After 25 years into meditation, Qi Gong and Chinese Martial Arts, and also an extensive career in Performing Arts, Sebastian Morgan decides to embark on a life-long, life-changing journey to pursue a vision about a better world without frontiers, through a more connected humanity.
Having travelled the world for years, he has met with different people from around the planet who all have in common the same ideas and hopes regarding life. Even though their environment, families, names and dreams may not be the same, they all agree that getting to know who we really are and integrating the different aspects of ourselves will bring us to connect with something inside. Once we have achieved that, we will be ready to connect with everything outside.
Please surf this website with that in mind and wherever you are in your journey through life, connect with us in this part of our journey in ours.
Thank you,
The Rock Move Team
Watch a video of Sebastian Morgan describing how
The Rock Move started
A decade ago, Seb should have been flying in to JFK on the morning of 9/11, but circumstances had altered his schedule so he saw what happened on TV rather than live. Unlike most of us, Seb had seen these terrible scenes before. He had been having recurrent nightmares about planes flying into tower blocks while he was living in New York a couple of years before the events took place. On that September morning, he not only awoke to see his nightmare on TV, but also realized how close he had been to being there.
In 1999, while he was at Songwriting and Composition class in NYU, he composed The Walls of Love. This song came to him after his nightmares, but at the time he didn't think this would be so life-changing. Two years later, after the 9/11 incidents, this song gathered a whole new meaning, so he decides to produce a videoclip for it.
He starts getting together with a group of people to talk about the project. Amazing Artists, illustrators, designers and other interested friends and professionals who would sometimes even leave their families and weekends aside to get together and brainstorm about this new idea.
In the following weeks, as the storyboard was being done and the initial drawings were coming to life, Seb gets up one morning, overwhelmed by a vision he had experienced while awakening. He sees a wonderful and audacious idea to build a monumental space that symbolizes the union of humanity and when built, will make everybody experience a heightened sense of awareness through participation and also by just being there.
He calls the idea The Rock Move.
Weekend brainstorming sessions about the videoclip for the song are slowly pushed to one side to leave space for this huge and, what seem impossible at the time, new idea. Other people join in and they put together a description of how all this can be achieved. Seb starts telling people about it, but in a post 9/11 2001, people like the idea, but are not convinced it can be pulled off in a world which was going to war against terror. Furthermore, Seb was living in Argentina, where everybody seemed to be more concerned about the current situation of the country which had just gone into economic meltdown.
Seb comes from a culturally mixed background. He is son to a British father whose family served the British Armed Forces for various generations and an Argentine/Spanish mother of Inca lineage who is an Anthropologist. With these attributes, together with professional training in the performing arts in NYC and his talent as a singer/songwriter, Seb is an interesting individual who is at home in all environments. He is then offered a job as the conductor/narrator of a documentary about a Hungarian family during World War II, and what seems to just be a freelance performing part, turns out to be The Rock Move's first true break. The documentary is set to be filmed in Budapest and with his wages, Seb decides to go to London to see what people there think of his idea.
He is immediately approached by someone who sees great potential in the vision and takes him to meet the Oxford University community. He is very well received at the Saïd Business School in Oxford and offered great advice and possibilities. He is also invited to participate at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship where he learns about the entrepreneurial world and how to pursue altruistic visions in a new rising competitive environment.
Back in Argentina, and following great advice from people in the UK, Seb decides to register a foundation and make it stand behind the idea for credibility. After two years of waiting and having to cope with unbelievable loads of bureaucratic paperwork, The Union Foundation is born with some of the people still following Seb as part of the board of directors. The vision moves on and now even a local newspaper picks up the idea to write an article about it.
A website with the vision has been up almost since the beginning and people around the world love the idea on it, but they are the regular folk on the street, not the people who could ultimately lend a hand and make this happen. Years go by and Seb is still faced with closed doors and rejection from governments and corporations. He then realises he has been talking about integration but is not integrated himself. He had trained as a performer, but had stopped doing what he loved for this calling in life.
Seb then starts looking for a way to tell his idea from within a genre that he knows and creates SHiFT. SHiFT is a four piece indie/rock band that performs Seb's music to an 80 minute awareness movie on stage which also shows what The Rock Move is. Having founded the band, Seb puts on several concerts in and around Buenos Aires. These are a great success, with the people invading the backstage area to find Seb and hug him emotionally hit by what they have experienced. They say "we now know what you are trying to do...” and Seb realises that he has to become his own project and, only by walking his talk and integrating all the different parts that compose his self, will he succeed in his endeavour. He then starts designing a touring promotion tool as a stand-alone project and starts contacting people in Europe about it.
The Arc is born. (read more about The Arc)
At this point in his life, Seb receives a personal blow and is left without a home and everything he has. Instead of boxing the project to take care of himself, he decides to leave Argentina for Europe to gather support to further his vision. He meets with professionals from the UK, Switzerland and Germany who hear his ideas and want to collaborate.
While Seb and his new partners work towards crystallising The Arc, Seb starts filming his walk with his mobile phone as a way to rehearse for The Arc tour and begins to post these clips on his facebook profile and on YouTube. As soon as he starts doing this, something amazing happens. As with his SHiFT try-out in Argentina, people begin to watch his videos and he immediately gets a following. He continues to travel and visits India, where he becomes a yoga meditator and keeps filming his journey where he shares his findings and thoughts about life, humanity and the environment. Seb is a naturally reflective person who has practiced and taught Chinese Martial Arts and Meditation for most of his adult life. His relaxed manner and sense of humour capture the heart of those whose lives he touches.
At this point in his journey, Seb meets his partner Catherine, a British former City Trader turned yoga meditator-writer-poet, who has been on a similar quest for a similar amount of time for an almost identical purpose. Catherine, after a highly enlightening spiritual-awakening experience, has been pursuing the creation of an Energy Centre in some part of Europe with a silent meditation space that will aid people with their journey in. She has got as far as being accepted by the British Olympic Commission to build such a space within the Olympic Villa for the 2011 Olympics, but for some unknown reason, her idea is blocked before design begins. At this point is when she meets Seb and they decide to join forces and work together for a common goal. Catherine brings the energy centre/meditation space part to the The Rock Move.
Seb has now spent the last two and a half years in intense travel, understanding people, the environment and himself, and has posted almost 1000 videos of this on the Internet. With Catherine they have since created Blue Butterfly Events & Media, a production company which will soon go online and will be in charge of creating and producing awareness-raising events, and managing SHiFT as self-funding for The Arc which will be promoting The Rock Move project.
The first Blue Butterfly event will be at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London on October 1st, 2011. Working closely with the Be The Change conference organisers, Being The Change will be a full day of shared inspiring ideas and wisdom, connecting people who are interested in being a conscious part of the collective shift towards a more integrated and evolved society. Seb's band SHiFT will be performing live at the end of it, launching with this, the first stage of The Arc.