recovering the
indigenous soul
returning to the
wisdom of the body
& the earth
Apprenticing Earth
We are living in an overly digitalised culture that fragments, distracts, and isolates us - rarely pausing to reckon with the real cost of all that is lost in endless performance, presentation, and self-curation. We are certainly a species navigating quite a bit of stress.
This is an invitation to come back into your body, to remember the living Earth and to reclaim what it means to be alive at this pivotal moment in human history. A living enquiry into how we might root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity and reverence.
My deep love is holding group space and tending community. I guide people toward what brings them alive - into connection with themselves, each other, and the more-than-human world.
This work is woven through dharma (truth), mythic journeys, the intelligence of the body and nature, creative practices and the living currents of the imaginal.
I’m Natasha Lythgoe
…and I believe the quality of our relatedness determines the shape of our lives, and the life of our planet.
Everything at The Art of Rewilding is experience-informed, values-led, and inspired-by-nature to help you connect with your innate wisdom and feel most alive to your life. For the benefit of all life.
The Art of Rewilding offers online and in-person programmes in the UK and Europe, including vision quests, rites of passage training, and immersive nature retreats, for those seeking deeper connection, clarity, and meaning. Rooted in earth-based wisdom and guided time in the wild, this work supports personal rewilding in a culture that has lost touch with too much.
Great Places to Start
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Elemental Soul
We will track three threads: nature-based ceremony, folk stories, and the felt sense of Gendlin’s somatic focusing.
By gently following their impulses we listen for what wants to be known and enter into a call-and -response with the living world and with the currents of the imaginal - how myth and dream shape the world.
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Body as Doorway
This course offers an opportunity to get acquainted with Gendlin’s Felt-Sensing Focusing method alongside learning simple and effective skills for embodiment.
Focusing is, by far, the best practice I’ve found for emotional regulation, finding flow in stuck places and connecting with a deep inspiration thread.
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Following the River Underground
This course offers creative ways to deepen Gene Gendlin’s Felt Sensing Focusing method through dream weaving betwixt inner and outer worlds -between the ways in which Focusing opens us to the currents of the imaginal, and the arts.
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Uncomfortable Conversations
Inspired by some Sharing Councils I co-led as part of my six month mentoring programme last year, these monthly drop-in sessions will offer support to stop self-censoring and to step into your authenticity. To respect and tolerate differnce, and to understand our common humanity.
Places to Go Deeper
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Conversations In The Forest with thresholds and mirrors
Three month Seasonal Journeys weaving three threads, starting with Autumn transitioning into Winter.
Drawing on my 25 years buddhist background and work as a vision quest guide, this three month experiential programme braids together the practices of:
Threshold Walks, The Mirror of Nature and The Art of Mirroring Stories
Sharing Councils
Gendlin’s Somatic practice of Focusing
This programme is a slow response to the fast pace our times; a living enquiry into how we might root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity and reverence.
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Murmurations Group Mentoring
A six month group mentoring programme in Deep Nature Connection: Ways to Apprentice Earth.
There is plenty of information available about the 'What to do' of nature-based practices, but very little on the vital 'How to' engage with them experientially—which is where, I believe, the true aliveness happens. This focus on the 'How to' is the core of the Murmurations Mentoring program.
This mentoring journey is about the individuals in the group and their specific unfolding journeys - it is personal and participatory by nature.
The programme focuses on the main elements used in contemporary wilderness rites of passage and vision quest leadership. Although the teachings are rooted in wilderness rites, each element can be adapted for a variety of settings and applications. In short, you don't need to be interested in solo quests to apply them.
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Retreats & Vision Quests
I take small groups and individuals on contemplative adventures and guided solo immersions in nature, with limited access to technology, lasting anywhere from one day to twelve days.
These take the form of Nature-based retreats, Buddhist retreats and Wilderness Vigils.
The Wilderness Vigils we offer are Vision Quests - 12 day facilitated processes at the core of which lies a 4-day solo fast. And Nature Vigils - 3 — 5 days at the core of which lies at 1 day solo fast.
* Please note quests are not a survival, bushcraft or hiking programme. And no prior experience of camping is necessary.
I also offer custom designed journeys | immersions for individuals and small groups in Europe & UK.
“ The medicine we need,
is in our wild,
both within us and around us.
Remembering Our Roots
Francis Weller’s article, The Movements That Made Us Human, speaks to his experience of learning to flintknap and how, In the process of learning this ancient skill, a body memory flickered into his awareness, “ We have been making this gesture, this exact movement of lifting stone above our heads and striking down on stone for over 1,000,000 years. This movement, along with others, such as making fire, cordage, tracking game, basket making, communal rituals, initiation and storytelling are what slowly gave shape to our psychic and communal lives. We have made these movements generation upon generation and now, in the barest wisp of a moment, we have stopped.”
What happens to our psyches, to our very beings, in the absence of these movements? What happens to our cultures in the absence of these sturdy and reliable rhythms?
