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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 most recent memoir Rewilding the Urban Soul explores how we might embody wild consciousness within a modern city context. Claire lives on Wurundjeri country on the banks of the Yarra on the outskirts of Melbourne where she lovingly tends to her partner, children, garden, community and her own wild heart.

Emily Coats

Facilitator, Threshold Crossing Guide and Office Alchemist

Emily 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 cultural visionary Bill Plotkin, 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.

Daniel Skye

Facilitator and Vision Quest Guide

Daniel (Dan) Skye is a carpenter-builder and father of three living on the banks of the Yarra. 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 children and partner Claire.

Yonke van Geloven

Facilitator and Threshold Crossing Guide

Yonke is a farmer, permaculturalist, and passionate nature connection facilitator and vision quest guide based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, central Victoria. As a single mother of three, she stewards a 20-acre permaculture property where she weaves together regenerative land practices, storytelling, and community ritual. Her work invites others into deeper relationship with the land and their own wild selves. 

Yonke’s facilitation style is grounded, playful, and deeply intuitive. She completed Nature’s Apprentice Nature-Based Leadership Training in 2021 and brings a wealth of lived experience in bushcraft, fibre arts, and earth-based ceremony. She is especially passionate about guiding others to reconnect with ancestral skills and the rhythms of the natural world, inviting people to slow down, listen, and remember their place in the great web of life. Yonke was a participant on season 3 of Alone Australia.

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.

Al Jeffery

Threshold Crossing Guide

Al is an integrative psychotherapist, regenerative leadership guide, wanderer and writer endlessly fascinated by the relationship between minds, cultures and Life herself. With family lines from India, Portugal, Ireland and Scotland, and growing up in the ferny hills of the Dandenong Ranges, he’s always carried a deep appreciation for Eastern, Western and place-based ways of seeing and knowing. He’s spent the last 12 years guiding individuals and groups through change, and apprenticing to various teachers and systems of practice such as contemplative psychology, social process design and facilitation, wilderness rites, Insight Meditation and in the last 4 years, the Indo-Tibetan Bön tradition.

Currently, he lives in Thornbury, Naarm and is committed to supporting Naarm’s transition to a life-affirming culture. He co-runs Turning Ground as a lighthouse and lab for place-based personal and cultural renewal. He also serves on the Council at Meditation Australia and semi-regularly teaches meditation in retreat settings.

Bone-deep sure of the need to re-plant our selves, our minds and our cultures back into the breathing earth, if you feel the call, he can’t wait to share in this threshold marking with you.

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