LEARN THE SECRET: Alice shares the secrets of The in-nature Experience Circuit... in just 8 minutes! Stop letting the clock dictate your potential. Step into what is next.
Updated: Sep 20
To learn from Alice in-nature why the Experience Circuit can deliver on the web site promise:
Our Vow: following the experience circuit...
You will feel relaxed.
You will feel rested.
You will feel creative.
You will feel like you have just finished a good book,
or found a friend.
You will feel restored.
You will feel safe.
You will feel alive.
Alice shares the secrets of the in-nature Experience Circuit... in just 8 minutes! Stop letting the clock dictate your potential. Step into what is next.
Please come to the FREE on line summit, 16th October – click this link to register: https://unbound-u.com
11 speakers all friends after Mindvalley course – Speaking and Influencing 2025. Mindvalley shatters everything you think you know about online learning!
Our summit is called 'Unbound-U – courage to become what is next’.
11 friends need to share a story with you. Their personal stories prove that while your life may be firmly anchored in place, your future is completely unbound by time.
Click here to claim your registration link today
Alice’s Talk Title:
Shifting Beliefs: Ancient Rhythm, New Ground
Format: Insight Session
The Story: Unbinding Time. Let’s start with a story that is perfectly anchored in place... but completely unhinged in time.
Overview: What happens when we take stories out of digital screens and throw them back into the wild air? Long before culture was committed to print, human intelligence thrived on the shared presence of the spoken word. In this fast-paced, rhythmic talk, Alice Grieb-Young explores how unbinding literature from books and returning it to its evolutionary home — nature — can structurally rebalance the modern mind.
The Vision: You will discover how to build an alternative community value system on the land. Through the lens of an immersive woodland audio exhibition in the New Forest, you will see exactly how to intentionally slow down time, dissolve mental rumination, and open up a visitor’s psychological mindscape.
The Value: You will explore the profound neuroplastic intersection of tree-bathing and the oral tradition. By understanding how the raw human voice resonates with our evolutionary internal scaffolding, you will learn why full sensory immersion in nature is the ultimate catalyst for deep-limbic calm, physiological rebalancing, and enhanced longevity.
The Vow: You will leave understanding exactly why the story matters, why we must fiercely protect the time to truly listen, and how to practice a simple, zero-cost "three-second fade" to unlock absolute presence in your daily life. It is far easier than you think.
Vision – Value – Vow is a framework Alice learns from the speaking and presentation master, Mr Anthony Lee. Please rock-up to this free club (hello) and meet the gang. You will then, too, shout about Anthony Lee; Thursday 8pm GMT find at https://www.heroicvoice.com/gym
Heroic Voice is his framework and Presentation Gym is the weekly free speaking platform, you will, love it. UK 8-9pm. All abilities welcome – it’s okay to be messy – that is how we get to intuitive voice!
Back to the summit: In just 8-minutes Alice demonstrates how her talk, Shifting Beliefs – Ancient Rhythm, New Ground answers to Vision – Value – Vow. Enjoy!
Now we have got that all chatted through, please enjoy Alice’s talk here, slowly, in a lovely long explanation write-up of why the exhibition works, how it makes sense and what you can learn from this low impact art event.
Remember, the story title: Unbinding Time. Alice's talk is anchored in place but completely unhinged in time.
So, let’s lift the latch, unwind the spring, and talk about time.
The lifespan of Cleopatra sits closer in history to the invention of the iPhone than it does to the architectural building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Cleopatra (VII – the one with the lover and the asp) lived from 69 BC to 30 BC. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2580 BC to 2560 BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu. This specific chronology is what makes the math so mind-boggling. Think about this a bit further...
Giza to Cleopatra: The span is roughly 2,530 years, between the construction of the Great Pyramid and the end of Cleopatra's life.
Cleopatra to the iPhone: There is a span of only 2,037 years between Cleopatra's death (30 BC) and Steve Jobs launching the first iPhone (2007 AD).
Chronologically, Cleopatra is roughly 500 years closer to the smart-phone in your pocket than she was to the building of the very monuments that define the global image of Ancient Egypt.
Take a breath and picture that immense gulf of time.
Now, travel back even further — long before a single word of our history was ever committed to print, to the era of an homer.
When we hear that name - Homer - today, we think of a single, ancient textbook author. But long before text was scribed, "an homer" was a job title. It was the role of the travelling oral performer. Before history was filed away on pages, human culture, superstitions, traditions, and triumphs survived purely because the homer person retold them aloud. (The homer poem included long descriptions of how to sew, or plough crops, how to rig a boat, how to treat the dead, how to birth, how to honour the gods with sacrifice and sacrifice was a vast and complicated topic with extraordinarily exact stipulations and traditions to appease past ills, or secure abundance). Every single story type you can think of is hidden in the epic poems – tragedy – comedy – vengeance – conquest – romance – jealousy – fate – destiny – heroism - human struggle – betrayal, or, even the journey home!
