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Nature Awareness Courses and Workshops
Scroll down to view a current listing of courses that offer training in Nature Awareness.
Integral Awareness Training Series (IATS)
Jul 18 2009
US/Alaska
Offered: November 2008 - August 2009 on selected Saturdays, 8:30am-4:30pm
Location: Greater Pescadero area (at a different location each time to be announced via email)
Instructors: Josh Lane, Jon Young and other special guests of the Shikari Tracking Guild
Explore the wildlife and natural history of the coastal landscapes through the perspective of holistic tracking and awareness. Learn routines of sensory awareness that have been used by trackers for thousands of years that foster a deep and powerful relationship with place.
Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness (RDNA) Program
Aug 28 2009 17:00
May 15 2010 17:00
US/Alaska
Creating Resilient Leaders and Community
Applications for RDNA 2009-10 due July 1
Are you ready to build a more meaningful relationship with the earth, your community and yourself – and make clear your role as a community member and an integral part of the natural world? The Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness (RDNA) program is an advanced 9-month program that extends hands-on, skill based training to help you develop the leadership skills you need to bring sustainability and regenerative practices into your personal and professional lives. Through RDNA, you can learn to design powerful communities, regenerate ecosystems and facilitate positive community change.
Our instructors are fully engaged visionaries working in regenerative design, nature awareness, cultural mentoring and leadership. They bring the tools they have gathered through years of experience, working locally and around the world, to create resilient leaders, cultural systems and landscapes. They weave these tools together into the dynamic and lifestyle that makes up the RDNA program.
Using the teachings of regenerative design, nature awareness, 8 Shields Culture Mentoring and the Ecology of Leadership, RDNA offers a comprehensive exploration of where we came from, where we are now and where we are going.
RDNA Native Eyes Program
Aug 29 2009
May 13 2010
US/Alaska
Offered: August 2009 - May 2010
Location: Bolinas and Pescadero, CA
Instructors: Jon Young and the RDNA team
If you trace your lineage back far enough, you’ll find ancestors who were natives — somewhere. To these indigenous ancestors, holistic awareness of the natural world (tracking) and land tending (permaculture) were so important that they became entwined and engrained in their biology. We can hardly guess what this relationship to land, creatures, and each other meant to our ancestors since we have come so far from it.
Using cultural mentoring, the tool that our ancestors used to teach this awareness, the Native Eyes Program will help you reclaim your human birthright to be an integrated and critical member of the natural world. This training, as outlined in Jon Young's new book, Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, is not being offered anywhere else in the world — because the Bushmen aren’t taking applications! Join us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Cultural Mentoring Series
Aug 29 2009 20:30
Sep 4 2009 20:30
US/Alaska
Cultural Mentoring Series
with Jon Young, Mark Morey and the 8 Shields Team
Are you searching for a better way to learn, mentor, and live that is deeply rooted in the rhythms of nature and that brings out the best in each member of the community? Do you wonder what keeps individuals and communities from moving forward in a powerful way? Do you want to learn to transform conflict into a growth opportunity for everybody involved?
The Cultural Mentoring Series will explore these questions and more, with the intent to build a team of cultural engineers poised to facilitate regenerative culture in their own communities. It is an opportunity not to be missed!
Cultural mentoring – or learning as a side-effect of intentional exposure to culture – is sometimes called "the invisible school." The structure that supports this kind of learning is often unnoticed or even invisible, yet it is instrumental in creating a healty, vibrant learning environment. When a community is filled with creatively empowered mentors, participants meet new learning opportunities in every moment. This is the role of the Cultural Mentor.
For the first time in California, Jon Young and the 8 Shields team present the Mind of Mentoring and Mentoring Nature Connection, two public cultural mentoring week-long intensives where you can explore and experience for yourself how a mentoring culture, like those our ancestors lived in, works and what makes it successful.
The first in the series, the Mind of Mentoring, focuses on the theory, practice and didactic exploration of 8 Shields Cultural Mentoring. The second intensive, Mentoring Nature Connection, takes the understanding gained in Mind of Mentoring and creates a living experience of a mentoring village. If you have been, or wanted to be, a participant in the Art of Mentoring cultural village created at RDI in past years, one or both of these courses may be for you!
Bird Language Weeklong Intensive
Apr 18 2010
Apr 24 2010
US/Alaska
Next Offered: April 18 – 24, 2010
Location: Commonweal Garden
One-Day Bird Language Workshop Offered:
Saturday, May 2
Instructors: Jon Young, Nicole Young, the RDNA team and Shikari Tracking Guild.
Find out how the most elusive animals in the forest detect danger and move secretly to avoid it – using the language of the birds, the alarm system of the forest. Learn to decipher what the birds are telling us about the location of other animals, and also what they have to say about our own patterns of movement and awareness.
This exciting week will open your senses to the various “shapes” of bird language - rings of movement, sound, and feeling that ripple across the landscape. Learn to move quietly while expanding the circle of your awareness through the power of bird language, a skill that has been passed down through countless generations of trackers around the world.
