Name: Wild Belonging - A day long gathering in Warrandyte
Start: 2026-05-02T23:30:00+10:00
Location: Warrandyte Pound Bend

Wild Belonging
A day long gathering in Warrandyte
What does it mean to be a participant in the wider earth community, in these times of human centrism and uber technological consciousness?
How does one experience a wider, wilder sense of self in busy daily life?
This day-long gathering is in service to a rewilding of our bodies, minds and souls, not through any peak experience on a mountain, but by coming together on the city outskirts to explore ancestral lifeways and deep nature connection practices.
We will explore skills and practices such as:
🪄 Sit Spots (deep listening to the ‘wild other’)
🪄 Sense opening and Wandering (another form of deep listening to the ‘wild other’).
🪄 Fire-by-Friction
🪄 Introduction into Fibres and Cordage Making.
🪄 Core Routines and Principles of Deep Nature Connection.
🪄 Building Ecological Literacy
In many ways, this is a ‘taster’ of the year-long Nature Based Leadership Training, but also a stand alone event. (Learn more about the Nature-Based Leadership Training here: https://www.naturesapprentice.com.au/events/nblt-2026 )
Awakening a wider ecological consciousness is one of the tasks of our times, and can be as simple as learning the woods in your area that make fire, what bird is calling first in the morning at any time of the year, and giving your full presence to a wildish patch of earth. Through these repeatable practices, these curiosities, we build cultures of reciprocity that nourish both ourselves and the wider world to which we belong.

Program details
Location: Pound Bend Reserve, Warrandyte.
Time: 9:30am - 4pm.
Investment:
Early bird (before March 22nd): $110
Full price: $120
Or save $20 when you purchase both this program and Earth Time: Into the Wild World, a day-long event on April 18th: https://www.facebook.com/events/897052636621294/
Facilitators:
Claire Skye
Claire Skye (Dunn) is a writer, speaker, mother, barefoot explorer, rewilding facilitator and founder of Nature’s Apprentice. Claire is passionate about human rewilding and believes that a reclaiming of our ecological selves and belonging is key to regenerating wildness on the planet.
For the last 15 years, Claire has been facilitating individuals to dive deeply into the mysteries of nature and psyche through the pathways of deep nature connection, ancestral earth skills, deep ecology, ecopsychology, soulcentric nature-based practice, village building, dance, ceremony and contemporary wilderness rites-of-passage.
Claire is the author of memoirs My Year Without Matches, which tells the story of her year living wild, and Rewilding the Urban Soul which explores how we might embody wild consciousness within a modern city context. Claire lives beside the Birrarung on the outskirts of Melbourne where she lovingly tends her family, her garden and her own wild heart.
Daniel Skye
Dan is a carpenter and father of three living in Warrandyte. Dan’s introduction to earth based ceremony was at age 16, and since then ceremony, sweat lodge and Vision Quest has been a powerfully consistent thread and guiding principle in his life, both as participant and more recently as a trained Vision Quest guide.
Since he was a child, Dan has nurtured a deep love and curiosity for the wild world. Conversations with the “wild other” are part of his everyday vernacular, and tracking a way of life.
Dan is currently apprenticing to the arts of storytelling, song, deep authentic relating, wandering, and the mythic in wild landscapes. You will often find him tending his garden, catching stories from friends, baking bread, running the trails of his mountain home, and spending sweet time with his children, and partner Claire.
Emily Coats
Emily Coats has been with Nature’s Apprentice since 2021 and is a facilitator of deep nature connection practices, ancestral skills and soulcentric nature-based ceremony. Recently returned from seven months alone in the wild, she brings passion for practices that awaken full sensory awareness, quieten the mind, and enliven body and Soul, and feels that a reweaving of these capabilities back into our culture is essential medicine for these times in which we live.
Emily's teachers include master tracker Tom Brown Junior, nature connection expert Jon Young and Australian bird language teacher Andrew Turbill, as well as Nature's Apprentice founder Claire Dunn, who set her on this path some seven years ago. Emily has completed an Advanced Diploma of Transpersonal Counselling, and is a trained Vision Quest Guide. Before joining Nature’s Apprentice Emily spun magic with numbers and data as an environmental policy analyst and wove force fields against big oil as an activist and campaigner.

Cover photo by Ella Henderson