiful, imposing, and properly carries the deep symbolic meaning of threshold, entrance, and place of passage. The walls are strong and thick, made of earth, they give us shelter, a dry safe place to rest. The fire brings us warmth, anger, eros, and the comfort of the hearth. The altar made of earth, beneath the clear window, reminds us of the yin and yang of our nature – descent and ascent – and how both are sacred.

Earth Friendly

The whole property is working to be earth friendly and earth honouring. We have solar power, a natural reed bed to process grey water, a teeny tiny hot water system in the spirit of less is more, and a super earth friendly low tech compost toilet.

Ethics – Trying to honour the Earth and its people

Both in the making of the studio and its furnishings, we have tried to make as many things naturally, by hand, and with as much recycled and found materials as possible.

In the studio we have tried hard to have only things which have been either ethically made and sourced, or have been bought second hand from a charity, so that the sacred space is not supporting slave labour and environmental destruction. I am vegan, so any wool or feather products in the space have been bought second hand from charities, with the idea of using resources that already exist, but not supporting those industries to continue.

So when you are staying here, I hope that you can feel that there is a deep effort to walk kindly on the earth.