Awaken Your Indigenous Heart & Mind
Are you looking to grow your connection to the natural world and a heart led nature-based culture?
Our vision is a world where everyone belongs to a heart-led culture, rooted in place, committed to building peace and caring for all of life as kindred beings.
We offer powerful spaces of this visionary regenerative culture, designed to support people to return home to nature, to remember and deepen their gifts, and to be catalysts for cultural repair and healing in their communities.
‘This course has turned a flickering candle into a roaring fire‘ – Sally Ann
HearthBeat
Our community of practice, in service to creating a culture of kinship
HearthBeat is a rhythmical community of practice, where we pulse in and out of community calls, and practice bringing the cultural theme we are exploring through personalized commitments we bring forward in our own lives. Read more
Ecological Homecoming
Deepen and expand your sense of wonder, curiosity, and belonging.
Ecological Homecoming is an introduction to the core nature connection practices that create the deep rootedness from which regenerative culture emerges. Read More.
‘The whole course was filled with wonder, appreciation and gratitude’
Nature’s Blueprint
When we bring together deep nature connection practices and heartful community we create a unique field of connection in todays world, a nature-based ‘village’. This is our most regenerative blueprint as a human being, and this is what we introduce and explore in Nature’s Blueprint. Read more.
Based on the 8 Shields teachings, our courses bring together learnings from earth-based cultures around the world. These rich on-line, and in your home, journeys will help 8 Shields practices and insights take deep root in you and your life, bringing connection and cultural healing to you and your people.
What are the 8 Shields?
The 8 Shields is an eight direction medicine wheel or cultural map, with each direction being referred to as a Shield for how it holds many different embodiments of the energy of that direction. These life maps have been used by earth-based cultures all around the world since time immemorial but have largely been forgotten in the modern era. With the seasons and cycles of the day as the foundation, they show us how to understand the patterns and energies of the natural world, how they are expressed through us as human beings, and how they teach us to be in right relationship with all of life. Just as a geographical map will help you orient to a physical landscape, these cultural maps are there to support you to understand life and to navigate your pathway within it, personally and societally. Ultimately ‘the map is not the territory’ and there is a mystery to life that maps can never fully capture, they show us the way to discover.
Developed by Jon Young and the 8 Shields Institute, the 8 Shields map draws on the wisdom from earth-based cultures around the world – specifically that we know of – the San Bushmen, Lakota, Apache, Mohawk, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Akamba, Odawa, Dagara, and Hawaiian peoples. When teachings are specific to an indigenous lineage they are only passed on with the blessings of a wisdom-keeper from that specific lineage.
Free bite-size Video Series – out now!
To give you a flavour we are sharing a set of short videos to –
- Explore each of the 8 orienting directions of this map, going from East round to North-East
- Bring us on a journey through the energies of all the directions, and what they hold and inspire in us
- Help you see how these translate into practices for deep nature connection and cultural regeneration
Register for the free series here
“There’s a learning of a model, a structure, a roadmap of how we can bring back that kind of culture and embed it in our lives, groups, projects, organisations, workplaces – wherever we want to bring that back to.
There’s been something really clear and easy to follow to deliberately create that healthy and wholesome culture of connection and resilience and regeneration – and that’s what for me the Bringing It Home programme has been about.” Listen to student and friend Jessica talk about her experience of the course.
Ecological Homecoming details
Facilitators
Why this matters, now
Further information on the 8 Shields
Bringing It Home 