Nature Connection Intensive

Fianna’s new yearlong immersion offers a deep journey into relationship with land, self, and community. 

Over 9 months, a small cohort of participants will gather monthly in the Comox Valley, stepping into skills, ceremony, and reciprocity on the land. It will include an overnight, with a ritual solo to mark the completion of the year. 

The structure of the yearlong course will involve 7 one-day sessions, on Sundays between September and April, followed by a weekend overnight in May in which  you will be invited to participate in a ceremony to mark your year of deepening this relationship. 

In between each monthly session we will host an optional evening council online, as a space to share some of your process, and remain connected to the group container.

All sessions will take place in the Comox Valley, at a variety of locations of natural beauty and potency.

The overnight will take place at a rec site within 2-hours drive of the Comox Valley. No previous camping experience is necessary. We can share rides, gear, and all necessary skills for our weekend on the land.

This course guides participants into an intentional practice of cultivating deep relationship with the natural world. This offers a path by which to tend to a deep longing in our lives - to deeply know a place, and be known by it. To belong. 

We will be entering the magnificent and strange reality of the land - a reality where humans are not the central focus, but are one part of a much greater whole. 

*All sessions will be outdoors, of course ;-)

More about the course:

This program will unfold with the seasons, each session taking the group deeper into practices of “core routines” that support connection, and deepen a culture of place.

Our ancestral cultures, and many Indigenous cultures today, continue to value their own forms of these core routines we. They include gratitude, singing, games, storytelling, sharing councils, imagination, embodiment, questioning, tracking, mapping, crafting, training the awareness, and more. 

We will start by exploring our  animal senses, and a more embodied way of being, moving, and noticing, that brings us into deeper presence with what surrounds us in the natural world.

We will then cultivate modes of inquiry that guide us into deeper relationship, learning to follow our curiosity and our questions towards the greater intelligence that is the ecosystem. 

We will study crafts that feed a relationship with beauty, and a capacity to give, upholding ancient protocols of reciprocity with place. 

And we will come together in councils to share our experience of unfolding relationships with the wild others, and our belonging to the Earth. 

In addition to learning personal and collective routines for connection, you can expect to pick up some naturalist's knowledge of local ecology, and learn some skills with fire, knives, shelters and survival, animal hides, local plant medicines, foods, and fibres, bird language and track and sign. 

Soul and the Land

Our aim with this immersion is for you to learn how to learn from the land. How to be guided by the land, and how to grow with the land.  This calls on a commitment to personal inquiry, and can yield a process of profound growth and transformation. 

The natural world, as the one who shaped us, is also the one who reshapes us over and again throughout life, into the most seasoned version of ourselves. This has been called the soul’s journey: a flowering into the world of our unique gifts for this time and place. 

Our yearlong group container will also hold space for this possibility of deepening understanding of Self in relationship with the land.  Because when we "apprentice" in this way to the guidance of the nature,   our own nature can be revealed.

Settler-led Reconciliation

All of us descend from Indigenous ancestors who lived in deep attunement with the land, subject to its abundance, and its harshness, which yielded incredible collective and individual capacities. Today we live at a distance from that harshness, and perhaps from that sense of abundance too. All of our resources still come from the natural world, but we rarely acknowledge the magnitude of that gift, or the real ecological cost.

This most central relationship of our existence has become exploitative, confusing, overwhelming. But still, we can only turn to the land for what we need, and for a good way forward. 

In our amnesia, or perhaps our guilt, it’s easy to forget that we can turn to the land for our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual resources too. We can enter genuine apprenticeship, meaningful reciprocity, and deep connection, even union. 

As a settler-led organization Fianna wishes to support cultural inquiry into what it means to belong to a place that might not be our homeland. By apprenticing to the land, we open to the question of what the place might ask of us, with regards to its stories, its history, and our own.

We invite you to join us in this courageous inquiry, and radical commitment, to belong to a place with all its beauty and complexity, all its grief, and the responsibilities it asks of us. 

< BACK