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“You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one in which you belong.”
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Claire Dunn
Founder
Claire is a writer, speaker, 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 memoir My Year Without Matches, which tells the story of her year living wild. Her recently released memoir Rewilding the Urban Soul explores how we might embody wild consciousness within a modern city context. Claire lives in Melbourne where she lovingly tends her garden, community and her own wild heart.
Read Claire’s farewell note as she prepares to enter the portal of motherhood.
Emily Coats
Facilitator and Office Alchemist
Emily has been a part of Nature's Apprentice for two and half years and remains grateful for the opportunity to share with the world her passion for deep nature connection, ancestral skills, and soulcentric nature practices such as Vision Quest. She is particularly drawn to 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 for these times in which we live.
Emily's teachers include master tracker Tom Brown, nature connection expert Jon Young and Australian bird language teacher Andrew Turbill, as well as multiple sit spots she has come to love over the last four years.
Emily is also a dancer and experimenting with weaving movement and nature connection practices together. She lives on Wurundjeri country in Warrandyte where she shares her garden with over 50 species of birds. She loves to escape to the bush and sink into Deep Time, practice her skills and apprentice to the mysteries of the wilds.
Daniel Amrein
Facilitator and Vision Quest Guide
Daniel (Dan) Amrein is a carpenter-builder and father of two living in the village of Warburton in the Yarra Valley. Dan’s first Vision Quest was at the age of 16 in the Lakota tradition, and since then the ceremony has been a powerful consistent thread and guiding principle in his life, both as Quester, and Guide.
Dan is passionate about the power of earth-based ceremony in its different forms as a tool for healing and growth. You will often find him running long distances, tending his garden, baking bread, tracking the trails of his mountain home, and spending sweet time with his partner and co-guide Claire.
Yonke van Geloven
Facilitator
Yonke is a mother, teacher, farmer and rewilding facilitator. She facilitates community gatherings on her honeybee, permaculture property ‘La Fleur de Soul’ in Central Victoria such as seasonal celebrations, moon gatherings, olive harvest festival, dandelion festival etc.
She is passionate about deep listening to the sacred wild for healing. Always in wander and wonder, she is co learning the crafts which bring us into deeper relationship with nature and the more than human world.
Caiyloirch Rupert Marques
Vision Quest Guide
My background is in environmental and outdoor education with an emphasis on experiential approaches to exploring ecological identity and personal agency. For several years I trained and guided with the School of Lost Borders (U.S.) in Contemporary wilderness rites of passage, and now offer this work in Europe and occasionally Australia.
The other thread of my livelihood centres on contemplative practice. I have practiced in the insight meditation tradition for over 25 years in Europe, America and Asia, and teach at various retreat centres in Europe and beyond.
In recent years I have sought to bring the fields of contemplative practice and wilderness immersion together. This has been supported by living and working at Ecodharma, a contemplative retreat community in the Spanish Pyrenees dedicated to the movements for social justice and ecological sustainability.
I currently work with individuals and organizations offering a range of retreats and trainings that explore personal empowerment and resilience in service of creating a more just and beneficial human presence on this Earth.
We'd love to hear from you...
Workshops & Events
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“The future must enter you long before it happens”
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This immersive, nature-based leadership program is the first of its kind in Australia. Building from many years’ experience delivering community learning that is grounded in the natural world, CERES and Nature’s Apprentice are coming together to offer a 10-month program that will create the kind of earth-based leadership and resilience we and our communities will need in the coming decades.