Offerings
Our inner work requires a strong commitment to deep self-reflection.
Coaching is a co-created partnership most valuable when the client is willing to take responsibility for their own growth and development. We offer coaching for individuals, couples and larger teams or groups. Coaching offers opportunities for clarifying values and visions, discovering strengths, identifying blind spots that inhibit growth, and living a purposeful life. Making a commitment to responsibility in relationship means valuing other as highly as self. This often leads to a coaching focus on heightening self-awareness and how others are impacted by our behaviors and responses. This attention to interpersonal skills has profound implications for both personal and professional development.
Very much like coaching, mentoring has a strong element of learning. Something unique about mentoring is that the mentor is learning too, very committed to a deep self-reflective process to support the relationship. There often is a theme, a focus, something specific the client wants to learn about, that the mentor offers.
We offer mentoring related to ecopsychological ways of being. These practices heal and strengthen the separation between humans and nature which research now confirms is the source for personal, community, cultural and planetary stresses, conflicts and destruction. For those who believe that learning and healing happens most profoundly in partnership with the natural world, we guide people in activating the senses, deepening their relationship to the environment, all in service of finding heartful connections, fulfillment and meeting their soul’s purpose.
We are social beings and learning in a group offers the ideal conditions for significant positive change and growth. Our workshop themes emphasize personal development in the larger context of nature offering individual and community skills and practices. We emphasize an experiential approach, and also offer materials to address a range of learning styles.
Our approach and orientation is strongly influenced by somatics and gestalt practice and theory. These bodies of knowledge suggest that to be whole, we must be present in our bodies and senses, in the here and now, for relationships, learning, and community to flourish. This happens most naturally with nature as partner, but requires skills and time to reverse the negative cultural influences that separate mind, body and spirit from each other.
Some topic examples related to ecological themes are:
- Developing an Ecological Identity
- Ecopsychology Practices
- Environmental Grief Work
- The Way of Council
- Skills Of Perceptual Attention
We also offer workshops to educate about gestalt and somatic practices, how to cultivate equanimity for activists, and for environmentalists suffering from compassion fatigue.
Upcoming Workshops
The natural world offers a supportive, challenging and sacred container for learning about self and other. We humans have become separated from the ancient rhythms of life. Our modern world offers many wonders, though it is too easy to make choices that do not contribute to a healthy planet. Our physical and mental health depends upon a healthy ecosystem.
Making nature integral in our daily activities can heal the separation. Nature is a container for more than recreation, solace and relaxation. We can partner with nature for problem solving, insights for relationship challenges, and much more. To communicate and reconnect with nature, we call forth our interdependence.
Wilderness Walks and Retreats
In many indigenous cultures of the world, growth and healing occurred with intentional time in nature. A day-long walkabout or a wilderness walk, also known a medicine walk in some cultures, often revealed an insight or solution to a problem, or imparted deep soul wisdom to the walker. A facilitated walk in nature allows you to activate your senses, shift consciousness and open to revelations. We guide short walks, or deeper immersions with a half-day or day-long. We can either accompany you, or hold space for your return, witness and reflect back to you the journey and its discoveries for even deeper awarenesses.
Ceremonies and Rites of Initiation
Ceremonies, whether self-designed or co-created and guided, offer time for expressing gratitude, connecting with ancestors or spirit guides, dialoguing with the divine and so much more. Ceremonies are opportunities to make the ordinary special, and can sacralize elements of our lives that are difficult and mundane.
Rites of initiation or rites of passage mark and honor a transition in our lives. Our lives are constantly changing, and with every transition there is something new to be with and simultaneously a loss of some kind. To move through life acknowledging the major and minor changes strengthen us, deepens our relationships with self and others, offers us time to express gratitude, set intentions, and clarify visions. While our personal cultural or spiritual traditions offer times to formally celebrate or grieve, there are many other opportunities perhaps less profound that resonate with our soul yearnings.
Ceremonies and rites of initiation or passage can be self-generated, co-created, witnessed, or guided. They can be a stand-alone event or part of a wilderness walk or retreat.