recovering the
indigenous soul
returning to the
wisdom of the body
& the earth
Apprenticing Earth
Our own moment in the unfolding journey of life may or may not be as extreme as the near extinction of some of our ancestors, but certainly we are a species navigating quite a bit of stress.
Reconnect with your body, remember the living Earth and reclaim what it means to be alive at this pivotal moment in human history. The Art of Rewilding offers a living enquiry into how we might root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity and reverence.
My deep love is holding group space and tending community.
I guide people toward what brings them alive and into connection with themselves, each other, and the more-than-human world.
This work is woven through dharma (truth), mythic journeys, the intelligence of the body and nature, creative practices and the living currents of the imaginal.
I’m Natasha Lythgoe
…and I believe the quality of our relatedness determines the shape of our lives, and the life of our planet.
Rewilding Our Inner And Outer Landscapes.
Everything at The Art of Rewilding is experience-informed, values-led, and inspired-by-nature to help you connect with your innate wisdom and feel most alive to your life. For the benefit of all life.
The Art of Rewilding offers online and in-person programmes in the UK and Europe, including vision quests, rites of passage training, and immersive nature retreats, for those seeking deeper connection, clarity, and meaning. Rooted in earth-based wisdom and guided time in the wild, this work supports personal rewilding in a culture that has lost touch with too much.
I will be on retreat with my Buddhist order and offline for January and February 2026.
I’ll share Sping dates for my short courses with you upon my return.
All retreats and vision quest enquiries and bookings can be dealt with by my co-guide and retreat centre whose details are on their respective webpages.
As of writing this the next Murmurations cohort beginning April has two places left.
Great Places to Start
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Soulcraft Bookclub
In my role as a vision quest guide, I’m often asked for resources and guidance on deepening understanding of nature-based initiation, myth, ritual, and soulful living. A handful of books and authors have profoundly shaped my perspective and practice, and this is an invitation to gather around one of them and harvest some of the gems they offer.
This is a relaxed way for people who share an interest in deep nature connection to explore its various facets - through some really great books.
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Body as Doorway
This course offers an opportunity to get acquainted with Gendlin’s Felt-Sensing Focusing method alongside learning simple and effective skills for embodiment.
Focusing is, by far, the best practice I’ve found for emotional regulation, finding flow in stuck places and connecting with a deep inspiration thread.
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Following the River Underground
This course offers creative ways to deepen Gene Gendlin’s Felt Sensing Focusing method through dream weaving betwixt inner and outer worlds -between the ways in which Focusing opens us to the currents of the imaginal, and the arts.
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Elemental Soul
We will track three threads: nature-based ceremony, folk stories, and the felt sense of Gendlin’s somatic focusing.
By gently following their impulses we listen for what wants to be known and enter into a call-and -response with the living world and with the currents of the imaginal - how myth and dream shape the world.
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Uncomfortable Conversations
Inspired by some Sharing Councils I co-led as part of my six month mentoring programme last year, these monthly drop-in sessions will offer support to stop self-censoring, to step into your authenticity and to experience shared humanity.
Council is a space beyond hierachy and evaluation. In Council there is a quality of connection that we often lack in everyday life: honest respectful communication and a common field of listening.
Places to Go Deeper
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Conversations In The Forest with thresholds and mirrors
Three month Seasonal Journeys weaving three threads, starting with Autumn transitioning into Winter.
Drawing on my 25 years buddhist background and work as a vision quest guide, this three month experiential programme braids together the practices of:
Threshold Walks, The Mirror of Nature and The Art of Mirroring Stories
Sharing Councils
Gendlin’s Somatic practice of Focusing
This programme is a slow response to the fast pace our times; a living enquiry into how we might root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity and reverence.
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Murmurations Group Mentoring
A six month group mentoring programme in Deep Nature Connection: Ways to Apprentice Earth.
There is plenty of information available about the 'What to do' of nature-based practices, but very little on the vital 'How to' engage with them experientially—which is where, I believe, the true aliveness happens. This focus on the 'How to' is the core of the Murmurations Mentoring program.
This mentoring journey is about the individuals in the group and their specific unfolding journeys - it is personal and participatory by nature.
The programme focuses on the main elements used in contemporary wilderness rites of passage and vision quest leadership. Although the teachings are rooted in wilderness rites, each element can be adapted for a variety of settings and applications. In short, you don't need to be interested in solo quests to apply them.
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Retreats & Vision Quests
I take small groups and individuals on contemplative adventures and guided solo immersions in nature, with limited access to technology, lasting anywhere from one day to twelve days.
These take the form of Nature-based retreats, Buddhist retreats and Wilderness Vigils.
The Wilderness Vigils we offer are Vision Quests - 12 day facilitated processes at the core of which lies a 4-day solo fast. And Nature Vigils - 3 — 5 days at the core of which lies at 1 day solo fast.
* Please note quests are not a survival, bushcraft or hiking programme. And no prior experience of camping is necessary.
I also offer custom designed journeys | immersions for individuals and small groups in Europe & UK.
“ The medicine we need,
is in our wild,
both within us and around us.
Remembering Our Roots
Francis Weller’s article, The Movements That Made Us Human, speaks to his experience of learning to flintknap and how, In the process of learning this ancient skill, a body memory flickered into his awareness, “ We have been making this gesture, this exact movement of lifting stone above our heads and striking down on stone for over 1,000,000 years. This movement, along with others, such as making fire, cordage, tracking game, basket making, communal rituals, initiation and storytelling are what slowly gave shape to our psychic and communal lives. We have made these movements generation upon generation and now, in the barest wisp of a moment, we have stopped.”
