What is The Wild School?
The Wild School is a yearly residential & online program for aspiring leaders willing to skill up & work towards eco-social restoration in their communities. To turn the tide from destruction to regeneration, to rebuild the natural VILLAGE & deep connection to PLACE that our hearts know we need.
Humanity is a custodial species. Us two-legged are designed to live in tribes, villages and communities that caretake and live in deep reciprocity with our Ancestral Lands. Across the centuries of empire building and colonisation, many have strayed far from our motherlands and from our important, custodial role in the web of life.
The symptoms of disconnect are everywhere. We all long for reconnection to Life. We have a deep sense of knowing that we need to live differently and together, but we don’t seem to know how to get there. Yet could the problem be the solution?
The world we live in now, requires regeneration on an urgent & massive scale, culturally & ecologically. For humanity to be able to meet this challenge within several generations, large numbers of willing, capable, skilled & empowered individuals are needed now to work collectively to undertake the strategic restoration of our Earth & repair of our human culture.
In 2022, The Wild School offered a world first:
an 8 month Residential Wilderness Program brought together a diverse group of humans, living, learning + unlearning to cocreate an off-grid, ecological cultural village & regenerative camp in the Border Ranges of Australia. Think “Alone” but with Community. Can you imagine?
“I think we may have participated in the greatest thing that’s ever happened, ever.” Nathan Meola aka Bearheart, 2022.
At The Wild School we build an active knowledge base, a culture for sharing & applying ancient, place-based wisdom, with permaculture and regenerative design to restore balance to our earth: locally, bio-regionally, in community.
It’s a complex adaptive system, EMERGENT & you are a main player.
It takes guts.
Complex adaptive systems are a fascinating phenomenon that arise when numbers of individual parts interact and adapt to one another over time. Examples of complex adaptive systems include ecosystems, economies, and the human brain.
These systems are characterized by their ability to evolve through the interaction of their many moving parts, as well as their sensitivity to initial conditions and their capacity for self-organization. For example, in an ecosystem, the interactions between species (such as predators and prey) can cause populations to fluctuate in unpredictable ways. But over time, the system can self-organize and stabilize around a dynamic equilibrium.
The Wild School facilitates the possibility of finding that dynamic equilibrium and of you learning how to generate the same possibility. Can you imagine yourself facilitating emergence or a beneficial trophic cascade?
When you complete our residential program you will be equipped with embodied skills in REGENERATIVE design-leadership-agriculture, Applied Indigenous Thinking, nature-connection mentoring, locally-applied permaculture + ecosystem restoration & holistic event management so you can facilitate your own events and learning opportunities.
Each year The Wild School model adapts to the land opportunities available to us and the needs of our student cohort. The program runs from Spring to Winter (Southern Hemisphere) for approximately 10 months.
The core LEARNING (and un-learning) is always EXPERIENTIAL via the complex frameworks of our dynamic cultural repair model:
The 5 sacred pathways
The 512 Project + 8 Shields
NEW! The 5 Fingers of the Tao
With The Wild School leadership training under your belt, you can be what the world needs: a Village Maker, a designer of complex adaptive systems, a connector to Natures intelligence, and an Embodied and Inspiring Leader.
Join us for the next online or residential leadership program. Apply with your expression of interest now.
Key curriculum at
Wild School
The Wild School provides an immersive training program in nature connection mentoring & holistic village building through the 8 Shields Lineage, the
5 minds of Sandtalk & The Wild School’s own 5 Sacred Pathways. These pathways are the key pillars of a lived, regenerative culture:
Food as Medicine
Nature Connection
Art & Creative Expression
Ceremony & Ritual
Village Making
You will walk these pathways personally, live these pathways as a community & breathe them into reality as a culture.
During the Wild School 9 month residential, you will live in an off-grid eco camp. Think “Alone” but with a village of people and an abundant food supply! It’s a unique-to-place, regenerative, eco-community of practice. Or, you could choose to study online, and you will apply the concepts in your own life and community through regular experiential questing with the frameworks and you will build your community of practice around you.
When you complete our program you will be equipped for leadership, mentoring, regenerative project design and unique team-management. We offer a unique journey in cultural regeneration that you can draw from to design and initiate your own regenerative events, camps and projects.
We call this the 5 Sacred Pathways of Cultural Regeneration supporting healthy Social Ecology - essential to successful regenerative projects.
People and communities around the world are embracing ‘Wild Schooling’ as a Cultural Repair Model for building community and creating the nature connected lives people want to be living and raising their Children in.
