FacultyMeet advaya’s teachers
Advaya’s global faculty blends science, practice, and story bringing localised, multidimensional wisdom to a shared learning space.
Ruby Reed
CEO @ Advaya
Ruby Reed is passionate about bringing people together in offline and online spaces that reframe how we see the world around us, and our role within it, so we recognise our ecological relationality, fall more in love with life, and actively participate in its ecological and spiritual regeneration. She is a community builder and a key figure in the UK alternative education space, where she takes an integrated and holistic approach with her work spanning a vast ecosystem and network from climate to psychedelics. Together with her sister Christabel Reed, Ruby has founded a number of organisations.
Ruby is the co-founder of transformative education and experience platform Advaya (founded 2015), as well as the co-founder and Director of Initiative Earth Charity and its Ecosystem Restoration and nature skills platform Earthed (founded 2023) and climate action campaign EcoResolution (2018-2022). She is a core team member of Medicine Festival since its inception in 2019, where she curates and hosts the talks stage and speakers across site and part of Be The Earth Foundation’s Flow Funding network. In 2018-2020 she led wellbeing across environmental action protests in the UK, setting up marquees and programmes in key sites across London as well as retreats for activists and changemakers.
Ruby has had the enormous privilege of learning directly from wisdom carriers, philosophers, indigenous leaders, academics, visionaries, economists and scientists from around the world. Her main interests are metaphysics and consciousness and how our relationship with these shapes our worldviews and cultures as a species. The idea of “transform your mind, transform your world” guides her work. She is passionate about the ocean and has been a yoga practitioner, diver and swimmer since childhood. Between 2014 and 2021 she taught yoga as a qualified yoga therapist, led nature-based retreats, and was also a competitive freediver. These days she simply enjoys swimming on the surface, which keeps her connected and happy.
Before starting her own projects, Ruby was an advisor, researcher and writer for leading art collectors in the UK and completed two Masters degrees in History of Art at Edinburgh University (ideal beauty and the body in the dawning of the enlightenment c.17th) and The Courtauld Institute (Latin American countercultures c.20th). She was set on academia and due to start a PhD at Oxford before having a change of heart and took a role in Private Sales at the auction house Christie’s in Private Sales (2012-2015).

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Foundation Course
Embark on a spiritual homecoming, reconnecting with your cultural roots, inner wisdom, and the deep sense of belonging to the earth and all beings.

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The Wild Feminine
Explore the Wild Feminine’s power and history, reclaiming balance beyond patriarchy through inspiring voices, healing, and gender liberation insights.

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Forest Guardians
Explore the sacred relationship between humans and forests, discovering the vital role of forest guardians in ecological stewardship and balance.

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Kinship: Being Together
Explore the vital role of community, fostering deep kinship and shared experiences that create a foundation for collective well-being and connection.

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The Digital Age
A global faculty of experts dive into the impact of the digital world on consciousness, society, and the future of humanity, questioning its role in shaping our collective future.

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The Rupert Sheldrake Course
Dive into Rupert Sheldrake’s groundbreaking insights into consciousness, science, and reality, challenging the nature of human and ecological interconnection.

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What Dionysus Can Teach Us about Liberation
The most intriguing deity and the role of ecstasy in his rituals.

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How Science Limits Our View of Consciousness
Exploring ideas beyond brain centered thinking with Rupert Sheldrake.

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Lessons on Liberation, from Water
Exploring water’s symbolism in myth, culture, and political thought.

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The Spirit of Water
A single water droplet holds thousands of memories.

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Secret history of the witches
Folk practices, historical biases and the persecution of wise women.

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Mystics’ call for Love and Non-Dualism
Christian mystics reclaim compassion and justice as core spiritual values.

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Dionysus: Echoes of an Ancient Future
Ahead of advaya's upcoming online course: Dionysus: Rave, Ritual and Revolution, we speak with curator and host Chiara Baldini all about Dionysus. In this webinar, we dove into the mythology, history and culture around Dionysus, one of the most intriguing deities of Western culture. The god of fertility, dance, vegetation, wild nature, ambiguity and egalitarianism sounds like the perfect match who will not disappoint us with the gifts of his mysteries. What role did ecstatic practices play in his rituals? Who were his followers and what were the reactions of the Greek and Roman authorities to their unruliness? What are the pre-patriarchal elements of these practices and what can we learn from them today?

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Rupert Sheldrake on Setting Science Free
The facts of science, scientific techniques and technologies are real enough. But, the philosophy of materialism that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith grounded in a 19th-century ideology. It is time to set science free. In this webinar, we dialogued with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on all things consciousness. Does it exist beyond the brain? Where did our ideas on consciousness originate from? How do we move beyond it?

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Imagining the future
A special event exploring Cultural Narratives & Imagination. Part of the advaya x Chelsea Green Publishing series: Food, Farming & Healing Our World.

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The new economy and systemic transformation
Part One of The Regenerative Activism Series: Deep Change Participants: Ann Pettifor (Green New Deal), Shaun Chamberlin (Fleming Policy Centre, Transition Network & Dark Optimisim), Fran Boait (Positive Money). Moderated by Ruby Reed (advaya & EcoResolution) Ann Pettifor, an architect of the Green New Deal says, "We can choose to survive. But in order to survive, everything must change. Everything". This is the scale of the challenge that new economic thinking and radical collective action needs to face. The structure of our economic system, driving both environmental destruction and social fragmentation, needs a radical overhaul. This panel brings together activists and thinkers who are facing the scale of that challenge. Each of them is developing inspiring approaches to systemic transformation, asking deep questions about the assumptions and beliefs that drive the system and the specific structural changes that are needed.

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Seeding liberation on the land
The first gathering in the online series Food, Farming and Healing Our World, a collaboration between advaya and Chelsea Green Publishing.