Touching the Earth Solstice 2025
19th-25rd June 2025
At the Beautiful Wangapeka Study and Retreat Centre
The most important thing for true societal change is that we have educational systems to help people ecologically awaken. When we have a large enough percentage everything will shift and we will start to embrace the world as all relatives.”
Bill Plotkin
Touching the Earth is a practice to awaken your deep ecological self. It is a creative approach to (re)-claim the birth rite of belonging to the living earth. This is not an intellectual study, these are powerful embodied practices and rituals inspired by Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, Tarchin Hearn and Jaimes work as wilderness rites of passage guide.
This 6 day retreat is a time for you to pause, breathe and listen deeply for the wisdom that lives in the depths of all being. The retreat brings together open floor movement inquires and nature based meditations. There will be times that nourish the heart of community, such as singing, conscious dance, circle sharing, poetry and myth. There will also be invitations and support to be alone and intimate with it all.
After 25 years contemplating and studying human growth and unfolding, we believe there is a need for a sane and truly functioning Self that can thrive in all the worlds. We speak of these world in three ways;
-
A self that is mature enough to taste and navigate the upper worlds of wonder, spirit and non dual experience.
-
A self that flourishes in the middle world of complex and potentially loving human and more than human relating.
-
The self that is able for the conversation with the underworld of mystery, intuition what many teachers call soul.
The retreat is offered and created to support humans on their path to discover (often through the wounding) their unique gift for the world. As G.Hopkins poetically alludes, to be that for which you came.
…Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
Except from As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Jaime will guide this retreat with the support of a team, yet to be confirmed.
The price includes a private room, a cook, all meals, all teaching resources. It does not include dana for the teacher.
Registrations can be made through this link or directly from the Wangapeka website.
Places are limited
Scholarships are available for young adults aged between 18-40 who are deeply motivated to be a part of the Great Turning.
Your Guides for the Retreat
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 a movement inspired by Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, Tarchin Hearn and many more.
Jaime is passionate to develop maps and inquiries that support the flowering of human creativity, wisdom and care for the generations of all life to come. He supports humans to awaken their ecological self, the innate sense of belonging to the natural world. Jaime has a Masters Degree in Education, he is a wild poet, a student of mythology and holds a mean blues guitar. He lives in the knowing of what it takes to live in a community aspiring to wake up. A friend to shadow, bruised and bumped with a heart still open. A recent new father and peaceful warrior to bring the right kind of trouble to a world waking up.
TheTeam
Jola is a life artist, a mover, a circus performer, acrobat, aerialist, dancer teacher, masseuse. Jola is a passionate barefoot walker, a tree lover, an optimist and a great believer in simplicity & all things to do with balance. A mother, a twin sister, a friend of all creatures & a lover of life. She is deeply passionate about creative expression through movement.
'Life is delicious.. you just have to add the right ingredients!' Good job she said that because Jola will be part of the cooking team for the retreat, a support person and be available for giving massages.
Margaret has felt drawn to eldering since reading Growing into Wisdom by Juliet Batten in her 40’s. Perhaps this early readiness to contemplate elderhood grew out of an equally early “soul initiation” when life was tipped upside-down in her later 20’s and early 30’s.
What ‘being elder’ means most of all to Margaret is a deep desire to share the wonder, challenge and lightness-of-being that arise from a life lived in connection with soul. Margaret has a long life enjoyment of nature, dance, of lying in rivers and seas, and of walking in wild places, she is reminded of, and grateful for, the good earth of which she is part, and which supports and sustains her aliveness. This aliveness makes all else possible as she chooses to offer her unique self to Life, encouraging others to do likewise.