Touching the Earth

June 16 - 22 Winter Solstice 2024 - Wangapeka, Aotearoa (NZ)

With Jaime Howell and Juliette McConachy

All the mytho-poets say the same thing —

We must leave the village, enter the forest and return with the gift

Touching the Earth is a guided journey into human wholeness inspired by the work of Bill Plotkin and Joanna Macy.

This is a nature-based retreat to support the journey of soul initiation, inspiration and encouragement to find the unique offering that is yours to make.

A retreat to find, feel and fuel our belonging, confidence, resilience and creativity through deep contact with the world and self as the Wild.

We will explore together through meditation, wilderness wandering, Open Floor movement inquiry, Terra Soma™ Yoga, guided nature reflections, a day of solo wilderness immersion, group singing, soul counsel and dreamwork.

We will aspire to bring together our bodies, hearts and minds with instincts for wisdom in service to The Great Turning.

Turning away from an Industrial Growth society, toward a life sustaining community of/with all beings.

  • The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe

    Joanna Macy

  • You hold within you — secreted for safekeeping in your heart — a great gift for this world... You might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don't really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service.

    Bill Plotkin

  • Pray with your body. Feel the tensing and relaxing of your muscles as prayer, the beating of your heart and the tides of your breathing as prayer... Pour the nectar of exquisite attention into whatever you are doing, moment by moment, so that that too becomes prayer. Prayer without ceasing. Life without ceasing.

    Tarchin Hearn

Meet the team

Jaime Howell


Jaime is a trained Wilderness Rites of Passage guide, Work That Reconnects facilitator and experienced teacher of Open Floor movement practice.

He is the founder of the Centre for the Great Turning, inspired by Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, Tarchin Hearn and many more. He is a humble apprentice to living in wholeness.

Jaime brings together the awakening arts of meditation, movement, song, mythopoetry, sweat lodge and vision quest.

These powerful initiations can help humans remember their innate sense of belonging to the natural world.

Jaime has a Masters in Education, he is a talented blues guitarist with a passion for singing and songwriting about the path of Soul Initiation in service to the Great Turning.

Juliette McConachy


Juliette is an apprentice to wildness at the meeting point of Tantra, Deep ecology and Somatic psychology.

Juliette is a Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator with a focus on ‘inter-being’ / Remembering the body home into relation with all beings. Widening the felt sense experience of personal health to acknowledge, include and contribute to our social and ecological experience of inter-connection, belonging and response-ability.

Juliette is the founder and director of Awakening Arts

For more about Juliette click here

Wangapeka

 

Hours
Monday–Friday
10am–6pm

Phone
(555) 555-555

… If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver’s hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
everyday, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver’s hands.

— David Whyte, excerpt ‘Faces at Braga’

Booking links coming soon