The Embodied Ecology retreats provide an opportunity to explore relationship - your relationship to yourself and your own body, your relationship to others and your relationship to earth. We invite you into an exploration of connection, belonging, play, tenderness, vulnerability, curiosity, love, grief and, as the holding element to all of these, presence.

We will soak in the healing goodness and create space for the challenges that come with a return home into our feeling bodies and into relationship with that which we are: nature. We will be drawing from permaculture, ecological principles, biomimicry, biophilia and other nature based practices to tap into the restorative and regulating patterns of the natural world and our own being. We’ll meet the edge of what it truly means, this being human in an individual body, yet part of a collective, an ecosystem, and ecology itself. What is it that’s common to us all and where do we find freedom within the natural boundaries of our existence?

Engage & Connect

For this upcoming summer retreat ‘Engage & Connect’, we will be exploring the nature of our engagement and our intrinsic embodied connection to life. Through our actions in the world we create relationships and affirm our ecological belonging. We will cultivate presence to ourselves and meet the land and people from there. The venue in Tuscany gives us the opportunity to bring the embodied principles and practices into engagement with the land and the local people through volunteering activities in the community.

What to expect?

The week will include workshops, relational practices and a variety of somatic practices such as sound, movement, resourcing, etc. 

Joining our retreat you can expect to embark on a journey that involves sharing, enquiring, contemplating, crafting and connecting with other humans and the more-than-human. We endeavour to create space that allows you to bring all of yourself into relationship with what we are exploring.

While trauma-informed, the retreat is not a replacement for therapy and if you see it as that, please talk to us before signing up. 

The facilitators

Dre Ferdinand is a social worker, therapist and artist whose practices include the integration of movement, energy, sound, soil, and EMDR; modalities that have informed her ‘MESSE’ approach. 

Her practice framework is rooted in healing, social, and restorative justice principles which she integrates in her work. She has been teaching on the Permaculture Design Course with Social Landscapes since 2017 and slowly allowing her practices to merge together, leading to her interest in embodied ecology.  Her soft and gentle teachings are centred on helping people navigate their internal landscape, collective care, and processing trauma. 

She is offering coaching, MESSE wellness services, facilitating workshops and cultivates spaces for observation, listening and reflection to aid in healing. Her work is centred on helping people navigate their internal landscape, collective care, and processing trauma.

Dre has presented at BASW Social Conference on ‘Navigating Burnout’, she has co-created a psychological survey for workplaces, co-hosted the first POC activist Restorative Resilence Retreat as well as the Healing for Healers retreat. She often hosts sound baths or yoga sessions at festivals such as (We Out Here, Black Farmers Market, Reign x Shine, Radical healing).

You can contact Dre at hello@dreferdinand.com or @idreferdi.

Michel Thill is a permaculture teacher, body-oriented coach and practitioner. He has been teaching permaculture since 2012, facilitating community-led permaculture design projects since 2014 and tutoring on the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design since 2021.

His personal interest in yogic and buddhist practices and presence work have led him to explore mindfulness approaches, movement, ecstatic dance and relational therapies and their links to ecology. He has designed and facilitated workshops based on Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects to bring awareness to the relationship between our inner experience and today’s challenges of climate change and social breakdown.

To him embodied ecology is a term that brings these different strands together and gives us an opportunity to explore our intrinsic connection to life, our belonging as ecological beings. He approaches psychology like a forest garden, with many different parts (plants) that play their purpose and role in our internal ecosystem. Presence work allows us to see the forest, not just the trees, and come in touch with the essence of who we are.

You can contact Michel at michel@sociallandscapes.co.uk or @sociallandscapes.

Venue & Directions

The venue is an old monastery from the 11th century, about 7 minutes drive from Siena at the border of the Chianti area. After restoration of the ancient buildings, the owners have decided to offer the resource in service of promoting accessible education by hosting national and international universities and not-for-profit organisations for free. To prevent it from losing its magic the owners would like to keep this space as secret and private as possible, hence details will be shared upon registration.

We can assure you though that we will be treated to comfortable accommodation and delicious and abundant meals. As part of our program, we will take part in some land and food growing activities on their extensive premises and will also do half a day volunteering on a local permaculture project. These activities are well integrated into the topics that we’ll be exploring.

Pricing & Registration

To register your interest in the retreat, please fill the form below. We will then be in touch within a week to complete registration with you.

The full fee for the retreat is £500. We have a pay-it-forward option available of £600 for those feeling more abundant. Those will allow us to offer more concessions to those that cannot afford the full price. The concession price is £400. We also have a couple of bigger concessions available for only £250. Please apply separately for those by emailing us.

The preferred mode of payment is via bank transfer. We will initially require a deposit of £100 which becomes non-refundable by March 31st 2025. The full fee will need to be paid by May 3rd, a month before the start of the retreat. You can pay in instalments leading up to May 3rd, in which case we recommend 5 regular payments of £100.