SoulRiver Anahata Giri

18/06/2026

I have just learned that this ground covering heath, with tiny tubular flowers that hold up star-shaped ends, is called Cranberry Heath.

Found this small patch in the Warrandyte state park.

❣️

18/06/2026

It was beautiful to share wintery stories at the Red Door home studio, with such a warm and deep-listening community. A big thank you to Julie and Virgil and kin for being so welcoming and supportive of all of us, and of the story-beings.

I feel like the story-beings would be happy to hear their stories being shared, bones tended to, longing and grief given song, impossible underworld journeys undertaken, home lost and found, ocean and land and storm, weathered...

With the rain pelting down outside, we lit candles and gave voice to what the stories stirred in us and our prayers for the world.

The next night of stories at the Red Door will be in Spring, Saturday 12 September. What story-seeds will be planted then?

♥️ Anahat

18/06/2026

Winter moss, de-composition…

11/06/2026

My heart is breaking for Gaza.

The least I can do is to participate in a ceremony of bearing witness and protesting, by marching in peace, in strength, in the city streets against the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government, over decades. Israel must be held to account for its brutality, for breaking international law, for breaching human rights, for committing genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza.

According to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner:
“The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”

“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza,” Pillay said. “The Commission also finds that Israel has failed to prevent and punish the commission of genocide, through failure to investigate genocidal acts and to prosecute alleged perpetrators.”

According to UNICEF, from 7 October 2023 to 3 February 2026, 71,803 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza strip including at least 21,289 children.

I would also like to acknowledge activist Benny Zable (the last photo), now 80 years old, who has worn this anti-war, care for country, costume for about 45 years. I first saw Benny Zable in this outfit at protests in the late 1980s, including ones organised by the Melbourne Rainforest Action Group, of which I was a member. It was incredible to see him at the Palestine protest a few days ago. Such commitment!

All we can do is show up in whatever small way we can, to stand by our values, to speak against injustice, to hold our hearts open for truth-telling, reconciliation and peace.

💔 ❤️‍🩹 ♥️ Anahata

11/06/2026

I am here, on this wintery day, to give thanks to this wild place. Even after years of speaking out loud to the land and plants and animals, every time I speak here, I still feel shy. But as my spoken words breathe puffs of mist in the cold air, the sulphur crested cockatoos on the other side of the river bank screech their encouragement.

Thankyou, wide, flowing Birrarung, with your name that means ‘river of mists and shadow.’ How many times on your banks, I have spoken my heart, sang, made ceremony, cried, laughed and simply sat, to be and listen. Through the seasons I come here. In winter your banks are lined with yellow wattle, in summer with white Christmas bush.

Birrarung, my story is nothing without your story.

I am sorry it has taken me so long to introduce myself. All these years of walking these trails, sitting on rocks by the river, sometimes with human friends, always with wild companions of this place. It has taken a lifetime to realise that I am part of all that is here, not seperate.

Indigenous elder Miriam Rose Ungunmerr says “When you sit on country, country sits in you.” I am not simply returned to myself or returned to this place - I am returned to myself belonging here in this place.

My name is Anahat Giri. I grew up in Naarm (Melbourne), on Wurundjeri country.

I acknowledge that I live on stolen land. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional custodians of this land. Their sovereignty was never ceded. I acknowledge we need a national treaty and courageous truth-telling about the genocide committed agains indigenous people, so we can have genuine reconciliation.

I acknowledge the generosity of the Wurundjeri people as they extend welcome, share wisdom and truth-telling, inviting colonial settlers to listen, to learn, to walk together into a new story of shared connection with country.

I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri ancestors and elders, past and emerging. I give thanks for their ongoing care of country.

I love the world so much my heart aches, much of the time. I am here to serve life, to serve love and to guide others to contribute in their unique way to this precious, yet turmoiled, world.

♥️ Anahata

29/05/2026

"Most modern people have lost the ability to converse - that is, to listen and exchange meaning - with animals, plants, elements, with any feature of land and sky, from an earth-bound rock to the far away stars. If you are yet to experience a meaningful exchange with a hopping yellow robin, or a staring male kangaroo or a cliff with faces of ancestors embedded in it, then these wild and transformative conversations are a precious and revelatory gift waiting for you."

"Poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder writes: “It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness. There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home” [1]. Wilderness has always shaped - and continue to shape - who we are as humans. To return to wild places means to pick up a vast, evolutionary thread of wondrous becoming. Who do we become if we only stay inside walls and technological confines? Who do we become if we remember home as wilderness? “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed…When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness.”

Read more on Substack

❣️ Anahata

28/05/2026

17/05/2026

An invitation to nestle into the wisdom, insight, humour and love of your dream life life this winter...

"Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.”
Carl Jung

There is something powerfully honest and authentic about our dreams. Stripped of the conscious ego, our dreams can bring raw, unfiltered messages, straight from the unconscious depths of our psyche, permeated with soul’s wisdom.

The challenge is to stay with the language that dreams speak. We slow down…even slower…so we can embody, inhabit and enact the experiential, felt, imaginal, intuitive, symbolic dream images and narratives.

Without taking the simplistic short cut of interpretation and analysis, that misses the rich meaning that saturates our dreams, we stay with what is unknown, mysterious and emergent. Through active imagination, dream embodiment and enactment, meaning-making that is deeply felt, arises organically, exquisitely attuned to our soul’s becoming.

Join this small supportive circle to:

✨ practise foundational dream tending skills that are also soul tending and life tending skills
✨ inhabit our dreaming by stepping through gateways of perception: awareness, deep feeling, sensing, active imagination and intuition (Bill Plotkin's wild mind map)
✨ explore the 5 keys to dream tending from Toko-Pa Turner
✨ deepen the art of embodied listening, sacred space holding, mirroring and relational care as we tend each others dreams
✨ experiment with ways to embody the sacred medicine of dreaming in our waking lives, with art making, ceremony and enactment

It amazes me how images that at first are baffling, always bring such profound, attuned, even precise, wisdom for the individual dreamer.

Our dreams bring medicine not just for the individual, but for the collective. I believe that the world needs our dreaming, to bring planetary regeneration. Maybe the world is dreaming through humanity, so that we might wake up?

I hope you can join us in the fertile underworld of dreams.

When: Thursday 7.00-9.15pm, 8 consecutive weeks from 11 June - 30 July 2026.

Places are limited to 8 participants. Booking essential, see link in bio.

❣️ Anahata

11/05/2026

"The ache in your heart is holy." - Ben Lee

The Wild Soul Apprenticeship group online is now open for 12 soulful wanderers.

Link is in the bio.

❣️ Anahat

01/05/2026

In the glow of the full moon, by the flickering light of the fire in her cave, La Loba, Wolf Woman, Bone Woman, sings over the bones.

Inside the intimate bones of hips and pelvis, ribcage and sternum, our blood is made. What life, what secrets are buried inside our bones? What is it like to listen with our bones, to sing from our bones, to live from soul-bones?

Come and listen to stories this Sunday 3 May at 6.00pm at the Kangaroo Ground Centre. We will share food, stories and our hearts.

Please book, link in bio.

♥️ Anahata

Image Anahata Giri: She Sings Over the Bones