Guilds at the Connection Camp

Step into a world where the whisper of the leaves, the dance of the trees, and the warmth of a shared fire guide us back to our true selves. The ‘Nature Culture’ guild, is a sanctuary for those ready to embark on a journey of discovery, connection, and renewal. It is an open invitation to any adults who are on the cusp of rediscovering their innate bond with the natural world.

With open hearts and curious minds, we’ll explore the ancient wisdom of the Eight Shields model and the principles of Cultural Emergence, forging paths to deeper self-awareness, community belonging, and a profound reconnection with the earth.

We will feel the earth beneath our feet with barefoot walks along dew-kissed trails, enjoy playful games to lighten the heart but also weave us into our natural surroundings, fostering laughter and joyous connections between the group.

We will dive deep into sensory experiences designed to sharpen your perception and awaken a sense of wonder and aliveness that modern life often dulls. Through tried and tested activities, we’ll guide you to feel more fully alive, tuned into the earth, the breath of the wind, and the myriad textures of the forest floor. Each moment is an opportunity to deepen your connection, not only with nature but with yourself and the vibrant community that surrounds you.

About Leona

Leona Johnson is dedicated life coach, eco-therapist and nature connection facilitator, deeply committed to fostering connections between individuals, communities, and the natural world, guiding people through transformative journeys towards personal growth and fulfilment with a blend of wisdom, compassion, and authentic connection.

Leona has facilited programmes as part of the Eight Shields Model for the past 8 years throught Live Wild CIC a nature connection organisation based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. 

She is also a facilitator of the Peace, Empowerment and Cultural Emergence Programme (PEACE) and the Cultural Emergence Leadership Training (CELT).

Are you ready to deep dive into nature, melting away from the village into the wilds around it? Embark on a 5 day journey by attending Ancient Scout! Through tried and tested practices honed to revitalise our entire nervous system, we will tap into base line frequency and go on an adventure!

We will cultivate our sensory field as well as inner compass. We will wander across the landscape, move as a herd, a pack or on individual quests. There will be engaging games to explore our edges, activities to challenge us as well as process that will strengthen bonds. 

We will learn concealment and silent movement, routines of invisibility, and play extended games to test and hone our skills.

You will be invited to immerse yourself in – 

• the language of the birds
• holistic tracking
• learning to read the stories of the landscape (outer and inner!)
• the art of invisibility (concealment/camouflage)
• awaken your animal body (primal movement)
• Cultivate internal compass (intuition)

About Kevin Button

Influenced by childhood adventures, Kevin pursued a BSc in Outdoor Education and explored meditation, martial arts, and yoga. After a decade of traveling across Europe and the Americas, engaging in cross-Atlantic sailing, and working on earth-based projects like permaculture and regenerative design, Kevin experienced a pivotal moment during a vision quest in the Andes. This event sparked his formal training in Deep Nature Connection, where he learned directly from traditions that integrate philosophy and mystery in their relationship with nature.

Kevin interned and worked with the renowned Twin Eagles Wilderness School and Purpose Mountain (vision questing) in the States, followed by a year-long apprenticeship at a subsistence farmstead in the Pacific Northwest. Since returning to the U.K., Kevin has collaborated with various nature connection organisations to apply his expertise. He’s a Forest School Leader, trained Survival Instructor, meditation and yoga teacher, and a breath-work and holistic sauna practitioner. Kevin continues to develop his skills and passions, always striving to go on new adventures and learning from accomplished nature-based mentors.

Let your hands be so absorbed in crafting and weaving all week, and find that every little niggling stress drops away, your shoulders sink down, your chin lifts up and the willow works its magic unspoken.

We’ll make a basket or two, oval or round, large or small, into which you might pack all your discoveries of the week, a fitting container of slow release appreciation when home!

The skills I pass on are from the Celtic traditions of making hoops and frames, lashed together with God’s Eyes, ribs woven with different species of willow with their various coloured barks, all organically grown in my Chagford withy bed on the edge of Dartmoor.

The basketry will involve a few basic knife skills, relatively strong hands and there’ll be place for patience and humour a plenty!”

About Linda Lemieux:

I am a Devon basketmaker of some 30 years standing. I ve been involved in the Art of Mentoring since its UK debut in 2009 and led many a Foxes Programme for children on the Camps.

Well attuned to the 8 Shields, I lean on the model in all I do whether teaching archaeology students at Exeter University or foragers on The Old Way, or inspiring young people on Craft and Nature Connection events with my Wild Woods ‘n Willow team.

