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

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.

Way of the Bear

Pan-cultural Bear MythopoeticS, Tracking & ecology

Yosemite

September 10-14, 2025

Along ancestral paths shaped by both footstep and paw, we’ll journey into Yosemite’s high country—homeland of the Ahwahneechee and other Miwok Peoples—to encounter the teachings of the Bear. For five days and four nights, an intimate circle (up to eleven participants + four guides) will backpack among glacial basins, alpine meadows, ancient forests, and deep clear lakes, walking with wonder, curiosity, and reverence for the living land. This retreat invites us to step into the dreamspace where ecology meets myth. Across the Northern Hemisphere, from the cave art of Ice Age Europe to the healing ceremonies of Siberian shamans and the stories of North America’s first peoples, Bear has stood as a keeper of thresholds—guardian of sleep and waking, of death and renewal, of body and spirit. As we move through bear habitat, we will listen for these deep archetypal echoes, tracking shadowing the Bear not only through physical track and sign, but through story, memory, and our own bodies.

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.

Autumn Enchantment

Ritual Connection with Land & Spirit

October 27 - 31, 2025

Esalen Institute

For thousands of years, autumnal holidays such as Samhain, Hallowe’en, and Vetrnætr have served as ceremonial foundations — connecting pre-modern peoples to landscape, ancestors, and ritual time. Many cultures believe “the veil thins” during this time, letting enchantment flood back into our world. The time is rife with opportunities to renew sacred relationships with the Earth, ourselves, and beings seen and unseen.

As the deciduous trees draw inward to direct energy into their roots, we too may feel drawn to our deeper inner worlds. The Big Sur wilderness — Esselen Tribal territory — is a fertile habitat for mind and spirit, and a potent domain for ritual to support transformation during this liminal season. Approaching the landscape as our teacher and guide, we will engage with the natural world in an embodied ecological context and explore the mythological and psycho-spiritual dimensions of land connectedness.

Wild Pilgrimage

Gestalt Backpacking Pilgrimage to the Esalen Institute

2026 DATES TBA

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

2026 DATES TBA

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…