‘A homecoming to community and the greater natural world’ – Sean, Bringing it Home 2020-2012
Bringing it Home is an in-depth, yearlong journey with seven spacious online weekends, solo time in nature (including a supported dusk to dawn or 24 hour solo) and other support to bring 8 Shields wisdom and nature-based culture repair practices into your life, family, work and communities.
We explore the cycles of nature within and without, finding our wholeness and belonging as a gift to our people and the rest of nature.
The next journey runs from the Spring equinox, March 2021, until February 2022.
Interested? Join us for a free introductory call on January 19th
Do you long to be part of an earth-based culture based on the cycles of nature and to grow more fully into a healthy, connected leader and community builder? Are you inspired by 8 Shields events like Art of Mentoring and Nature Culture Regeneration, or other nature-based and personal development work? Are you holding space for others in some way, and longing for support to do that more elegantly and easefully?
Hosted by experienced facilitators Peter Cow and Sky Maria Buitenhuis, with support from Rebecca Card and others, this rich journey home 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.
The course is a connective cycle of spacious weekends, interwoven with personal mentoring sessions, peer mentoring, outdoor activities and access to some of the 8 Shields Institute’s ‘512 Project‘ videos in between the weekends.
To give you a flavour we will be posting videos that explore each of the 8 orienting directions of this map, beginning and ending in the North-East, bringing us on a journey through the energies of all the directions and what they hold, and how these translate into deep nature connection and cultural repair practices. Enjoy and please let us know what is emerging for you! We will be releasing these through our facebook page (‘follow’ our page here to see the videos as we release them) or
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The 8 Shields is an 8 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. However, ‘the map is not the territory’ and there is a mystery to life that maps can never capture, they can only show us the way to discover.
When teachings are specific to an indigenous lineage they are only passed on with the blessings of a wisdom-keeper from that specific lineage.
“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.
Bringing It Home 