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Wilderness Scout Program
Gain The Heightened senses and
primitive skills of being a wilderness scout
A doorway can be an opening to our fears or to great possibilities. As a guide, you learn how to present doorways and hold a safe space for others to greet it with where they are.
This is a unique guide training. To be a Rites of Passage Guide & Nature Mentor, you want to have both wilderness skills and the ability to artfully guide others through their inner landscape where they may greet their thresholds.
We’re looking for eight souls who are wanting to learn basic primitive skills… who are looking to adopt the mindsets of coming into relationship with the natural world so they may be able to guide others from an authentic space of personal connection with the tracks, plants, birds, and forest relatives… who are ready and willing to move through their own shadows so they evolve in their own way of deliberately being in the world… For those who want to learn how to use nature as a catalyst to provide others deeper inner shifts and healing.
This training is hence not just about learning wilderness skills and how to teach them to others. This training requires a certain mindset and desire to have a deep personal connection with nature. It's an approach to being a guide as an esteemed craft to be honed over a lifetime.
This is a 10 month experienced based training of learning nature skills, how to guide and mentor, and how to weave together the invisible cultural practices that provide a deep sense of belonging and connection. We’re hoping you’ll want to continue with us and help facilitate nature classes and retreats.
You will learn to facilitate nature and wilderness skills classes for youth and adults, guide rites of passage, and lead circle/council work for providing deep shifts, healing, and learning.
How You Learn
We step onto the forest path as a humble student with a mindset of being a life long student of the path. Here we discover it's not about finding answers and instead is about finding the right questions and resting within them.
You'll learn through what's traditionally called the invisible school. While there's definitely focused learning intensives, much of the the learning happens through experiencing the mentoring and invisible structure first hand.
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What we're doing here is cultivating a Guide Culture. This is the way in which we show up as individuals and as a group. It's adopting the mindsets, ways of asking questions, of connecting with the forest, others, and ourselves.
Part of our training is honoring you can only share at the level you yourself have experienced deep shifts. To facilitate profound change and guide others from an expanded and grounded awareness you first must journey through your own shadows so you may comfortably rest in who you are. You'll have experiences to meet your own edges and gain the tools to gently move through them as well as how to honor them.
A Personal Path
The skill level of any nature guide is determined by their personal motivation and hunger to learn, to connect and grow. This isn't a path of gaining information and remembering it. You'll be provided the means of learning and you'll be guided in following through to learn the plants, tracks, and animals. The majority of your learning is up to your own commitment.
Nature Skills
Plant I.D.
You’ll learn how to identify the trees and fauna of the PNW or guided how to learn those of your region. Rather than learning information, you’re guided into the naturalist mindset so you may begin to not just identify, but see the relationships of plants, animals and eco-systems. It’s learning a new language and way of perceiving.
Tracking & Animal Sign:
You’ll learn the basics of tracking. More importantly, you’ll learn how to adopt the Tracker’s mind and how to ask the right questions to piece together the story and discover the relational aspects at play
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Primitive Skills:
How to make friction fire by bow-drill, make primitive shelters, and use plants for medicine or practical uses such as cordage.
Bird Language
Learn the core calls/songs of birds and how they reveal what’s happening all around you in the forest. Discover how to learn the baseline of a given area, to identify the community and get to know the routines.
Nature Awareness
Learn how to discover the baseline community and languages of a specific environment. Learn how to be included within the community and hence become part of the conversations the animals, birds, plants and energies are having. Learn to communicate with them.
Teaching Skills
Learn how to share these with others in a way that they experience a sense of remembering rather than being taught…. how to use coyote mentoring and the invisible school to inspire a sense of curiosity so the student is owning their learning or “rememberings”.
Coyote Mentoring
Learn how to facilitate classes and rites of passage.. how to inspire a deep curiosity so the student is engaged and asking to be taught… how to know when to teach and when to sit back and guide the student in the process of learning and resting in their own questions.