The Wild School in Australia brings an intentional student community together each year to live experientially as a regenerative learning village for 10 months.
WILD SCHOOLING provides an immersive learning experience that reconnects people with nature and encourages them to explore their own potential.
It is based on the idea that learning should be an adventure, and that the natural world can be a powerful teacher.
The Wild School encourages participants to take risks, be creative and develop a deeper understanding of the environment and their place in it.
The living wisdom held by the Indigenous Elders of this Earth needs to be urgently passed on to a new generation of capable custodians. The people in the world who are motivated to lead this work are disparate and few.
To succeed they require the time and space to collaborate, synthesise and upgrade their professional and personal capacity to respond to the Earth’s current crisis whilst having direct access to the Elders who carry original custodial wisdom.
The 5 Sacred Pathways
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FOOD AS MEDICINE
This pathway is about fully inhabiting the body to reinstate body as physician- reclaiming our personal relationship to the all providing Mother Earth, and our capacity to heal and thrive in a self-empowered, relational way, with Nature as ally.
Preparing the Body for reconnection to Creation, to Country. This pathway is critical for preparing the body for the journey ahead, and is the foundational pathway.
First food experiences are critical in people’s deep psyche, people embody their trauma through their food experiences. Absorbing culture , maintain or detering connection through the food one eats and the culture around food. Reclaiming and nourishing the epigenetic response and health in relation to place.
This pathway Includes personal dietary questing, detoxing, learning permaculture, herbal medicine, natural remedies, regenerative agriculture, organic cultivation, wild foraging and developing a village food culture.
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NATURE CONNECTION : REWILDING
Nature connection practices and core routines for limbic realignment to the human continuum, for accessing ancestral hardwiring and restoring a deeply connected relationship to Nature.
Reconnecting to nature is the essence of the 8 shields work embedded in the WILD SCHOOL experience.
Core routines, developing relationships with nature, others and self. Grief may arise during this journey - hitting the WALL OF GRIEF to move through it and beyond, connection restored.
Bushcraft, survival skills, foraging, hunting and all the fun and challenging stuff is in this pathway - think “ALONE” with a village.
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ART AS MEDICINE : CREATIVE EXPRESSION
The third pillar of Cultural Repair : Art and Creative practices for healing, self-discovery and personal and artistic expression . In a healthy culture you can express all human emotions and creativity is not separate from your personal expression of self. This comes through art, dance, painting … any creative expression - dance and music are a very important part of village life and expression of PLACE.
Everyone has a unique song , a soul song - a unique part of the collective song of creation - when we sing together, the vibration of that song uplifts the vibration of the Earth.
Everything thrives in the right conditions - positive forward movement. Healthy expression of your true and unique gifts is what this pathway is all about.
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CEREMONY + RITUAL: RECLAIMING CYCLES
Creating and reclaiming the everyday sacred- ritual, celebration and ritualisation of personal and social rhythm and patterns, building new traditions. Liberating habits to intentional ritual.
Advanced connection practices - utilising gifts from spirit to walk towards a spiritual and earth connected life.
Healthy human expression lived as cultural patterns in the landscape. Group energy in conscious connection allows for a direct flow between spirit and earth.
Ceremony offers us a path to humility as we walk with what spirit teaches us, how to live in right-relation with all our relations. This is when we are living into the fullness of who we are and the fullness of our gifts, so that we can each live out our piece of the greater picture of this creation.
EG anyone can be the messenger for the village, and the elders are watching knowing what needs to be enacted, which may be a teaching of the moment or may be something that will be a medicine for time to come.
When this is enacted it will encompass the other paths - a feast, a dance, a season/moon cycle etc
Here we make sense of rites of passage, questing, biological milestones, cycles and rhythms, and gratitude.
How we celebrate life that it may continue - this is our obligation as a human.
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VILLAGE MAKING : THE MEDICINE THE WORLD NEEDS
Description goes Village Making as World Medicine - arriving to the heart of the village with the innocence of a child, restored to nature, kinship and sacred lore, activating the beating living heart of a new village, becoming the Village Maker.
When all other 4 pathways are active in the collective then the lived experience is a living Village. The village arises as individuals embody self responsibility, self actualisation - living fully into their gifts with a clear place and role in the village.
Harmony in diversity is present.
Kanyini Is present. - love and self responsibility
We are then maturing into this place, coming of age, reaching a milestone collectively. This pathway asks: how do we teach the fullness of the cycles? … what do death and rebirth bring to us? … how do we come to know that death truly feeds life? In the fifth pathway we are honouring the cycling of life … through this, the village builds wisdom and develops CULTURE.
