Join us on an immersive year-long journey through the five elements of nature: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal and learn how they reflect and affect your own inner landscape. Each element has its own season, emotions, qualities and wisdom.
Through nature connection, creative practices, personal reflection, movement, meditation and shared experiences in stunning locations around the bay, you’ll explore how this ancient and eternal cycle can support your health, understanding and flourishing, along with that of our planet.
This is a space to engage with the wider systems and cycles of life, to reconnect with our beautiful Bay and our shared, evolving story, as we celebrate the depth and complexity of being human.
Our Journey with Wood – Spring 2026
As the light returns and sap begins to rise, we turn toward the element of Wood, the energy of spring, growth, vision and new beginnings. Wood invites us to stretch, to imagine, to act, and to align with what feels morally true. Through movement, nature connection, creativity, systems thinking, and reflective enquiry, we’ll explore flexibility and courage, anger and compassion, and the quiet intelligence of plants and forests.
Set in beautiful local venues at the height of spring, this course offers space to root into place while reaching toward possibility. Together we’ll explore our relationship with the green world — from deep time plant evolution to biodiversity loss, asking how we might grow in ways that are life-giving for ourselves and the wider living system.
Session 1 – Orders of Plants: Growth and Flexibility
TBC – 11th April 2026 – 10–4pm
We begin with the plants themselves. Exploring the evolution and succession of plant life across deep time, we’ll consider how diverse species collaborate, communicate, and create resilient ecosystems, and what is happening now to the living systems we depend upon. In Chinese Medicine, Wood is associated with the Liver and Gall Bladder, vision and direction; the Liver, the only organ that can regenerate, reminds us of nature’s extraordinary capacity for renewal.
Through gentle movement, craft, meditation, and connection with plants, we’ll enquire: Where are we growing? How flexible are we? This day opens us to noticing the systems we are embedded in, while quietly strengthening body and imagination for what might come next.
Session 2 – Food & Medicinal Plants: Anger, Courage and Moral Compass
Manor Gardens & St. Matthias Church, Torquay – 18th April 2026 – 10–4pm
Spring carries the emotions of Wood: anger and the lack of anger, courage, hope and control. We’ll explore how these emotions can both inhibit and inspire us, and how we might work skilfully with them. We’ll explore wild and medicinal herbs and the central role of plants in food chains and human survival.
Through yin yoga, journalling, foraging, planting, and reflection, we’ll ask: How do I align my actions with my moral compass? Building on our first session, this day invites us to imagine life-giving possibilities rooted in courage and compassion.
Session 3 – The Forest: Calling, Systems and Compassion
Sticklepath Village Hall, Dartmoor – 25th April 2026 – 10–4pm
Our final gathering takes us into the forest. Here we step back in time, into the remnants of ancient woodland, listening for what it can teach us about endurance. We’ll explore the human systems we are part of and the ways they have become brittle and unyielding, before considering how we might respond with flexibility and care.
Through an empathy walk, forest bathing, art, compassion practice and shared reflection, we’ll ask: What is my calling? What is the work I can’t not do? This space bridges present systems and emerging possibilities, helping us clarify direction while staying rooted in relationship with the more-than-human world.
Spring is a time of stretching toward the light. This journey with Wood is about growing with flexibility and strength, individually and collectively, in service of a flourishing Earth for all life.
Cost: It is our heartfelt wish to offer this course as authentically as we can and to anyone who is drawn to it. Therefore, we are offering it based on Dana. Dana is an ancient Pali word meaning generosity or giving and comes from the Buddhist tradition.
In practice, it means that at the end of the course, you will be asked to consider the value of the experience and teachings you have received and give what you can to ensure that courses can continue for others. There is no set price – just like all other aspects of our lives, each of our financial circumstances is unique. In the Dana tradition, the amount is less significant than the intention to enhance the lives of others. This is an intention which has kept the Buddhist tradition alive for the last 2,500 years, it is a commitment to our Collective well-being.
See all courses here
Open to the Elements A Quest for Personal & Planetary Well-being