I’m keen on passing on traditional skills and my experience and doing anything I can to help foster peoples love of our mother earth.

How do we bring the connective culture of the camp into our everyday lives, such that we live within a community culture that truly nurtures our fundamental human needs, every day of the year?  

We will delve into the details of the 8 Shields/Connection Camp village design, with a view to understanding the multiple layers of deliberate threads that comprise the web of connections in the camp.

David SmartKnight

Following a thriving career as an IT consultant, for nearly 30 years David has asked: “What does it mean to live sustainably?”.
This has resulted in studying & applying Permaculture, shamanism, Non-Violent Communication, storytelling, teaching, social enterprise, running a smallholding, planting and managing coppice, making greenwood furniture, keeping livestock and holding ceremonies.  All woven into a joyful second career as an environmental educator, devising and delivering European-wide teacher training programs, creating and piloting school sustainability curricula, establishing two award-winning Environmental Education Centres and running eco-build projects as community empowerment exercises.
David considers himself privileged to have spent time with, and learnt from some deeply inspiring teachers including SunBear, Pat McCabe, Jon Young, Meredith Little, Manitonquat, Satish Kumar and Mac MacCartney.   “Sustainability”, he now believes “is a completely inadequate ambition:  what we actually need is regeneration, which, by necessity, requires both personal fulfilment and social justice.” 
Working as mentor, facilitator, ceremonialist and consultant, David describes himself as a “cultural engineer”, devising and delivering programs designed to build “Regenerative Cultures”.  Amongst numerous other endeavours in recent years this has included working in a team with Jon Young on developing his Connection First programme, consulting with the international sufi order of the Inayatiyya Knighthood council on the development of the Green Rules, and delivering numerous programs in support of Extinction Rebellion, all of it deeply rooted in 8 Shields technologies.
In the past year David has worked on numerous Sacred Fire teams, drawing on Lakota and Odawa lineages and stood in for Jon Young delivering a Rekindling Connection camp alongside Grandmother Shore Charnoe on Manitoulin Island, in Ontario, Canada.

David runs a small environmental education project in West Cornwall, designed to give people the opportunity to drop into themselves as nature, in the form of a human being.

Take a journey to an even deeper connection with the natural world. Listen to what nature and the animals have to say, perceive the true nature and essence of an animal’s unique personality and soul, and discover the world anew from the perspective of the animals.

Mornings will be spent learning the step-by-step processes and techniques to communicate telepathically with other beings. Each day will build upon the skills learned the day before, as you practise with animals you don’t know as well as those in your own life.

Afternoons will be spent out on the land. Explore your newfound abilities as you extend your telepathic sensing to include birds, insects, trees, and whoever else we discover here. You will play with tracking and other nature connection routines, and discover how these support interspecies communication.

Interspecies communication helps us to understand what the more-than-human realms are telling us, allowing us to return to our natural place in the order of things as we work collaboratively and co-creatively with all of life.

About Jacqueline Buckingham

Jacqueline Buckingham is an animal communication teacher and mentor working in Europe, Australia, Africa and online. She began communicating with animals and plants as a child, growing up on the family farm. This profound connection with nature deepened further through her study with aboriginal elders while living in Australia.

As a teacher she was mentored by and worked with renowned animal communicator Anna Breytenbach for several years. She has also studied with indigenous elders from Ecuador and North America.

Jacqueline is passionate about reconnecting people to their love of nature, and helping to restore balance and harmony between humans and the rest of the natural world. www.understandinganimals.org

Join us as we explore the craft of tanning, re-remembering skills that our ancestors understood deeply and used to create the clothing, containers, footwear and more that were essential to life.

Techniques differ all over the world, dependent on place and people. During this week, we will work with fish skins, exploring the process of bark tanning that the people of Britain would have been familiar with. Together we will also learn how to brain/oil tan a deer skin, to make soft and supple buckskin. The focus will be on the tanning process, and there may be a possibility of crafting with the finished leather at the end. 

Each participant will be guided on an individual project, as well as participating in a collective hide tan during the week.

We will work with the trees around us to create a bark tanning solution, and with our hands we will alchemise tree skin and animal skin to create beautiful finished leather. Sharing songs and stories as we work, we will deepen our connection with the trees, animals, our bodies and our ancestors who knew this craft well.