CULTURE = “that which works”.
Village making = wisdom making, and wisdom is a lived thing, there is no other way except collective embodiment.
The fruit of this pathway is to be truly seen, heard, understood and loved - in reciprocity. This is true belonging but it requires true vulnerability and deep responsibility of walking the first four pathways.
5 Minds of Sandtalk
(Shared with permission from Tyson Yunkaporta)
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KINSHIP MIND
KINSHIP MIND is about relationships and connectedness. In Aboriginal worldviews nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables - every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated not separated . The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places and senior knowledge keepers is paramount. It facilitates shared memory and sustainable knowledge systems. An observer does not try to be objective, but it is integrated within a sentient system that is observing itself.
REPATTERINING FOR DEEP RELATIONSHIP THAT GENERATES GENUINE TRUST.
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STORY MIND
STORY MIND is about the role of narrative in memory and knowledge transmission. It is the most powerful tool for memorisation, particularly when connected to place. This is how songlines have worked in Australia for Millenia to store knowledge in stories mapped in the land and reflected in the night sky. It includes yarning as a method of knowledge production and transmission. Today it is also about challenging grand narratives and histories.
Approaching nature with ‘Story mind’ generates connection to place more effectively and generates increased knowledge of place through memorisation via metaphor/story. 8 Shields ‘‘story of the day’ core routine is critical to cultivate this cultural practice. The outcome is full participation and practice of your ecological identity. Rembedding yourself within your landscape/place - conscious or responsible participation in the wider story of co-creation.
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DREAMING MIND
DREAMING MIND is about using metaphors to work with knowledge. The circle on left represents abstract knowledge and on the right represents tangible knowledge. Lines above and below represent communication between the physical and non-physical world’s, which occurs through metaphors, being : images, dance, song, language, culture, objects, ritual, gestures and more. Feedback loops between the worlds must be completed with practical action. Creation is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continually unfolding and needs custodians to be continually cocreating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice.
Life is continually co-created, constant creative practice and finding metaphorical expression between spirit and physical worlds strengthens our role as cocreators in a constantly unfolding creation. Understanding your unique ecological niche and role that you're here to embody and express = your purpose.
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ANCESTOR MIND
ANCESTOR MIND - is all about deep engagement, connecting with a timeless state of mind or alpha wave state, an optimal neural state for learning. We can reach this state through most Aboriginal cultural activities. It is characterised by complete concentration, engagement and LOSING TRACK OF LINEAR TIME. Ancestor mind can involve immersive visualisation and extra-cognitive learning such as revealed knowledge in dreams and inherited knowledge in cellular memory.
Ceremony and ritual generate ancestral connection, ancestor mind deepens the experience of ceremony and ritual, the two are symbiotic. Emergence can occur and real spiritual power can be experienced.
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PATTERN MIND
PATTERN MIND is about seeing entire systems and the trends and patterns within them, using these to make accurate predictions and find solutions to complex problems. There are three lines with three sections. Each section represents the line from the kinship mind symbol which is two elements linked by a relationship. You can see at each point a new pair begins linked by a new relationship. It is about truly holistic, contextual reasoning.
Yarning circles are critical to our ability to hold complexity and recognise emergent patterns in the Village. Natural Time, Cycles, Seasons, can all gain their rightful place as our core framework for interacting with a living cosmos. A Cosmological worldview becomes genuinely possible.
The 512 Project
Jon Young is the founder of Living Connection 1st and has dedicated his life to Cultural Repair in deep connection to Nature. He is our friend and mentor since 2011.
“The 512 Project is the culmination of Jon Young’s life work. With 40 years of collaboration with trackers and cultural leaders from around the globe, Jon and his collaborators have distilled the essential Cultural Elements that connect people to people, nature, and themselves.
Jon Young has spent decades distilling the practices that help us create this supportive environment, practices that activate our brain and nervous system for deep connection, and teach us to embrace and empower the best in ourselves and others. In 36 years of dedicated field work and research, in collaboration with countless mentors and elders from around the world, Jon has produced a map of 64 simple and highly effective practices that create this space. These universal cultural archetypes are practiced by traditional cultures across the globe. Each cultural element is practiced on at least three continents. We aren’t teaching culturally specific traditions. We are laying a framework, a universal map of the types of tools that create healthy, thriving and connected culture.”
