Are you someone who longs to connect deeply with nature and learn real skills of resilience and belonging to place?
Do you want to understand more about your unique gifts and how you can be of service to others and the world at this time of great change?
This immersive, nature-based leadership program is the first of its kind in Australia. Building from many years’ experience delivering community learning that is grounded in the natural world, CERES and Nature’s Apprentice are coming together to offer a 10-month program that will create the kind of earth-based leadership and resilience we and our communities will need in the coming decades.
If you’ve felt called to connect more deeply with your passions, to nature, and be supported by a like-minded community then this course is for you. It offers transformational learning through engaging the whole person: the head, the heart and the hands.
Overview
This course recognises and builds on contributions from ecology, indigenous wisdom, environmental studies, eco-psychology, spiritual traditions, and place-based education, synthesizing and applying them to our local context.
Nature-based leadership draws on these and other disciplines to nurture leadership in all aspects of society, with the aim that people in all relationships—with themselves, others and the Earth itself—contribute to a healthy, peaceful and regenerative present and future.
The course is suited to those new to these fields (entry level welcome!), as well as those wanting to deepen their experience, knowledge and applicability of these areas in the world.
Program Design
The course takes a hybrid approach to curriculum, including nature-based experiential activities in the outdoors, classroom discussions, online readings and commentary, and personalised projects.
Beginning and ending with nature immersion retreats outside Melbourne, as well as a mid-way winter residential, the program will cover six core modules that seek to explore both the philosophy and practice of nature-based leadership.
While each module will turn our lens to a different facet of Nature Based Leadership, our experiential face-to-face time will have a consistent thread of core routines of nature connection and earth skills throughout the year.
Tending the Wild
Deep Nature Connection
Village Building
The Wider Story
Leadership, Authenticity and Purpose
Spirituality & Sacred Activism
Each module will involve a set of recommended texts and readings, experiential processes and exploration of a broader context that embeds it into work for the world. The modules will be woven together into the retreats, and studied in more detail during the twice monthly workshops and webinars.
Participants will be invited to reflect on their learnings in each module through an online platform, and during the peer-led sessions in the middle of the year.
In the second half of the program, participants are invited to model and integrate the skills of nature-based leadership through creating a small project within their community.
As part of the final retreat, participants will have the opportunity to enact a 24-hour Vision Fast to deepen and clarify their gifts and purpose going forth.
Time commitment & Schedule
This is a 10-month program starting February 2024.
The program is centred around 2 nature-immersion retreats. These immersions are supported by 14 in person day gatherings, 6 online evening webinars, 4 peer-to-peer curriculum review online sessions, 2 personal mentoring sessions, and peer-to-peer support for personal project design and implementation which will be celebrated by a storytelling/presentation fire for friends and family the end of the program
Reading and resources for each module will be provided through an interactive online learning platform. You will also have the opportunity to design and deliver a community project or activity of your choice, to integrate your learnings.
Trimester 1 (Feb-Jun)
Exploration of the first three modules: Tending the Wild, Deep Nature Connection and Village Building.
Trimester 2 (Jul-Aug):
Integration, reflection and the development of personal projects. Time to reflect on some of the curriculum reading material, and to develop and enlist feedback on the personal projects that will be carried out in the second half of the year. Supported by 4 peer facilitated online forums.
Trimester 3 (Sep-Dec):
Exploration of the final three modules - Leadership, Authenticity and Purpose, Wider Stories, and Spirituality and Sacred Activism. The final retreat will span a week long residential including the enactment of a 24 hour Vision Fast.
Outcomes
This course will take participants on a journey towards a more resilient and interconnected sense of self – rooted in the ecological, biological, sensory, emotional and rational dimensions. We call this learning through the ‘head, heart and hands.’