Guide Skills You Learn
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How to guide others to their own answers, truths, and understandings
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How to let others struggle without needing to fix or provide answers
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How to adopt the mind of the Tracker which is to rest in the Question rather than need an answer
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How to facilitate Way of Council, ask the right questions, and provide safe, sacred space for others to authentically share
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Art of Mentoring
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Emotional Intelligence and how to help others learn it, communicate it, and live it
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Limiting Beliefs & story Destroyer… how to recognize them and ask the right questions to lead others to a more expansive mindset
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Stages of the Hero’s Journey… how to recognize what stage you or someone is in and how to support them in shifting into the next and honoring the journey as a whole
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How to help others discover and step into their medicine
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You’ll learn core psychological processes/techniques to guide others through their limitations, emotions, and stories
We NEED trained guides. Our primary motivation for offering this training is so we have enough quality guides to help facilitate youth and adults wilderness rites of passage and nature classes. Possible paid employment options for those interested.
Other Skills & "rememberings"
Class Structures
You'll learn how to facilitate multiple nature classes and immersions from simple nature connection to multiple day wilderness primitive skill retreats. You'll learn how to structure a class and guide it's flow so the participants experience a natural process of learning, being engaged and discover their own passions. You'll learn how to weave in games, skill activities, council work, and core learnings.
Storytelling Culture
A significant part of our guide culture is a storytelling. Throughout the world and across cultures, stories has been the way wisdom, knowledge and cultural learnings have been passed done. Stories allow us to bypass our normal barriers and invite us to internalize the lessons and make them our own. You'll learn the art of storytelling and how to weave these into your classes.
Games & Activities
You'll learn an array of nature base games to engage youth and adults. Through games we learn how to heighten our senses and nature skills. They also provide safe space for others to meet their edges, to move through their inner landscape, and grow into their unique strengths. Games are part of what's called "South" energy which evokes Child Passion and Play. One of the invisible cultural pillars.
Nature Awareness Practices
You'll adopt nature routines and practices that'll deepen your connection with nature, place, and the forest relatives. These practices will heighten your senses, hone in your skills, and expand you awareness of what's happening in the forest.
Making Forest Relatives
This is a special process of shifting from being an outsider or tourist in nature to becoming part of the forest community. It's a way of earning relationship and shifting from having a "transactional" relationship to having a "relational" relationship with the plants, animals, and land features. It's a way of becoming claimed by place and allowing the land to steward you.
Heritage and Mending The Ancestral line
Most people have been cut off from their bloodline and ancestral roots. When the Europeans came to America they suppressed the songs, stories, and ceremonies of their people.
Today, most all people on American soil are orphaned from their ancestral roots and the cultural ways of their people. Religions have suppressed the organic expression of earth based wisdom and persecuted those who practiced it. There’s a lot of wounds of being disconnected from our roots with nature and how spirit is dreaming us uniquely into the world.
In this program, we explore how to adopt new and old cultural practices to bring a sense of wholeness, connection and belonging into our lives. It is these cultural pillars that gives us the strength of knowing who we are, where we come from and where we’re going. It is this understanding that enables us to prepare the way for those who will come after us.
Way of Council & Circle Work
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Cultural way of being in relationship with people, nature, & sacred others
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Art of listening… of receiving… of speaking from aligned self
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You'll be tasked with facilitating groups circles
Being Claimed By Land
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How to be "belonged" to the earth
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How to steward the earth
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How to let “place/nature” steward you
Details & Logistics
Flow
We'll gather one weekend a month. This is an overnight campout and our locations may change as the weather and season dictates. Our base camp is on Mt Hood just outside of Welches OR. We may also gather at Oxbox Regional Park and the Oregon Coast. Be prepared to campout Friday and Saturday night or meet us first thing Saturday Morning.
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Times:
9:00am to 4pm Friday, Saturday & Sunday
Friday & Saturday evenings or social times around the fire.
Dates:
Jan 17, 18 & 19
Feb 14, 15 & 16
March 20, 21 & 22
April 10, 11 & 12
May 15, 16 & 17
June 19, 20 & 21
Investment
$3,000
Monthly Installments:
$500/month x 6 months
OR
$375/month x 8 months
How To Join
If your curious to learn more or interested in joining us, fill out the form. Please share why this resonates and would like to get from it. We'll then schedule a FREE 30 minute phone interview to connect with you further, share details and answer any questions you have.
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Much Gratitude