A three-month immersion into perception, agency, and the craft of thinking in motion
Season 2: Spring 2026 (March 1 – May 31)
A seasonal cycle shaped around your own life and work.
Your life is a brief flicker between two immense silences.
Between them shimmers the ceaseless movement of perception, change and possibility. To dwell here consciously is to inhabit a world that is alive, unfinished and responsive – where attention itself becomes an act of creation.
The Shimmer Method is an immersive, dialogical journey across disciplines – a practice in noticing, discerning and participating in the flux of life. It is a distillation of everything I have learned over two decades of work and coincides with me moving further south again after lengthy periods in the Highlands and Islands.
The Philosophical Ground
This work draws on pre-Socratic philosophy, existentialism, psychogeography and contemporary cutting-edge creative practice.
It begins with a simple understanding: Reality is not fixed.
The world is a flux, a stage, a game best understood not through rules, but through attention, movement and aesthetic perception.
Within that flux, your task is to discern, edit and participate.
A Practice in Perception and Action
The mentorship unfolds through unique personal dialogue, not lectures or coursework. It develops a way of seeing that is beneficial to your own work and circumstances. It is not a set of beliefs or doctrines.
There is nothing else quite like this. It is equally science and equally art. The work exists outside institutions and trends.
Themes explored include:
- Zooming: Expanding and contracting perspective and scale from the microscopic to the planetary.
- Essentialism: Engaging only where presence matters, letting the rest dissolve into silence.
- Drones: Patient observation, cultivating awareness of subtle shifts that usually go unnoticed.
- The Unlearning: Casting off inherited assumptions and fashionable ideas.
- Trance Awareness: Recognising that ordinary consciousness is already a trance. And then learning to reshape it.
- Reclaiming Language: Words like manipulation and discrimination regain their original meaning: the ability to shape and discern.
This is not therapy, coaching or spirituality – though it may intersect with any of them.
It is primarily a form of philosophical craftsmanship and guidance applicable to all aspects of life. Lived, improvised and applied to both real and theoretical circumstances. The mentorship is immersive, conversational and quietly transformative – built around the rhythms of your own days.
Format
- Duration: Three months of unfolding practice (a ‘season’)
- Dialogue: Continuous, direct conversation – text, voice or image – wherever perception calls
- Focus: Your projects (creative or otherwise), choices and perception of the world
- Cost: £600 per month (three months minimum)
- Cohort: Limited for the first season to three paid places
- Scholarship place: One extra space for someone without financial means
- Option to extend: Continue or evolve your work into the next season
Who It’s For
Writers, artists, thinkers, educators, entrepreneurs or anyone who senses that their way of seeing has become dulled or automated.
The Shimmer Method is for those who want to perceive with depth and rediscover creative autonomy. It is delivered remotely so is suitable for participants in all time zones and locations. Participants can be working on their creative projects full-time or on evenings and weekends alongside a day job.
Apply
This is an independent practice based on the findings of over two decades of specialist, unique work.
If you are keen to know more, write a short message describing your background and how you think The Shimmer Method can help. Genuine curiosity matters more than experience.
A maximum of four people (three paid, one free) will be invited to begin Season 1: Winter 2025/26.
Apply / Enquire via dan@gunung.org
ALSO AVAILABLE: Micro-Shimmer: 30 Minutes
Enter a private, focused encounter with the Shimmer Method. Bring one living question, one challenge that pulses in your creative field. Thirty minutes to notice, trace and explore it. Insight arrives where attention flows. £50, advance booking.
“It’s like having a philosopher in your pocket that you can bounce creative ideas off.”
Daniel Patrick Quinn
Composer, writer, researcher.
Co-founder, Gunung Bagging.
Former Artistic Director, One More Grain.
Lead author, The Relative Mountains of Earth.
Philosopher, lecturer, traveller, lifelong student of perception.