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If our last update wasn't exciting enough, we are so pleased to announce our first full day event that brings into being our new year goal to craft "longer sound journeys, partnered in with our Holistic offerings to include guided meditation". We've spent nearly three years exploring how Annabeth's practice of Buddhist chants meets and relates to Nik's experience in classical Hindustani music as a sitar player; now we're really ready to share! So, we are delighted to offer a whole Saturday of meditation, chanting and music inspired in essence by the ancient principles of Nāda yoga. You are very welcome to come for the morning or afternoon as stand-alone sessions but we'd love for you to join us in a whole spacious day of complete immersion in the sacred dance between sound and silence.
Each ticket gives you the option to include a homemade, vegan meal from the Earth Heart Kitchen (of course prepared with seasonal produce from the Earth Heart Garden!), or you can choose to bring your own.
We're offering a wide range of ticket options because we want to meet as many different needs and schedules as possible; but we have to make sure we don't overbook in total, so we've given ourselves quite a mission on organising the tickets! If you'd like to join us but find we're sold out of the ticket option you want, please email us. As long as there are still spaces available, we can probably have a wiggle about and free up the tickets you want! Equally in the interests of inclusion, we've got limited spaces available for anyone who would be financially unable to access our tickets at the full price we're asking. Though we've done our best to make tickets affordable and believe they're really good value, we would genuinely like to hear from anyone who feels moved to come but just can't meet the cost. We understand. We want you to share in this. Let's talk. It's also such a joy to say that as we come to write this post, less than 24 hours after going live with tickets, we've already filled about a third of our spaces! We're looking forward to continuing that trend and sharing our mutual love of these ancient and profound practices with as many people as possible. Are you free on Saturday the 30th of May? Might you be one of them? We really hope to see you there!ICKET UPDATE! Wow! We've
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As we share this exciting update, it seems like forever since we posted the news that we’d had our planning application validated. Well, maybe not forever but six months back at the end of July. We knew we then had to wait until September at the earliest to hear if we would be granted permission to erect ‘a glamping yurt with decking for holiday use, bicycle store, bin store & WC/shower structures and all associated works’.
Thankfully, that eventually worked in our favour and following an assessment (and overdue emptying, whoops) of our domestic septic tank up at the cottage, we were able to replan the grey water drainage into our existing system. Yay. Of course these things delayed matters somewhat and the initial September deadline had already sailed past without so much as a nod by the time we finally submitted the additional ‘compost toilet management plan’ to Environmental Protection. We’ll spare you the details but suffice to say we hadn’t expected to calculate the average daily solid and liquid waste produced by our anticipated guests; four hundred grams and three litres in case you wondered! Then came the nervous waiting, anxious checking and fretful rechecking for further comments from different council departments. We were fearing the worst after so much effort and expense to respond to the various issues but finally, at the beginning of November we received the news we’d been hardly daring to hope for; our planning permission was approved! There followed at least 45 minutes of cautious jubilation until we read the small print, which was frankly boggling and demanded further information (and another chunky fee) for yet more approval under the worrying title of ‘discharge of conditions’.
Happily, in mid January the condition of our discharge (it didn’t say how many grams) also met with approval, and now we merely have the trifling task of making it happen. Thankfully we’ve got five years to recover before we get started. Not that we want to wait even half that long at all! So now what? There we were thinking the planning application process was complex and expensive enough, but now we’ve been through it and we’re in a position to turn diagrams into manifest reality, we know how woefully inadequate our original budgeting was. Maybe it’s kinder to say ‘wonderfully optimistic’ but ‘uneducated’ is more accurate. So what next? Where to start? Cue ‘visioning’. The first month of 2026 may already be behind us but last weekend we sat down at the Earth Heart Kitchen table (so oft the centre of operations!) and started thinking ahead to the rest of the year. The first question was how much we wanted 2026 to look like 2025, and how we would choose for it to be different. What do we want to cultivate and make more time for? What then, do we want to let go of, in order to make more time for it? We started by revisiting our central ethos, our values, passions and driving motivations.
This helped us sketch out a slight shift of perspective on which of these petals to give more or less attention. We know we want to nourish and cultivate the Holistic whilst pursuing a different emphasis on the Creative. To resource that, there will need to be a little less Kitchen, though we’ll still be excited to cultivate as much Garden as the Welsh valley will accommodate! (It appears to be the wettest February on record so that might be a bit beyond our control.) Sounds all very theoretical doesn’t it? What’s it actually going to look like? Well, it’s back to those petals and here are some things to expect from Earth Heart as 2026 gets underway: Earth Heart Kitchen 2026:We’re hoping the Lake Vyrnwy Farmer’s markets will continue from April and we plan to keep attending the Welshpool Car Boot Sales.
