Journeying Within: Rewilding Ourselves

Four day / Three-night immersive camp

“We need to rewild from the bottom up, but also from the inside out …”

Nick Baker

Friday 21 April 2023 @ 2pm – Monday 24 April 2023 @ 2pm

Ivybridge, Devon

Facilitators: Max Hope and Jenna Blencowe

Cost: £350

This event is run in partnership with Centre for CBE

Educator, teacher, trainer, facilitator, youth worker. Lecturer. Guide. Leader. What do you call yourself?

The shorthand we use here is ‘educator’, but this four-day camp is for anyone who hears about it and gets that sense, deep down, that it might be for them. If you think it is for you, then it’s for you.

We are not usually educators by accident. Most of us are motivated by a desire to support, to help, to guide, to teach, to share, to build connections, to encourage, to inspire. What motivates you? Some of us work in mainstream education and others in alternative settings, in wild places, in our homes or in community buildings.

This camp is for educators who yearn for more. More connection. More time. More space. This camp is for educators who want time to talk, to think, to be, to remember, to reconnect. This camp is for educators who know that the way things are is not how they need to be.

We aim to provide a circuit breaker, a chance to step away from everyday life and step into a held and contained space where deep reflection is possible. Who are we and what drives us as educators? How have our own experiences of schooling shaped us? This camp offers an opportunity to press the reset button and gain a new perspective on who we are and who we want to become.

The Journeying Within camp is located at a beautiful spot on a working farm in Devon, just next door to a nature reserve with a mix of ponds, meadows, glades, and woodland, Exmoor ponies, deer, foxes, amphibians, reptiles, fungi, and lichen. By being here, in a wild place, we offer a range of activities which help us connect more deeply with the natural world - including the options to rise early for a dawn chorus, to cook on open fires, and to explore the land at night - and as a result, to connect more deeply with our own nature.

The primary offering of the camp, and the element that we consider as having the greatest transformational potential, is the opportunity to experience an extended period of solo time in the wild. The facilitators of this camp, Max Hope and Jenna Blencowe, are experienced guides for work of this nature - sometimes framed as vision quests, wilderness solos, intuition, or medicine walks - and are excited about supporting participants to plan their solos, frame their own intention/question, cross a threshold into an adventure where the wild can be experienced in a different way, and tell their stories on the return. This solo time in the wild might take place during daylight hours but more intrepid participants might extend this into a night-time solo.

By connecting more strongly with the natural world we seek to connect deeply to ourselves. We hear ourselves more clearly, we trust ourselves, we rewild ourselves. What is your soul saying? What is your place here, as part of this living world? What is your internal compass telling you about yourself, your work as an educator, and your future?

Guiding Questions for this camp:

• What’s my story around being an educator?
• What is my soul saying right now?
• How might a solo adventure in the wild help me to tune into myself, to rewild myself, and to connect with the living world?
• What’s my hope for the future and what support do I need?
  

This camp is run in partnership with the Centre for Consent-Based Education. We are offering a plan and a structure and will support you to navigate that plan in a consent-based and self-directed way. You choose what you want to take part in and how you want to participate. No activities are compulsory apart from opening meetings at the start of each day and a closing meeting at the end of the camp. We also ask everyone to take a share in camp duties such as helping with cooking and washing up. We are also guided by the Rewilding Education Compass.

The Journeying Within camp can be booked as a standalone experience but it is designed to be twinned with the Looking Out camp which takes place in May – participants are encouraged to attend both if they can.