For the head:
Understanding new possibilities for systems change on the personal, social and planetary levels
Knowledge of contemporary eco-psychology philosophy and practice
Understanding of the stories and narratives of our times
For the heart:
A greater sense of place and belonging
Greater clarity of personal gifts and purpose
A greater depth of spiritual practice
For the hands:
Practical skills of wildcrafting and rewilding
Skills in community-building technologies, including the completion of a community project of your choice
Facilitation, mentoring and leadership skills
The Six Modules
Tending the Wild
What does “wildness” mean as an inner and outer experience? Why is it important and how do we access it when living in urban or suburban areas? The wilds of both our inner and outer landscapes have been paved over and domesticated by western culture. Our relationship with the wild is a source of aliveness, vitality and inspiration. In this component we will learn earth-skills and practices to court and cultivate the wild back into ourselves and our lives including:
Earth-living skills and wildcrafting: shelter, water, fire, fibre, basketry
Edible and medicinal food plants
Indigenous perspectives and earth intimacy
Rewilding philosophy and practice
Caretaker and stewardship
Cultivating a ‘wild mind’
Deep Nature Connection
How do we cultivate a deeper sense of belonging, right where we are? How do we start to develop an ecological literacy of place? Our natural inheritance is to feel a deep sense of belonging. Learning and applying the core routines of deep nature connection will build strong ropes of connection between us and the places where we live. By connecting deeply to nature around us, we also start to awaken our ‘naturalness’ – our unique genius.
The purpose of this module is to explore how nature-based practice can be a support for embodying our belonging as members of the wider Earth community:
Learn and practice the core routines of intimacy with the natural world
Expand sensory awareness
Reading the landscape: holistic tracking, pattern recognition and nature observation
Nature journaling and cultivating ecological literacy of place
Exploring bird language
Develop daily sit spot practices
The Art of Wandering
The Wider Story: Old Stories and New
How does telling stories change anything? How do stories shape our lives, and what do the great myths have to say about the times we find ourselves in? The old story of separation is fast being replaced by a new story of connection and interrelationship. Pioneering thinkers and conceptual pathways offer a different way of locating ourselves and our work in the world: a shift from ego-centric to ecocentric:
Narratives to re-imagine the world such as eco-psychology, deep ecology, sacred economics, ecological identity, systems theory, complexity theory and spiritual ecology.
Embed yourself in the new story of interrelationship.
Explore ancient myths for modern times
Learn ecocentric approaches to human development and identity.
Gain an understanding into the philosophical and historical underpinnings of disconnection and separation from nature.
Village Building
How do we cultivate community resilience for the changes ahead? How do we form strong anchoring relationships that create a foundation of connections for our lives? One of the main roles of culture is to connect, yet the dominant culture is one of disconnection. A village-builder learns to see and support the big picture of what’s happening in their community. They can recognise needs, gifts, strengths and possibilities for greater peace, responsibility and connection in their people.
Immerse in an empowering regenerative culture
Learn the technologies of village building and how to embed them into your region, project or organisation.
Explore song, storytelling, earth-art and creative expression
Experience and understand the role of grief in community connection
Explore the role of ceremony in community and ecological cohesion
Learn peacemaking practices
Learn cultural mentoring models for developing nature-connected communities
Explore community resilience in the context of deep adaptation such as neo-peasantry and community sufficiency
Grow capacity to give and receive feedback
Leadership, Authenticity and Purpose
What are the qualities of a leader and what does nature tell us about the kind of leadership the world needs at this time? How do we become the leadership that is required? Leadership, in essence, can be seen as the courage and humility to follow our deepest authenticity. This module explores how to “be the change we want to see in the world” and move forward with our visions:
Develop mentoring and group facilitation skills and experience
Learn about patterns of power, privilege and oppression
Systems thinking: from separation to interrelationship
Explore your ‘ecological niche’: your unique purpose and appropriate delivery systems
‘Inner Tracking’ of personal obstacles and opportunities
Embedding our work in the context of the Anthropocene
Initiation and Rites-of-Passage as cultural tools
Spirituality & Sacred Activism
What’s the relationship between our spiritual practices and our world work? How do weave back together the threads of ecology, culture and spirituality? For much of our story as a people, the wider sensuous world was seen as an opening to something larger than ourselves. In this module, we will learn about different spiritual traditions and how they intersect with nature-based practices, and explore how to reconnect the spiritual with the material in our lives and work.
