Natasha Lythgoe - The Art of ReWilding

Hi, it’s me.
My resistance to marketing is at an all lifetime high, and yet I managed to write a thoughtful newsletter.

It includes links to my latest article on Creativity and Animism (I have in fact been writing much more these days). The first of three articles on Animism and my work.

Plus musings on where Buddhist practice might meet Vision Questing | Wilderness Vigils.

The link is below in the comments.

Blessings on a day where stress about local elections are high for UK folks.

This image and quote sums up one of the most precious gifts of participating in a wilderness vigil also known as vision quest.

The Art of Rewilding’s upcoming Vision Quest- with some places available (so far we are all men) - is going to be in Scotland at the end of August | beginning of September.

If you’d like an informal chat with my co-guide or myself don’t hesitate to reach out.

We offer a sliding scale rate to accommodate a variety of incomes and two bursary places.

Sent from walking the local fields listening with glee to northern lapwings who I am told are also called peewits…

———
With both words and image, I couldn’t have said this any more succinctly. Though I may have changed the word watch to sense...

If you’ve visited my website you’ll know that being succinct is not my way 😉

With thanks to for inviting us to guide this quest.

Thanks to for these words and an artist who I will name in the comments for this incredible spring vitality.

Last year the Eshwege Institut asked Werner and I to guide their International Vision Quest at Findhorn.

We had a wonderful inter-generational community spanning from 20 to nearly 70!

Hopefully you can see the joy, and play and depth of our time together in these photos.

We are coming back this August so if you know any folks who might want to join please do pass on our details which are in the comments below.

love from me

- a gorgeous quote from one of my heroes, Stephen Buhner
Hildegard of Bingen cleverly combined two Latin words: veritas and verde - truth and green - to make one word. It’s a word that means - allatthesametime - the living intelligence of the green world and the sacredness that can be found there. It’s a path filled with soul shaping as old as First Man and First Woman.

I sent a rare newsletter out at the weekend. Here's part of what I shared...

It’s been a week of interesting conversations.

A big thank you to the beautifully articulate Rachel Blackman for instigating my reflections around the concept of synthesis during a lovely shared cuppa earlier this week. Synthesis has its roots in the Greek word Suntithenai which means simply ‘to place together’.

Aged 38 I had the most amazing dyslexia support tutor (Tim Stephens) and every so often he would try and articulate how my mind works so that I could better write my thesis for the understanding of the reader, “Your mind works like a high flying bird who can survey different fields at the same time and make new links between them,” he would say. “Now spell those links out to the readers.”

Speaking with Rachel prompted this memory and the sense that my dyslexia is at the root of my ability and enjoyment in synthesising seemingly separate territories.

“You are a Jack of all trades and a master of what binds them”

The reason I am telling you this is that through facilitating my Murmurations Mentoring programme for the last three cohorts I’ve experienced a surprisingly natural synthesis of my backgrounds in Somatics, Wilderness guiding, a decade of tracking my own mytho-poetic threads and my Buddhist practice.

The first three areas were already blending together well but the Buddhist bit has been a bit late to the synthesising party and slower to integrate. Besides the natural fit with presence and interconnection I’ve been realising there’s more specific buddhist practices that are seriously helpful for vision questing.

What’s curious to me is that latest synthesising (which is still in process) came in quite effortlessly - after a longer period of years where I often sat with a perplexed curiosity around particular connections. For example, the meeting place between Buddhist practice and rites of passage, or our modern conditioning and animist world views.

It takes a lot of ongoing effort to articulate these crossovers and guide people through them experientially. I must sheepishly admit I do feel protective of the specific practices I've developed, as they focus more on the 'How to' than the 'What to do'. There does seem to be plenty of information available about the 'What to do' in nature-based practices, but very little on the vital 'How to' engage with them experientially—which is where, I believe, the true aliveness happens. This focus on the 'How to' is the core of the Murmurations Mentoring program.

By bridging these territories, the purpose is to help people go deeper into their own experience. Hopefully, this brings greater depth and nuance to engaging with the traditional practices that have been central to ancestral human nature throughout history.

Clearly connecting with nature through myth and ritual, forest and fire, with the earth as our bed and the stars as our blanket is not of my own making. Our ancestors lived as kin amongst kin for vast swathes of time. But as modern beings bought up in a materialistic world view it takes ‘a something’ to experientially recover an attitude or way of being that perceives the natural world as deeply alive.

Tuning in… listening in for the conversation between 'life-ing as me' and 'life-ing as natural world' - a conversation imbued with embodied wisdom from goat-speak, rock-speak, horizon-speak, snake-speak and more. Entering into this great participation, a soulful practice of reciprocity, of following our soul-threads, listening to the wild tongues from within and all around…

Something in me is curious about my seemingly selfish longing for ‘authorship recognition’ for this body of bridging practices. I wonder if it is because I haven’t gotten around to writing that bl**dy book about my work. Anyhow, that's another conversation...

With Murmurations I offer an unfolding process that is about the individuals in the group and their specific unfolding journeys - it is personal and participatory by nature.