More about Ellie and Owen:

Tanning and working with the gift of the bodies and skins of our animal kin, feels like the greatest honour. For Ellie, it opens a door to connect more deeply, in reciprocity and love, with our kin and with the land. 

Owen, the son of an herbalist mother and a bow and birch bark canoe making father, grew up in the woodlands of Vermont. He attended, and later instructed at Oyase, an eight-shields based nature connection program founded by Mark Morey and Jon Young. In 2011 Owen staffed the teen program at the UK Art of Mentoring at Marcassie Farm – the first of three UK Art of Mentorings he has staffed over the years.

Since then he has instructed at many nature connection programs, sharing his passion for fire making, hide tanning, and foraging with students on both sides of the Atlantic.

Owen enjoys timber framing, acorn pancakes, and rare venison steak.

Soul can be described as the aspect of ourselves, and all animate beings, that is our ‘ecological niche’. The
unique shape, or pattern, that has always existed, that only we, as each individual, can fit into and find
expression through. The way in which we uniquely express ourselves is our unique gift to the world,
which is different to ‘what’ we do. Soul is more concerned with the ‘how’ than the ‘what’.
Soul work, therefore, is the exploration of how we show up consciously as an offering to Life,
as if our place in the complex and miraculous fabric of the wider (and smaller) ecology of the world really
does matter.
The Soul’s home is in wild nature and cannot be accessed from our habitual consciousness. Soul work
offers ways to shift from our habitual consciousness into more open states of consciousness in order to
enter into relationship with the underworld ~ a realm that is deeply alluring to soul and psyche.

Through these days together we will explore different consciousness shifting practices. We might spend time working dreams.  How might our dreams feed the village ?  There will be Deep Imagination Journeys, Embodiment, Wild Mind practices to develop the Facets of Wholeness, practices of reciprocity with the wild others, and journalling.  You can expect time in circle together and time alone with the other-than-humans.  

More about Rebecca

I’m based on the granite and mossed-laden land of Dartmoor where I work as a Nature-based Soul Guide, Human Development Mentor and Cultural Healing Practitioner. I support people to find their authentic selves and to embody wholeness through the body of work developed by Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute cohort with whom I am apprenticing and training in the realms of Soul Initiation.

My passion is to be alongside other humans as we learn together what it means to live as part of the earth’s dream.  To explore different ways of shifting consciousness as a movement towards the greater shift in consciousness I feel is needed at this time. As if our unique expression, our conscious participation is our gift to the world. As if our place here matters.

I guide anyone who is ready through Soul Quests and other practices of the wild by sharing my affinity with the underworld, my love of dreams (both sleeping and waking), journeys into the deep imaginal realm, reciprocity with the other-than-humans and embodiment practices.

I trained with the School of Lost Borders as a Wilderness Rites of Passage Guide and I see all of my work with individuals as part of the collective evolutionary shift that is already happening.

I’m also a trained and experienced yoga teacher and Somatic Educator (School for Body-Mind Centering). I trust the body’s wisdom beyond anything the mind can tell us and this is a guiding principle of my work.

http://naturewisdom.life/

This special guild is an evolution of the Kitchen Volunteers that have been a vital part of every Art of Mentoring and Connection Camp. This year we are framing it as the Food Guild alongside the other Guilds to honour the work and passion it involves, and to integrate the participants into the Camp more.
Participants get a 100% discounted ticket, and can attend the camp for free. Please note, a place in this guild requires you to attend the staff dates of the camp which is 09.00 on Tuesday 5th August to 14.00 on Wednesday 13th August. You are encouraged to arrive on the Monday 4th from 18.00 onwards to give you more time to land and settle in.

Foraging for tea herbs, serving food to people, keeping areas beautiful and clean, baking treats – what lights you up around food?

Led by our Kitchen Culture North and Head Cook, this Guild has a different timetable to the others, with a shift system going through the day to make sure that tasty food is available on time for everyone at the camp. This means that participants will miss some of the whole group circles and other sessions, and will sometimes need to rise early to set up breakfast. There will be opportunities to bring your creativity and skills into the work, using your passions and initiative to shine as you support the village.
Guild members will be introduced to the 8 Shields ‘Acorn Leadership’ model, and invited and supported to hold an Acorn role as part of their learning and experience of the week.

Once we have received your booking request, we shall let you know we have received it. There will be a process with the Food Guild North before places are confirmed. We shall share with you more details as soon as we can. Any questions please do email Emma at [email protected]