A single performance by one of these orators could last as long as three entire days. The crowd didn't just sit and listen to facts; they engaged in a shared cultural intelligence. They surrendered their attention to a specific, hypnotic vocal rhythm—the dactylic hexameter.
And that rhythm created entirely contrasting brainwave states in the listener than the ones we are used to today.
The Clash: The Saxon Hammer vs. The Italian Wave
To understand how the homer person altered the minds of that ancient crowd, we have to look at how languages move.
Think of Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote in a rhythm we call iambic pentameter. It relies on a stress-accent system — loud syllables versus quiet syllables. It moves in strict two-syllable blocks: short-LONG, short-LONG.
da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.
to-BE or-NOT to-BE
This is what could be called The Saxon Hammer. It is the natural heartbeat rhythm of the English language. It is march-like, percussive, grounded, and Anglo-Saxon. It knocks directly on the door of the logical brain and keeps it awake, alert, and tracking.
Colloquially; the left brain, is the maths and science side. The right brain is the art and creative side...
And that ancient, unwritten oral tradition moved entirely differently than our language today. Long before it was ever frozen onto a page, this flowing ancestral speech rhythm was much like modern Italian.
The Geography of Sound: Why Prehistoric Chant Felt Like an "Italian Wave"
When talking about the ancient oral storytellers — the "homers" who carried our collective cultural memory through the wild air — I often use the term "The Italian Wave" to describe their performance rhythm.
But if we peel back the layers of history, a glaring geographical paradox emerges.
Italy hadn't been invented yet.
The ancestors of those ancient poets were not Italian, nor were they singing across the Mediterranean hills we know today. When we link this prehistoric oral rhythm to the Italian language, we are using it strictly as a sonic illustration — a modern echo of an ancient architecture.
So, how do we actually know that for tens of thousands of years, prehistoric humans chanted in this fluid, rolling rhythm long before the first pen ever touched parchment?
The answer lies in two incredible discoveries: one hidden deep inside our ancestral DNA, and the other trapped like a fossil inside the oldest texts we possess.
1. The Deep Linguistic Architecture (Proto-Indo-European Origins)
Long before languages fractured into English, Greek, Spanish, or Hindi, they shared a single prehistoric mother tongue known to scholars as Proto-Indo-European.
This ancestral language possessed a beautifully musical, quantitative framework. It didn’t care about hitting a syllable with a heavy, percussive punch the way modern English does (what we call a stress-accent system). Instead, it operated entirely on duration—the literal quantity of time a speaker held a vowel sound in the air.
A short syllable was one beat of breath; a long syllable was exactly two. When the very first prehistoric storytellers gathered communities around ancient fires, they weren’t shouting, or speaking in flat prose. Their native tongue naturally forced them to glide. They were structurally locked into a rolling, cascading cadence where vowels danced and open word-endings flowed effortlessly.
2. The Fossilised "Cheat Codes" (The Genius of Milman Parry)
For centuries, historians wondered how a single, illiterate travelling storyteller could possibly perform a narrative like, The Odyssey, or The Iliad — thousands of lines long — completely from memory, over three consecutive days.
In the 1930s, a visionary linguist named Milman Parry solved the mystery. He discovered that the written epics were packed with repetitive, seemingly simple building blocks: phrases like "wine-dark sea," "swift-footed Achilles," or "rosy-fingered dawn."
Parry proved these weren’t just colourful creative descriptions. They were metrical cheat codes.
Because these oral performers had to improvise, live, for hours on end, they relied on the strict, rhythmic momentum of the dactylic hexameter, DUM-da-da. When a performer reached a dramatic climax and needed a split second to remember the next major plot point, they didn't freeze, or stammer. Their mouths automatically dropped in a pre-memorised, beautifully rolling phonetic phrase that perfectly filled the musical time slot.
The rhythm wasn't invented by a writer sitting at a desk. The rhythm was the very scaffolding that allowed human memory to survive without paper. It existed in the wild air long before the pen ever did.
It was a pitch-accented, quantitative language.
This is the Italian Wave. It is a quantitative language. Now, that sounds mathematical, but in the ancient world, quantity didn't mean numbers on a spreadsheet — it meant the literal quantity of time given to a human breath. It didn't care about hitting a syllable harder; it cared about how long a beautiful vowel sound was held in the air. It cared about the musical rise and fall of the tone.