Like many, I have a certain amount of zoom fatigue but I have realised that if my presence counts this isn’t an issue for me. This is why I keep my group numbers so small. It is deliberate - not for my bank balance - but for the intimacy and involvement factor.

My new dates for next year are now live. We begin in April 2026.

I'll be very interested to see how my much longer retreat at the beginning of the year informs the 2026 journey. I'll put the link in the comments if all this sounds intriguing and you want to find out more.

love from me on this wintery afternoon xx

Here is my latest newsletter. In it you'll find:

Finding our way back to being dreamt by earth. Something on my Murmurations Six Month Mentoring Programme which now has its very own Men's cohort,

a documentary recommendation about Men's Group Work,

a poem for today called, Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse,

and a document about the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland

(thanks to Claire Heron for the inspiration with the engravings)

love Natasha

Spring News A friend shared recently about Margaret Wheatley who works to create organisations and communities worthy of human habitation. She speaks of creating 'islands of sanity’. This Murmurations Programme has most certainly become an Island of Sanity and a Community of Sanity.

If you have Women Who Run With Wolves on your bookshelf you may be interested in the unfolding myth of your life and how to apply that within community.

Exploring our unfolding myth alongside oral story telling traditions are an important element of my rites of passage work because this realm is completely interwoven with the mirror of nature.

The mirror of myth wakes us up to the big questions and reveals to us the dormant part of our lives.

We are steeped in this territory right now at the halfway point of Murmurations. My six month group mentoring programme in deep nature connection.

If you’d like to register interest for the next cohort please go to my website:
https://www.theartofrewilding.com/murmurations

AND I heartily recommend the book ‘Gertrud’ by the artist who uses photography to reconfigure the history of the Swedish witch-hunts. These images are from this book.

Reflections from Blue Earth Summit

I may write a few of these. This is my first.

I was unexpectedly and pleasantly surprised that this card from my selection of business cards was the most popular.

I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that the AMAZING compostable packaging that looks identical to plastic, created and produced by Amir Afshar and Shellworks was in fact discovered in the 1940's. Apparently it's the slightly higher cost that keeps plastic being bought over this product. Geez!

I was delighted to meet with Navjot Sawhney who created The Machine Washing Project which aims to supply the incredible flat packed off-grid clothes washing machine to some of the 5.6 billion people who still hand wash their clothes spending on average 20 hours a week.

And I was shocked by the generosity offered to me by this man Carl Rowlinson. I apologise again for the look in my face Carl, when you said you would help me - not by way of transaction - but because you believe in what I do. There was SACRED ECONOMY being embodied right there.

I will write about the incredible group of women who I presented with, as Our Wilder Selves, at the summit, a little around what we offered and how it was received. But for now, this.

warmly, Natasha

In my latest newsletter my husband told me NOT to use the photo I made on the shores of Denmark because he finds it morbid but I’ve decided to keep it because it speaks to me of that beautiful liminal territory embodied by both mist and ocean - and what can emerge from leaning into these formless | not yet known spaces.

Over the past few years, I have been reflecting and creating in response to the theme of inscendence which I’ve also called following the river underground. If you read my sporadic newsletters you might remember me writing about an encounter with a womb cave in my Grandmothers garden. I’ve been following this thread in various forms and this brings me to…

In the Belly of the Night, This is Geeta’s & my offering in January in Sweden, where we’ll be sharing about how we might, in relation with the rhythm and the cycles of the whole year, court the winter. And cultivate a deeper listening, a curiosity and sensitivity to what she has to say. Those of you who remember my no-moon night gatherings on the south downs called Romancing The Dark will already have a sense of this territory.

What Geeta and I are dreaming into is a collective mid-winter ritual, a nest to gather together and connect to that space of hibernation and gestation during the darkest months. Entering in the belly of the earth, into a kind of dreaming den (in the sauna that floats on the lake at our venue).

If you’d like to know more about this territory please join Geeta and I on our TWO FREE TASTER SESSIONS (with no pressure to sign up to anything).

THE MEDICINE WE NEED IS IN OUR WILD (Natasha)

22nd OCT at 6.30PM UK

Join us for an informal introduction to the four directions medicine wheel, also known as the nature based map of psyche, where I'll share why we might want to court Winter.

YIELDING UNDERLIES ALL MOVEMENT (Geeta)

5th NOVEMBER at 6.30PM UK

An exploration of initiating movement from a place of stillness.

TO BOOK on this either email me via my website or go to the newsletter called Hibernation & Dreaming Dens and you'll find the links inside there:

https://www.theartofrewilding.com/campaigns/view-campaign/6ML5cApenjcHC0hcZW36P51POqhurCog3zPlAbm059WrRSw-na8_StBDr4W8qN4CKTTc-iyovitQaPxuCdtong6y5PohFkrv

It is more than twenty five years since I first stepped foot in this retreat centre and finally I have come to run a full week here, in this very place, within this sangha that has helped me transition over many, many years.

Here is a photo of Much Silliness at the end of seven days together.

Don’t underestimate playfulness, uselessness and joy in the spiritual life.

20 beauties (not all in this pic)
7 days
Buddhist practice woven with Gendlin’s Focusing and Animism

My work is done for this week and I am pooped, and a teensy bit proud.