This module is suitable for all belief systems. It will include the opportunity for a 24-hour solo ‘Vision Quest’ on the land.
Explore sacred activism, spiritual ecology and compassionate action
Deepen your own personal spiritual practice
Expand ecological consciousness
Deepen a practice of earth-based spirituality
Expand the possibilities for authentic action in the word
Explore the different spheres of activism
Learn how to develop work that is ecological and relational
Teachers and Facilitators
This program is designed and facilitated by Claire Dunn and Sieta Beckwith and this year will be joined by Daniel Amrein in the facilitation team, with support from guest presenters and mentors.
Claire Dunn
Claire Dunn is a writer, speaker, barefoot explorer, rewilding facilitator and founder of Nature’s Apprentice. Claire is passionate about human rewilding and believes that a reclaiming of our ecological selves and belonging is key to regenerating wildness on the planet. For the last 15 years, Claire has been facilitating individuals to dive deeply into the mysteries of nature and psyche through the pathways of deep nature connection, ancestral earth skills, deep ecology, ecopsychology, soulcentric nature-based practice, village building, dance, ceremony and contemporary wilderness rites-of-passage. Claire is the author of memoir My Year Without Matches, which tells the story of her year living wild. Her recently released memoir Rewilding the Urban Soul explores how we might embody wild consciousness within a modern city context. Claire lives in Melbourne where she lovingly tends her garden, community and her own wild heart. www.naturesapprentice.com.au
Sieta Beckwith
Over the past 15 years, Sieta has worked in strategic communications roles in social enterprise, for-profit and non-profit organisations, assisting to discover, share and live the deeper mission and vision of the places she works. Through her work as Narrative Director at CERES, Sieta is using stories centred on universal human values, to articulate the potential power of bringing people together across divides to take action for the Earth. Inspired by the work of Emergence Magazine (US), since 2014 Sieta has been actively engaged in the emerging Spiritual Ecology movement, which seeks to explore what is the role of spirituality in social, economic, political and ecological change. She has found joy in bringing together small groups of humans from all ages and backgrounds to explore heart-centred practice, and learning to live from a place of love and compassion for all beings. Sieta also loves supporting millennials to creatively explore new ways of thinking and being together, in a time of significant challenge. Sieta was born on Noongar country but has made her home on Wurundjeri land, and loves to rockclimb, dance, weave baskets and have conversations with trees.
Daniel Amrein
Daniel (Dan) Amrein is a carpenter and father of three living in the village of Warburton in the Yarra Valley. Dan’s introduction to earth based ceremony was at age 16, and since then ceremony, sweat lodge and Vision Quest has been a powerfully consistent thread and guiding principle in his life, both as participant and more recently as a trained Vision Quest guide. Since a kid Dan has had a deep love and curiosity for the wild world. Conversations with the wild other are part of his everyday vernacular, and tracking a way of life. Dan is currently apprenticing to the arts of storytelling, song, deep authentic relating, wandering, and the mythic in wild landscapes. You will often find him tending his garden, catching stories from friends, baking bread, running the trails of his mountain home, and spending sweet time with his children, and partner Claire.
Guest Speakers and Facilitators
Dr Maya Ward
Maya is passionate about deepening the connections between body, ecology and culture through writing, dancing and tending the earth. Her PhD explored shamanistic and somatic metaphysics, and she runs workshops on the role of embodiment in facilitating ecological and spiritual connection. She has worked as an urban designer, outdoor theatre director and permaculture teacher where she focussed on developing intimacy between the human body and the places we dwell by creating humane and intimate environments. Her memoir The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage detailed her walk from the sea to the source of the Yarra following the length of an ancient Wurundjeri Songline. She lives in the mountain village of Warburton, Australia, where she co-creates pilgrimage-based ritual, runs contact improvisation dance classes, and grows food and replants forest with her home community. Informed by the philosophies of deep ecology and indigenous knowledge systems she dances with trees, exploring the embodiment of the vegetal realm.
