Earth, Art, and Heart for Women:
A nature-connected weekend retreat in service to tending the wild soul.
Summer 2023
Earth, Art, & Heart for Women
Earth, Art, & Heart for Women is a weekend retreat designed to support women in honoring the seasons of their heart and soul, as well as to support deepened relationship with both the outer and inner landscapes of our lives. Women taking part in this retreat will be guided in the art of council, a nature-connected practice of sharing from the heart, informed by the wisdom of the land. We will explore nature-connected frameworks rooted in the natural life cycles and turnings of the earth, and will integrate this as a resource for recognizing and honoring the various seasons of change in our lives. We will deepen into an inquiry around human wholeness— our own, and that which we long to cultivate in our lives, within our families, and within the cultural fabrics of our communities.
Together, we will listen for the wild whisper of the soul that sings out to us our deepest longings for our life— that whisper that often grows clearer as we slow down and root into nature’s rhythms. We will court this whisper and tend it through artistic expression, poetry, song, storytelling, exploration of symbol and metaphor, authentic connection with community, guided mindfulness practices, and healing somatic practices.
“The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés
-
Earth
This experience will focus on the cultivation of meaningful relationship with earth as home— as an ever-deepening relationship of sanctuary, healing, and reciprocity. We will explore primitive skills as a practice of deep nature-connection, particularly the art of fire by friction. Each woman will complete her own bow drill set and receive bow drilling mentorship during this weekend retreat.
-
Art
This retreat will invite an exploration of the practice of beauty-making with natural materials in community with other women.
-
Heart
Amidst the hustle of our fast-paced industrial culture, this retreat is being offered to create space for deep listening to one’s own interior landscape, as well as to share in authentic and meaningful ways in circle.
We will connect through the art of council under the stars around a fire, as well as through sharing in nature-connected song and storytelling.
“Our job is not to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story we are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to us. Our job is to be fully alive in the life we have, to pick up the invisible thread of our own story and follow where it leads. Our job is to find the thread of our own dream and live it all the way to the end.”
Shae is a poet, ecotherapist, university professor, artisan of cultural revitalization, and lover of wild landscapes— both inner and outer. Shae completed her Masters in Clinical Mental Health at ETSU, where she collaborated with Dr. Bethany Novotny in establishing the Nature-Based Therapy Graduate Certificate.
She is deeply committed to contributing to the cultivation of soul-centered community, education, farming, and healing approaches that center care of people, place, and the more-than-human world. She longs deeply for a world in which all of life is resourced and tended in ways that support its greatest sprouting, flowering, and fruiting. She is particularly passionate about supporting girls and women in their unfolding journeys of becoming the fullest expression of themselves in their lives. She is brought alive accompanying them in deep inquires of the heart, particularly as relates to the questions: “Who am I?” and “What are my gifts?” Shae understands authentic relationship with the life of the land and meaningful nature-connected rites of passage experiences to be of the most powerful elements for deepening this inquiry and mending the torn cultural fabrics of meaning and vitality.
Shae is passionate about showing up as artisan of connection— connection with the soul, with community, with animals, with the earth, and with the unfolding mystery of each individual’s life. She loves inviting people into experiences that may serve to bring them ever-closer to the home of themselves through nature-connected song & storytelling, creative expression, somatic practices, growing and tending life, engaging in meaningful council, and adventuring into the unknown wilds.
Shae is on a journey of flowering her heart’s dream at Fauna Forest Farm in Jonesborough, TN, where she stewards land and community, offers sessions as an ecotherapeutic guide, and serves as co-director of The Earth School.
To inquire about one-on-one ecotherapeutic sessions with Shae, reach out to her via email at: ecosessions@faunaforestfarm.org. Click the button below for more information.
Shae Keane-
Retreat Guide
