Wildtender offers immersive, educational wilderness programs that cultivate kinship with the natural world, embody earth-based wisdom traditions, nurture authenticity & wholeness of self, engender meaningful community, and foster ecological stewardship.

Upcoming Programs

Wild Pilgrimage

Gestalt Backpacking Pilgrimage to the Esalen Institute

April 28 – May 4, 2025

Big Sur / Esalen Institute

In the mountains east of Esalen, an enchanting, ecologically diverse, and psycho-spiritually fertile wilderness awaits. Over four nights and five days, we will engage in a contemporary form of pilgrimage, and immerse in practices and perspectives from Esalen's Gestalt lineage, while backpacking as reverent seekers through these ancestral lands of the Esselen Tribe, now known as the Big Sur backcountry. Our journey will conclude at the coastal grounds of Esalen Institute with a weekend of reflection and integration…

Wild Dharma

Zen Backpacking Pilgrimage to the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center

May 9 – 16, 2025

Big Sur / Tassajara

Following in the philosophical footsteps of the ancient, hermetic Zen sages, we will turn to the mountains in pursuit of a wild Dharma (timeless Buddhist wisdom) that is embodied and expressed by boulders, grasses, trees, and all aspects of the wild landscape. Our four-night backpacking journey through the mountains will deliver us to Tassajara to participate in a three-night sangha retreat including formal Zen instruction, light service work (three hours per day), hot spring baths, delicious vegetarian cuisine, integration, and rest…

Sangha of the Wild

Cultivating Kinship with the Tassajara Wilderness

May 21 – 25, 2025

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center

Just beyond Tassajara’s gate, another luminous temple vibrates with aliveness, calls out for our veneration and presence, and overflows with timeless wisdom: the Ventana wilderness. Suzuki Roshi, founder of Tassajara, regarded this landscape as a potent habitat for awakening and the beings within it as fellow practitioners: “although we practice with people, our goal is to practice with mountains and rivers, with trees and stones, with everything in the world”. In this retreat, we will embrace gestures of reciprocity and kinship with the wild. We will form a Sangha of mutual support with the land, our wild relatives, and one another, cultivating relationships for our collective ecological and personal well-being. Through contemplative hiking on rugged and diverse wilderness trails, we will attune ourselves to the living presence of our more-than-human kin—plants, animals, boulders, waters, winds. We will engage in Buddhist and non-Buddhist practices to cultivate awareness of the world as it actually is: alive, aware, and interconnected. And we will encounter ourselves as members of a vast, sacred family of beings, communing in the temple of the wild that has awaited our return.

Wild Kinship

Hiking and Connection with the Big Sur Wilderness

June 2–6, 2025

Esalen Institute

The natural world – in all its arresting beauty and enchanting complexity – calls out for our presence and reverence.There are subtle currents of communion and communication happening all around us; the land and wild beings beckon us into expanded states of sensitivity, reciprocity and fellowship. Immersed in the wilds of Big Sur, and the beautiful grounds of Esalen, we will cultivate our fundamental connection with the land. Through practices of sensate engagement, earth-based ritual, and mindfulness, we will build relationships with this place and our other-than-human kin. We will traverse physical hiking trails alongside the trails of intuition, affinity, and imagination. Following our innate curiosity, we will grow our ecological knowledge and uncover the stories of the mountains, waters, animals, plants, and fungi that live around us.

The Plants Who Know Us:

Traditions of Botanical Kinship

August 25–29, 2025

Esalen Institute

For hundreds of thousands of years, plants have been humanity’s greatest allies, shaping culture in material and spiritual ways. Across the Northern Hemisphere, a shared cohort of plants has profoundly influenced human existence, providing sustenance, medicine, textiles, and more. Honored as wise relatives, they carry mythic and spiritual significance across diverse cultures, forming a thread of kinship connecting our ancestors across continents and histories. Though modernity has painfully estranged us from the expansive web of relationality that our ancestors shared with the more-than-human-world, we can reclaim our “inalienable belonging to the earth community,” in the words of Joanna Macy. Meeting our botanical kin with curiosity and intention is a gesture toward restoring this enchanted ecological paradigm.

Earth-Body:

 An Eco-Somatic Backpacking Journey and Retreat

October 7-12, 2025

Big Sur / Esalen Institute

Rooted in the Gestalt traditions of Esalen and the emergent field of eco-somatics, our four-day backpacking journey will guide us through the wilds of Big Sur—Esselen tribal territory—in an immersive exploration of belonging, awareness, and interconnection, followed by a weekend of retreat and integration at Esalen Institute. While trekking through awe-inspiring wilderness, we will engage in somatic practices that reawaken our felt kinship with the natural world. Embracing slowness and spaciousness, we will attune to gravity, breath, and the sensuous aliveness of place. Silent hiking, intuitive movement, meditation, and earth-based ritual will dissolve the false boundary between self and landscape. Exploring embodiment as an intimate community, we will move beyond notions of individual self-care to a lived experience of healing as relational and ecological. Through this retreat, we step into a different rhythm—one guided by the living world around and within us. As we listen with our whole bodies, we begin to sense the reciprocity woven into all things. What emerges is not just connection but remembering—a return to a relationship as ancient as our true body: the Earth.