Visit Maya’s website mayaward.com.au
Dr Beth Emily Hill
Beth studies and writes about the relationship between humans and the more-than-human-world, questioning the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Her research is concerned with the cultural and psychological dimensions of climate change: beyond adaptation and mitigation, in the possibility for transformation that climate change represents. Beth also designs and facilitates workshops for those coming to terms with the complex alchemy of hope and despair in these times of climate crisis.
Artist as Family
We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody). We live in Daylesford, Australia in Djaara Mother Country on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University. We practice a unique form of performance art, comprising how we live, get our food and medicine, and move around; performing modes of life making we call permacultural neopeasantry.
We teach a unique skill set of radical homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and online through our various videos, talks and blog posts.
We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, goatherders, gardeners and video makers who also make music, but mostly we’re a family who belong to a bloody great community and a beautiful small patch of sacred forest, and therefore we’re much more than the sum of our parts.
Dr Yin Paradies
Dr. Yin Paradies is an Aboriginal-Asian-Anglo Australian of the Wakaya people from the Gulf of Carpentaria. He is Professor of Race Relations at Deakin University, where he conducts research on racism and anti-racism as well as teaching and researching Indigenous knowledges and decoloniality. Yin is a climate and ecological activist who is committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies. He seeks meaningful mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being and doing that are grounded in wisdom, humility, respect and generosity. He is a current Moora Moora resident, having moved to the mountain in 2020 to be in community, cultivate a closer connection to Country and engage in an ethos of down-shifted collective sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, frugality, direct democracy and radical localisation.
Taj Scicluna
Taj Scicluna (the Perma Pixie) is passionate and motivated to inspire and educate people to live more nourishing and regenerative lifestyles with a deep connection to nature. Using her skills of Permaculture and Herbalism, she reminds those wishing for a deeper sense of purpose that individual and collective action can generate change and reformat the current state of humanity. She intends to create a fusion of ancient wisdom with modern times, weaving the awareness of the past with the knowledge at present to form a synergy that will benefit future generations.
Josh McLean
Josh is a social workers and Bush Adventure Therapy Facilitator who also happens to be an expert in the ancient arts of hide tanning. Josh McLean learnt the skills of leather tanning in Lapland, Sweden, based on master tanner Lotta Rahme’s work. While travelling, Josh had the privilege of learning firsthand from Lotta at her tannery in Sigtuna, and is now operating his own small business here in Australia out of the Yarra Valley called The Bush Tannery. The knowledge of traditional tanning and leather-crafting has been handed down from various Indigenous groups across the planet with a strong common message and one that Josh fully embraces – craft beautiful textiles that celebrate life, not destroy it.
Core Curriculum
The curriculum is structured around six modules that will guide participants toward a deeper connection with self, community, and the natural world.
Each topic could be explored and studied deeply in its own right, and we will offer insights from some of the leading thinkers and pioneers in each area, grounded in our own experiences as facilitators. Participants may wish to further explore some areas after the program, and we expect each person will bring knowledge and experience to share of their own.
Who this program is for
People from all backgrounds and experiences who wish to live from their purpose, and be of service to their community and the Earth at this time of great change. Entry-level people are welcome.
Anyone who feels called to deepen their experience of connection and belonging to self, earth and community; who wants to enquire with a group of others into the largest questions of our times; who feels passionate about creative pathways of change and holds a desire to serve the world from a place that is empowered, ecocentric and community-oriented.
Fees
Tuition includes in-person workshops, online seminars, camping and catering on retreats, program supplies and mentoring.
Corporate rate / pay it forward
$9,950
Standard
$7,950
Student and unwaged
$6,950
A 10% deposit is required to secure your place. Payment plans are available on request. A limited number of partial scholarships are available (including for First Nations people).