Learning > Trees as Teachers: Connecting the Wisdom of Self and Nature
Trees as Teachers: Connecting the Wisdom of Self and Nature
Please join Anne Forbes and Rebecca Power to explore the many dimensions of our connections with trees and discover the remarkable witness they provide as partners in our learning, playing, and growing. Through a year of seasons, participants will integrate spiritual and scientific ways of knowing as they deepen their relationships with trees and come home to a renewed sense of self.
The Wheel of the Year will keep us rooted as we navigate the seasons. We will learn from the qualities and gifts of our tree ally beginning as the sap rises and concluding as the leaves fall and rejoin the soil beneath a blanket of snow. Through the keeping of a journal or other creative project of your choosing, you will deepen your connection with yourself, your tree ally, and your place on Earth.
What is Trees as Teachers?
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>2012 LOGISTICS AND REGISTRATION
Photos by Rebecca Power
The group will meet once each season for a full day of study and practice from March through December 2012. Each study day is designed around a carefully selected series of experiential activities and reflective conversations. Between study days, you will receive monthly prompts to support you in following the transition between seasons, and you will be invited to share your words, images, or photographs in our private online group.
Over the months of the program, we will hone our skills and deepen your connection with the natural world. We will learn how to:
- Observe using all your senses and abilities to notice what is
- Investigate by asking good questions using the wisdom of body, mind, emotions, and spirit
- Reflect upon the meaning of your encounters with respect for self and other
- Integrate your experience through story telling and creative expression
Three key themes will guide our learning: alliances with trees; the qualities and gifts of the seasons; and circles of relationship. We will each select an individual tree that will become our ally for the year. With our ally as a guide, we will learn by observing, investigating, reflecting upon, and integrating the qualities and gifts of each season as the sap rises in the spring, new growth flourishes in summer, and the leaves fall and rejoin the soil beneath a blanket of snow in winter. Ultimately, you will deepen your connection with yourself, your tree ally, your community, and your place on Earth.
The program begins in the spring, the time of awakening and opening, with a focus on Body Wisdom, as we connect with ourselves and individual trees. During the time of summer's growth and productivity, we explore connection and communication among people and trees through the theme of Family Wisdom. The harvest, reserve, and release of fall encourages us to value the Community Wisdom that supports respectful networks of people and trees. The dormancy, rest, and renewal of winter calls our year to a close, with the integration and celebration that comes with Earth Wisdom
• You feel a connection to the trees in and around your home place and seek a deeper experience.
• You sometimes feel disconnected from yourself or other people, and find yourself attracted to a connection with trees as a source of healing and well being.
• You wish to nurture your inner wisdom by accessing the wisdom of nature.
• You are an elder and wish to serve as a mentor, helping young people cultivate their relationship to nature and sense of belonging.
Whether you tend toward the spiritual dimensions of your relationship to nature or toward the scientific, Trees as Teachers will expand your capacity to integrate sensual, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual ways of knowing. As you renew your connection to the trees in your home place on a daily basis, you will renew the home place in your heart and reinvigorate your life.
Rebecca Power and Anne Forbes combine years of experience as students of nature and students of the human heart and soul. They are skilled guides in personal and group explorations of human connections to the plants, animals, and landscapes of our home places.
“Anne is an inspired guide. I always come away from her workshops with deeper awareness and dazzlement at the magnificent natural world we are part of. I am inspired to be more present in this growing breathing place around us, and I am so thankful for Anne's way of inviting, welcoming and skillfully orchestrating the day so that the big view of this world and the tiniest view are all in focus. A breathtaking experience.” – Joan Laurion, author of Creating Connections: How to Lead Family Child Care Support Groups
"Rebecca is one of the most powerful, insightful, and gentle facilitators and presenters in the mid-west. She has a knack of framing difficult concepts for experiential learning that reaches all types of learners. She builds community within groups with ease and simultaneously initiates an individual's personal development. Her ability to combine science, art and life experience provides an exciting environment for learning." - R. Anne Abbott, UWSP, emeritus Professor Health Promotion and Human Development