The "Italian Wave" to give it the linguistic name, the dactylic hexameter, is built on a mathematical ratio of time = one 2-beat syllable, followed by two 1-beat syllables: DUM-da-da.
It is quantified by duration.
We are measuring the physical volume of breath and time allocated to each sound. It used a three-syllables-at-a-time foot called a dactyl — one long syllable followed by two short ones.
DUM-da-da, DUM-da-da, DUM-da-da, DUM-da-da.
This is The Italian Wave. Think of how Italian words roll effortlessly off the tongue in elongated, fluid, multi-syllable waves where the endings dance and cascade: “Grazie mille” (DUM-da-da). “Benvenuti” (DUM-da-da). “Arrivederci” (DUM-da-da-da-da).
Because those vowels are purely phonetic and open, the language sings without the hard, consonant-heavy "stops" of English. When an homer person performed, it didn't sound like a spoken poem; it sounded like a cascading operatic chant, a rolling ocean wave that acted as an auditory sedative.
It bypassed the analytical mind entirely, lowering defensive barriers and triggering an explosion of childhood neuroplasticity.
The Forging of the Saxon Hammer: How English Traded the Melody for the Beat
If the ancient ancestral tongue was a fluid, rolling "Italian Wave," how did we end up speaking a language that sounds like a blacksmith striking an anvil? How did our words become so heavy, so consonants-heavy, and so utterly percussive?
To understand how the Saxon Hammer was forged, we have to look at a linguistic rebellion that happened thousands of years ago in the dense, misty forests of northern Europe.
The Great Germanic Breakaway
As the old Indo-European tribes migrated, a specific group split off and settled in what are now Germany, Scandinavia, and Denmark. These were the Proto-Germanic peoples — the direct linguistic ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons.
And they did something radical to human speech. They looked at the elegant, pitch-accented, musical system of their ancestors and completely smashed it.
Linguists call this shift The First Syllable Accent Rule, but rhetorically, it was the moment the hammer was cast. In the old musical timeline, a speaker could place the vocal emphasis anywhere in a word, letting the voice rise, fall, and dance across multiple syllables. The Germanic tribes changed the rules: they decided that the very first syllable of the root word would receive a massive, heavy vocal punch, no matter what.
Suddenly, language stopped glissando-ing. It started stamping.
Trading Vowels for Iron Consonants
This shift from a pitch/duration system to a heavy stress system had a violent domino effect on the physics of speech.
When you hit the front of a word with an intense vocal punch, the human mouth naturally expends all its breath and energy right at the beginning. As a result, the endings of the words get starved of air. Over centuries, the beautifully rolling vowels at the ends of words began to wither away, decay, and drop off entirely.
Think of how the Latin/Italian word (for horse) Caballus or Cavallo rolls through three distinct, open syllables. When the Germanic Anglo-Saxons took hold of their words, they compressed them down into tight, explosive, single-syllable blocks. Horse. House. Ground. Spade. Storm.
The language traded the long, operatic vowel waves for hard, abrupt consonant clusters—sounds that require you to physically block the airflow in your mouth with your tongue, teeth, and lips (st-, gr-, sp-, -rsh).
The Birth of the Stress-Timed Heartbeat
By the time the Anglo-Saxons crossed the North Sea and landed in Britain in the 5th century, the transformation was complete. They brought with them a stress-timed language.
In English, we do not give equal time to every syllable. Instead, we march from one heavy, stressed peak to the next, entirely compressing and blurring the "unstressed" syllables in between.
When William Shakespeare sat down centuries later to write his plays, he didn't invent the da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM of iambic pentameter out of thin air. He was simply channelling the natural, ancient heartbeat of the Saxon Hammer that was already hardcoded into the English vocabulary.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
It is march-like. It is percussive. It is grounded. It is a language built for a landscape of tracking, building, defending, and analysing. One might argue the cultural bedrock of inventors, mariners, engineers and entrepreneurs!
The New Forest woodland experiment exists because the human mind cannot constantly live in "building and defending" mode. We need a sanctuary where the hammer stops swinging.
Why This Contrast Matters for the Unbound-U Summit
In this blog — and on the summit stage on October 16th, 2026 — this historical context explains why the modern world is so exhausted.
We live our entire lives inside the operational frequency of the Saxon Hammer. Our digital screens, our heavy emails, our structured calendars, and our very language keep our logical, analytical minds constantly awake, alert, and defensive.
