Growing Roots - yoga and permaculture retreat at Wild Mountains

From the promotional materials:

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"Learn from the Forest as Our Teacher…

Share a nourishing weekend in beautiful mountain forests. Explore the elements of nature and implement these patterns through yoga/ chi kung/shiatsu movements and hands on permaculture gardening.

This seasonal workshop series explores interconnectedness, combining the planting and maintenance of a food forest with movement meditations, bush walking and time to breathe in the mountain air to integrate your experiences.

Bunya Halasz has worked as an ecologist, environmental scientist and Permaculture practitioner for the last 15 years. He is as an educator at Northey Street City Farm, a Yoga Instructor and a Shiatsu practitioner. Will Bulmer is an intern psychologist, yoga teacher, bodywork practitioner and deep ecology facilitator. He is passionate about practices that optimise health, wellbeing and connectedness with the natural world.

Wild Mountains Trust is an environmental education centre situated high in the pristine wilderness of the Border Ranges. Accommodation is in share cabins or camping with exhilarating mountain views. Delicious and nourishing meals are prepared according to macrobiotic principles."

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I'll write more later about these retreats, about Oki-do yoga and about Wild Mountains, but for now here are my thoughts having recently returned from "Growing Roots."

This retreat continues to evolve and has been offered 2-3 times per year for the last few years.  The facilitators are Bunya Halasz and Will Bulmer (see above).  It started as an impulse to begin bringing the mindfulness of practices like yoga and qigong into everyday activities, and so the retreat combines a wide range of activities into a holistic experience.  It was also an attempt to bridge the apparent divide between introspective healing, strengthening and energy work (such as yoga), and outward looking permaculture design activities.  Perhaps the way to bridge these two types of work is to remember, as Philip Carr-Gomm says in The Druid Way, that "nature isn't only outside us." So I could say simply that the retreat offered an opportunity to explore the natural world of forest, mountain, body and spirit.

But as with any really great workshop or retreat, the magic comes in large part from the efforts and intentions of all the amazing people who show up and participate openly.  Not just Will and Bunya as facilitators but Liz and Anaheke making delicious, enlivening biodynamic food, Peter weaving a group practice of musical awareness and of course Susan and Richard, the elders of Wild Mountains and our friendly hosts.  Then there were all the individual participants with their own gifts and stories to share and many with injuries other conditions to tend to.  Thank you to everyone.