What happens to our psyches, to our very beings, in the absence of these movements? What happens to our cultures in the absence of these sturdy and reliable rhythms? The Art of Rewilding offers a living enquiry into how we might root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity and reverence with these movements.
One aspect of my work, known as Vision Quests - also called Soul Quests, Vision Fasts, Rites of Passage, or Wilderness Vigils - involves communal rituals, initiation and story telling for those seeking greater depth and clarity around life purpose and meaning.
Life eventually brings us to crossroads. This may take the form of a relationship ending, a career change, the loss of a loved one, a midlife crisis, the transition from one life stage to another, or a deep sense that something essential is missing. These moments can feel unstable and disorientating, but they are actually nature’s way of calling us forward. These transitions are as natural as life itself; they are unavoidable and often necessary thresholds we must pass through to evolve into the next chapter.
Tending to this deeply human need for periodic renewal is at the heart of vision quests. These initiations are an ancient communal ritual found in traditional cultures throughout time - time spent alone in nature, where the more-than-human world and the deep imagination become guides. Through marking significant life transitions they support maturation, transformation, and entry into a new phase of life, or the deepening of one already being lived.
Ultimately these communal rites show us how to align with our true nature and embody the gifts we carry so that we can live as grounded and potent, healing influences in our communities. These teachings show us how to mature as humans and eventually become elders for the health of the community in the largest sense of that word.
In many traditional cultures, such initiations are guided in close relationship with the four directions medicine wheel. You may already be familiar with the Celtic Wheel of the Year, woven through the solstices, equinoxes and seasonal fire festivals. The wheels I work most closely with, grounded in natures cycles and our own natural cycles, map the Body in the South, Soul/Psyche in the West, Heart-Mind in the North and Mystery in the East.
These maps, deeply intertwined with land and seasonal cycles, are known as the Four Directions Medicine Wheel and the Nature Based Map of Psyche. Their teachings - of nature within us, and around us - contain sacred paths and ceremonies that were once the life-blood of our ancestors and communities. Various forms of these ancient, seasonal teachings have been used pan culturally by peoples to navigate what it means to be humans deeply connected to the wild.
The Living Currents of the Imaginal
Rooted in depth psychology, phenomenology, Indigenous and wilderness-based traditions, and imaginal philosophy there is a threshold in the imagination that opens beyond what can be seen or explained through a materialist worldview alone. When we learn to reach it, we enter a deep realm of imagination where nature’s systemic intelligence reveals itself through resonance, imagery, symbolic forms, and patterned relationships rather than through sensory perception alone.
Within wilderness-based rites, this mode of perception has been described as the Mirror of Nature and is commonly accessed through practices such as ritual fasting. Other doorways might be meditation, shamanic drumming, trance practices, certain forms of depth-oriented psychotherapy, dreamwork, music, myth, poetry, and the arts.
Blending ancient wisdom with contemporary insight
Supporting you to rekindle your own true nature
Whilst offering ways to ground it back home one step at a time
Rewilding our inner and outer landscapes | supporting individual and collective change
Becoming future ancestors
To be authentic means to be true to oneself.
It is a very, very dangerous phenomenon, rare people can do that. But whenever people do it, they achieve such beauty, such grace, such contentment that you cannot imagine…
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Human Growth
There is only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want - David Whyte
There are particular points in your life when something needs to change and you have the feeling that you want to evolve into the next chapter. An identity shift, if you will. These shifts are as natural as life itself; whether from childhood to adulthood or youth to middle age we all know something of these passages. There are also more nuanced passages but no less important; times when it might seem like the hardest thing in the world is to be ourselves.
When we ask, Who am I? Really? Aside from what family and society and conventions tell me. And how do I get to that place of self knowledge and conviction where I are able to state without doubt, fear or anger, ‘This is who I am, this is what I stand for, this is how I intend to live my life’?
These are all death and rebirth moments within a life; when we die to what is no-longer so that we can open to what is new. Natures cycles of death and rebirth are inherent to all life, human and more-than-human. My passion is to share ways in which we can live in harmony with these cycles, to support folk in navigating and transitioning the different seasons of their lives.
Who do we walk this path for?
Ultimately these journeys invite us to embody the gifts we carry so that we can live as mature, powerful, healing influences in our communities. We do this not only for ourselves, but for our kin, human and more-than-human. These are our offerings for future generations.
I’m an experienced guide specialising in Rites of Passage | Vision Quests having trained in the States, Europe and the UK over the past decade. I bring and blend my twenty six years of experience in complimentary modalities which I believe are necessary to guiding this work in a way that is relevant to 2025. The about page lists my qualifications and modalities.
In addition to traditional ways of facilitating nature-based-rites of passage programmes I ensure all my programmes are trauma-aware, do not overly psychologise the process at the expense of experiences of self transcendence, and emphasise integration. The way I work with people emphasises embodied and experiential learning over cognition that operates solely from the neck up.
I offer online and in person programmes, nature based seminars and retreats, vision quests and 1-2-1 mentoring.
Guardian (2024) 10 of the Best Wellness Nature Retreats for 2024A little about me
An interesting idea that turns up in myths and stories is that the crises we experience, both individually and collectively, are not here to destroy us but rather to break the spell of the little self, and to break the spell of collective lives that are also imagined as small and not connected to the source and origins of life
That the crises that we experience individually or collectively are here to crack the shell and break us open to the inner eyes of the soul and to give us the opportunity to reconnect to the deeper self which knows why we are here and what our life purpose already is.
- M. Meade