By understanding that the Saxon Hammer is just one way to use a human voice, we unlock the courage to unbind ourselves. We realize that by changing our environment — by stepping into the wild air of the New Forest — we can intentionally trigger a rhythmic retreat, step off the percussive treadmill of modern English and slide back into the deep, limbic healing of the ancient wave.
The Experiment: The 'In-Nature' Reality
But somewhere along the line, we bound the stories up. We put them into closed books, and then we put those books inside glowing digital screens. We traded three days of shared community presence for three seconds of a frantic online scroll. We starved our brains of that ancient, internal scaffolding.
This summer, my own sap was rising. I wanted to unbind the spoken word. I wanted to see what would happen if we took poetry out of the modern book and threw it back into its original home: the wild air.
Like a mad Victorian butterfly collector, I have tried to capture spoken poem s by attending live events and surreptitiously pouncing on and inviting darling poets to enter the exhibition. I found myself operating like an opportunistic, transcendental, incidental Victorian collector. At this point I wonder if the exhibition might be called serendipity.
At our farm in the New Forest, for Hampshire Open Studios, (the art studio open days celebration, now in its 26th year) my family and I created a temporary exhibition called 'haste ye back'. We cleared a rustic garage-barn, mowed paddock parking, set out benches and birthed the experiential trail through our paddocks and Radnor Firs.
We didn't use an app. We didn't use live drama students jumping out from behind bushes. We simply invited a curated mix of national and local poets to record their own poems, in their own authentic voice, using standard smartphone voice memos. We loaded those files onto local headsets, handed them to visitors, and invited them to go off-grid.
And the result was pure physiological and psychological magic.
When we step into a natural woodland canopy and hear a raw human voice speaking directly into your ears, the brain shifts. The combination of tree-bathing — which lowers cortisol and blood pressure — with the rhythmic, rolling cadence of the spoken voice triggers a profound deep-limbic mellowing.
Time slows down. Mindscape opens.
Suburbanites arrived at our paddock gate stressed, clutching their phones. They drank our foraged elderflower cordial, took a short transmission which is a bespoke visualization, breath work and mental de-cluttering to become beautifully self-absorbed, put on the headsets, and disappeared into the trees.
This transmission isn’t an afterthought. One of the invited poets is a renowned meditation and visualisation master with a core message and ethos that aligns with the message and ethos of the Experience Circuit. Olelo pa’a Ogawa creates the introduction transmission that is just for the Experience Circuit. Her poem is crafted just for this exhibition and is such a beautiful gift, Olelo was only too pleased to create a fabulous introduction for visitors to help them begin the letting go; visitors commented that they thought they recognised her face in the photo and loved her voice in meditation. We are so lucky to share Olelo’s gifts.
When visitors emerged up the track, at the other end of the trail, into our 0%-commission barn, they didn't talk about shopping. Visitor comments from event week include:
'Thank you for a magical slice of time.'
'Quite different from the usual 'open studios' event - well done.’ ‘Amazing Experience!'
'Space to unwind. I liked the poets talking, too'.
'Abundance is more than wealth!'
'Mindfulness at its best.’
‘The poems create stillness, thank you'.
The Takeaway Gift: Three-Second Fade
We changed their beliefs about what art can be.
We proved that in-nature is not just a geographical coordinate, or a What3Words location; it is the exact place where we finally remember who we are.
We don't need giant budgets to create community value.
We just need the intuition to share, the courage to step off-grid, and the willingness to truly listen to the stories that matter. We need to take time, AND we need to make time.
As you step of this blog today, I want to offer you a physical tool to help your own thoughts calm down, refresh, and rebalance.
It is your Three-Second Room Silence Ticket.
When my poets recorded their files, they left exactly three seconds of absolute, unedited silence at the very beginning and the very end of their tracks so I could smoothly fade the audio for the listeners.
My vow to you is that you can do this too. Before you open your next heavy email, before you start your next intense meeting, before you hit "record" on your daily stresses — take a three-second fade. Sit in your own room silence. Unbind yourself from the clock, look out at the trees, let your limbic system settle, and leave with your answer.
Thank you. I LOVE YOU.
Side A: The Entry Ticket (The Front)
IN-NATURE™
Hampshire Open Studios — Exhibit No. 7
ADMIT ONE: TO THE MOMENT
Close eyes – breathe in slowly – see tree in mind – breathe out – open eyes.
Exhibition Trail: ‘haste ye back’ Location: Windyeats Farm, The New Forest
“Come for the poetry, stay for the trees, leave with your answer.”
Use this QR code to connect with Olelo pa'a Ogawa: fabulous presteige authority - Olelo may be 7,000 miles away on a map, but her spirit, wisdom and love are right here... go on... find her web site (she is a top drawer chick!)
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