To keep moving ever more in line with our central values, we’ll be looking to source more organic ingredients, even if we can’t always source completely organic ingredients. This means prices might fluctuate a bit more but we’ll always try and keep healthy, compassionate and sustainable choices as affordable as possible. If we wouldn’t pay it, we won’t charge it! earth Heart Garden 2026:
Earth Heart Creative 2026:
Earth Heart Holistic 2026:
Earth Heart Yurt:
We were delighted to return to Forever Cacao Club last week, on a particularly special evening as part of the Reset and Restore weekend of wellness in collaboration with Aventurine Wellbeing. It was a real honour to be at the close of the Saturday night cacao dance and offer a journey of sound woven with Nat Bhairav on sitar by Nik and Maitreya's mantra by Annabeth. Maitreya is the Buddha of the future, the enlightening of consciousness that will arise again when our current world system has fallen away into darkness. This piece is therefore a love song to our individual and collective potential, a yearning for the evolution of consciousness itself. We hope you enjoy it! The Earth Heart Kitchen has been pretty productive over the spring into summer months but it’s been lovely to slow down a little at the arrival of autumn and have an opportunity for a bit more rest before the next busy season at the end of the year. It’s true, I have already made a batch of mincemeat but I’m very much enjoying the gentle shift of the season as we approach Samhain and the darker months. It’s a real season of reward; so much work has been done, so much energy spent in generating outcomes, yet here we arrive at a time of stillness whilst still benefitting from the abundant fruits of those efforts. We posted about Apple Day back in August (it came really early this year!) and I still had homemade apple spread on my toast this morning. As I write, Nik is preparing the spare demijohn for the job of racking off the cider and on this rather soft and gentle drizzly day, we’ll be enjoying my latest seasonal creation for a teatime treat; Pumpkin Spice Flapjacks! This time last year, I made mini ‘pumpkin’ pies with our homegrown squash. They were really tasty and we enjoyed them very much… but they were quite a lot of work (filling all the mini pie cases carefully with pastry, blind baking, making the filling, pressing out all the little lids) and actually they weren’t great sellers. Maybe pumpkin pie is just a little too exotic for a Welsh valley?!
Pumpkin Spice FLapjacksIngredients:
Method:
Next time I make this, I’ll be sure to have some pumpkin seeds in stock as I think they’d make a lovely topping, scattered onto the surface before baking, possibly even with a maple syrup glaze. I didn’t have any this time though and so I’d say that’s an entirely optional extra! However you make it, we hope you enjoy this little autumnal treat as much as we did!
Incidentally, the last recipe I posted back in February, Squash and Celeriac Soup, also used our homegrown squash, the fabulous Uchiki Kuri. If you fancy something a little more savoury, check it out! Xx
With many thanks to Pete of local Art Blanc Combo fame for organising the afternoon, to The Cross Keys for hosting and to all the audience members for joining us! Watch this space for more performances soon!
Here we are again, back at the time of year where the natural world begins to invite us to slow down, take stock, rest and refresh. The autumn equinox is one of two astronomical points in the year when we find our days have equal hours of daylight and darkness, the other being at springtime. At Earth Heart, we like to see the autumn equinox as an opportunity for a moment of stillness and reflection, a time to realign and find a similar balance in ourselves before stepping into all the winter season might bring. This is a new 30 minute meditative practice, which we hope you will be able to find time to enjoy in your own way. The video is fully guided but your meditative experience will always be personal and unique! If you find the practice supportive or beneficial, please consider supporting Earth Heart Holistic by making a donation at Buy me a Coffee. Thank you! Xx
Back on the 22nd of March we posted a little update from the garden on our Instagram site to share that the most exciting thing going on in the green house at that time was... Chickpeas! Not a native crop, and not one you'd necessarily expect to flourish half way up the side of a Welsh valley but we like to apply creativity and curiosity to all our ventures so Nik thought it was worth a shot... Here's a little update to fill you in on how it went!
Now, that’s not to say we’ve got planning permission, just that Powys County Council have acknowledged submission of a valid application along with all the necessary diagrams, documents, surveys and figures. That might not sound like much to celebrate, since we’ve still got at least eight weeks to wait for a decision, but it’s been a long time and a lot of paperwork to get even this far. We submitted our pre-planning application two weeks after launching the Earth Heart Kitchen and received feedback from the council a month later. It was after ruminating the contents of that for a good few months that we decided to bite the proverbial bullet and enlist help from people who could calculate turning circles, produce scale drawings and commission ecological surveys. We started working with Glampitect in March of this year and it’s still taken us more than four months to submit! It’s also cost us something in the region of three thousand five hundred and seventy packs of peanut butter cookies, so you’ll understand that it’s something we feel rather excited about! (And no, we’ve not sold, nor even made, three thousand five hundred and seventy packs of peanut butter cookies.)
Of course, the project will be relying on local tourism for a majority of its financial viability but we do want it to be a space for the local community too and when we don’t have glampers (we’ll have a wood burner for cosy off-season use), we’d like to make the yurt and its facilities available for day hire by donation. We envisage it as an ideal space for use by healers, for acoustic rehearsals, small workshops and intimate gatherings. You might even have an idea we’ve not yet thought of!
So this post is a bit of a ‘watch this space’ teaser, but we’re quietly confident and we’re certainly creeping ever closer to realising the next stage of our mission, whilst continuing to let the multifaceted entity that is Earth Heart gather pace and grow itself organically from the roots up. Ultimately, Earth Heart is a place making project; we want to craft a space where people can connect more deeply with the world, to experience healthfulness and beauty in a place that feels safe, loved and cared for. Going forward, there will be all sorts of opportunities to get involved and be part of that vision, we’d love for you to join us on this exciting journey! Maybe, just maybe, our next update will be more exciting still. The notional deadline for a decision is the 8th of September. With crossed fingers, take care until then!
So you may by now have guessed, I romped through April, skipped through the first week of May 'just a little tired round the edges', staggered over the finishing line that was a (surprisingly successful) Welshpool car boot sale and patted myself on the back for remembering to take a single rest day on the May bank hol. I then managed half a day of attempted normality before the extent of my exhaustion became increasingly unavoidable and I ended up practically bed bound for the rest of the week.
Well, that's a bit of a work in progress... But happily he also counsels that 'since you cannot become a Buddha merely by understanding Dharma' you should 'practice earnestly'. And I'm certainly getting plenty of practice, even realising that understanding is a bit slow in the development some times!
I shall be attempting a somewhat more measured May (although we're already half way through!) and June, enjoying the next dates in the season for many of the events we attended in recent weeks. At the top of this page you can find the locations of our upcoming stalls and dates when the honesty box will be open. Do check those before making a special trip, sometimes we have to make changes... To avoid double booking and exhaustion! Thanks for reading... Until next time! Xx |