Initiation is an ancient form of ceremony that has been practiced in traditional societies throughout time - bringing maturity and transformation into a new phase of life, or the deepening of an existing one.
Community is the beating heart of this work. Vision Quests (also known as Vision Fasts, Rites of Passage and Wilderness Vigils) are typically communal passage ways in which we are guided through active participation within the human ‘village’ and the more than human realm.
Vision Quests assist us in stepping into our ‘true shape’ and taking up our place within the collective.
Many traditional cultures guide these initiations in close relationship to the four directions medicine wheel. You may already be familiar with the Celtic wheel of the year interwoven with the solstices, equinoxes and seasonal fire festivals. The wheels I am most familiar with, based on natures cycles and our own natural cycles, map the Body in the south, Soul/Psyche in the west, Heart-Mind in the north and Mystery in the east.
These maps, deeply woven with land and cycles, are known as the Four Directions Medicine Wheel and the Nature Based Map of Psyche. Their teachings of nature within us, and around us, contain sacred paths and ceremonies which were once the life-blood of our ancestors and communities. Various forms of these ancient, circular, seasonal teachings have been used pan culturally by peoples to navigate what it means to be humans deeply connected to the wild.
Marking important life transitions, growing a person and connecting them with their innate wisdom, these rites of initiations are known as vision quests, rites of passage or wilderness vigils.
Ultimately they show us paths that enable healing, whole-ing and transformation - how to align with our true nature and embody the gifts we carry so that we can live as potent, healing influences in our communities. These teachings show us how to become mature humans and eventually elders for the health of the community in the largest sense of that word.
Blending ancient wisdom with contemporary knowledge for the benefit of all life.
Supporting you to connect with innate wisdom and awaken your true nature.
Whilst offering ways to ground it back home one step at a time.
Supporting individual and collective change.
The way I guide and mentor draws on my background in the Arts, Buddhism, Rites of Passage and Somatic practices. I design trainings and nature based immersions that lay the ground for students and participants to engage in conversations between land, body and soul.
I have a longing to reawaken the sense of Being-Indigenous to Earth for myself and others, and How to Grow Eldership (I know this is a niche word but it simply means how to grow wisdom, authenticity and maturity in people). I believe these are vitally important processes for actualising a future that is good for soul, soil and society.
A typical retreat will include spending time in nature sitting around fires, resting, swimming, dancing, singing, playing but also engaging with the deeper aspects of our lives through meditation, reflection, ritual, silence, shared meals, teachings and discussion.
To be authentic means to be true to oneself.
It is a very, very dangerous phenomenon, rare people can do that. But whenever people do it, they achieve such beauty, such grace, such contentment that you cannot imagine…
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Human Growth
There is only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want - David Whyte
There are particular points in your life when something needs to change and you have the feeling that you want to evolve into the next chapter. An identity shift, if you will. These shifts are as natural as life itself; whether from childhood to adulthood or youth to middle age we all know something of these passages. There are also more nuanced passages but no less important; times when it might seem like the hardest thing in the world is to be ourselves.
When we ask, Who am I? Really? Aside from what family and society and conventions tell me. And how do I get to that place of self knowledge and conviction where I are able to state without doubt, fear or anger, ‘This is who I am, this is what I stand for, this is how I intend to live my life’?
These are all death and rebirth moments within a life; when we die to what is no-longer so that we can open to what is new. Natures cycles of death and rebirth are inherent to all life, human and more-than-human. My passion is to share ways in which we can live in harmony with these cycles, to support folk in navigating and transitioning the different seasons of their lives.
Who do we walk this path for?
Ultimately these journeys invite us to embody the gifts we carry so that we can live as mature, powerful, healing influences in our communities. We do this not only for ourselves, but for our kin, human and more-than-human. These are our offerings for future generations.
I’m an experienced guide specialising in Rites of Passage | Vision Quests having trained in the States, Europe and the UK over the past decade. I bring and blend my twenty six years of experience in complimentary modalities which I believe are necessary to guiding this work in a way that is relevant to 2025. The about page lists my qualifications and modalities.
In addition to traditional ways of facilitating nature-based-rites of passage programmes I ensure all my programmes are trauma-aware, do not overly psychologise the process at the expense of experiences of self transcendence, and emphasise integration. The way I work with people emphasises embodied and experiential learning over cognition that operates solely from the neck up.
I offer online and in person programmes, nature based seminars and retreats, vision quests and 1-2-1 mentoring.
Guardian (2024) 10 of the Best Wellness Nature Retreats for 2024A little about me
An interesting idea that turns up in myths and stories is that the crises we experience, both individually and collectively, are not here to destroy us but rather to break the spell of the little self, and to break the spell of collective lives that are also imagined as small and not connected to the source and origins of life
That the crises that we experience individually or collectively are here to crack the shell and break us open to the inner eyes of the soul and to give us the opportunity to reconnect to the deeper self which knows why we are here and what our life purpose already is.
- M. Meade