Edge of the Wild 2019: Our invited guests 

 

Louise Warner lives in West Yorkshire, in the Pennines close to Huddersfield. She has a private practice where she works with small groups, families, couples and individuals in a studio under a Wesleyan Chapel where she lives. She also works with Red Cross within the field of trauma.
Louise completed her Processwork training in June 2015, though she has practised as a therapist /facilitator since 1998 drawing on a background and training in movement / dance therapy, and embodied work, systemic family therapy, supervision and community development. She is increasingly keen to be and work outside in nature with people and draw on the perspective it brings in a world where we have marginalised the earth & environment at a cost.

She has an interested in ‘beyond words experiences’ and curious how our felt sense is often a gateway to becoming more ourselves. She refers to herself as a facilitator with a purpose of making ease in the world. and alongside colleagues offers open forums on world issues to bring more awareness through deepen dialogue.


She is a dancer, dreamer, a feminist, a mother of 3 young adults, a daily yoga practitioner, walker and cyclist of lowlands and highlands, and enjoys cooking and eating with friends & family. She lives in a loose collective where on a small plot of land, bees and hens are kept , fruit and vegetables grown. She loves reading quantum ideas, and can’t recall any of it and sings in the bath.

Nadine Andrews is a psychosocial researcher interested in language and lived experience, and a mindfulness and nature-based coach, consultant and trainer.

Currently working part-time as a social researcher with the Scottish Government, Nadine is also a visiting researcher at Lancaster University’s Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, and a core group member of Green House think tank. She previously worked in the arts & heritage sector and music industry.

Ian Siddons Heginworth lives with his wife and children in Exeter, Devon. He is a leading practitioner, innovator and teacher of environmental arts therapy, a practical ecopsychology that uses the locations, themes, cycles and materials of Nature as its therapeutic media. Ian is a storyteller. He is a drama therapist registered with the U.K. Health Professions Council and has an MPhil in drama. He has recently retired from the NHS after thirty five years, where he was last employed as a specialist practitioner running the Wild Things project, which combined environmental arts therapy with outward bound activities for mental health service users in Exeter. As the founder of Dreamtime Theatre he has led many large community arts workshops, performances and rituals in outdoor locations throughout the U.K and in the U.S. He also runs the Post graduate certificate course in environmental arts therapy at the London art therapy centre and a private practice as an environmental arts therapist in therapeutic woodland around Exeter. He has written two books: Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life and Hairy Tales, a collection of original fairy stories (both from Spirit’s Rest Books), and is currently editing a collection of environmental arts therapy writing for Routledge.

“As an environmental arts therapist I lead people into wild places and ask simply “how are you?” As their story unfolds I notice metaphors that have depth, hold feeling or are pertinent to the month that we are in. I follow the scent, questioning, until a hidden vein of feeling emerges. Then we seek it or make it among the trees, with stone, with wood, with water. There is a dialogue, an exchange, a battle, a revelation. Feeling is released at last. Wounds begin to heal. Things change. Everything we need is there.”

Toni Spencer is a curator with The Emergence Network and leads on the upcoming course Vulture: Courting the Other/wise in a Time of Breakdown. Current collaborations include events exploring practices and possibilities of ‘Deep Adaptation’ and de-colonisation, alongside her ongoing one-to-one mentoring work and personal inquiry in to how to belong in a fractured world. She is a course mentor, trainer and teacher for Call of The Wild with Wildwise /Schumacher College including grief tending, deep ecology and embodiment. Her work engages with different ways of knowing, kinship with that which we usually exclude and a love for beauty in the intimate.

Following her instinct for the margins and the magical, Toni initiated the pause as part of Extinction Rebellion: an invitation to bear witness and to lean in to the liminal in the midst of action. This is part of an ongoing inquiry in to ‘A Politics of Wonder’ and how to invite mystery and curiousity in to the everyday in times of trouble.

As a lecturer and course leader Toni has taught on the faculty of Schumacher College, and at Goldsmiths, University of London (Eco Design), and as a participatory artist and facilitator with Encounters Arts, Embercombe, the Transition movement, St Ethelburgas and others. She is a poet and has taken ‘The Work That Reconnects’ and other creative practices to activist communities at Occupy London and elsewhere. She has an Action Research based MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice and has trained in a diverse range of awakening practices, grief tending, creativity and facilitation modalities, alongside many years of dancing, foraging and ‘living life as inquiry’.

She is a Trustee at ProcessworkUK.

www.tonispencer.co.uk

www.emergencenetwork.org

Edge of the Wild 2019: The organising group

James Barrett

James is a psychotherapist, in Leamington Spa.  His practice has roots in Jungian culture, relational psychoanalysis, energy psychology and shamanism. He enjoys shifting confusion, pain and trauma to comprehension, with clients. He loves the matrices of biosemiosis, (all matter nattering and mattering), imaginal windows, the vigour of listening and recognition; changing the extraordinary to the beautiful ordinary.

Ned Henderson

I am an Integrative Body Psychotherapist living and practising in Norfolk. Through our connectedness to our bodies we contact and recognise our fundamental relationship and interdependency with the earth. I see disturbances in embodiment as contributing massively to damaging and exploitative patterns of relationship which have led to severe environmental crisis and species extinction. My interest is in supporting embodiment and healthier relationships with ourselves, other humans and the other than human.

Matthew Henson

I describe myself professionally as an existential psychotherapist, ecopsychologist, group facilitator and trainer; qualified and experienced in each of those areas. What that means in practice is that I am motivated to offer and develop the kinds of therapeutic intervention that I have been fortunate enough to personally benefit from. I have been involved with this meeting at the edge of the wild as a regular participant, workshop facilitator and occasional organising group member since the first event in 2012. I am particularly interested in what it means to practice psychotherapy at this time of global ecological crisis and in the application of existential-phenomenology in facilitating healthy human-nature connectedness.

Laurie Michaelis

Laurie is involved in several communities of inquiry into sustainable human flourishing and is particularly concerned with the ways we develop individual and collective agency in relation to climate change. He has been a Lead Author for several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and since 2002 he has co-ordinated Living Witness, a Quaker charity supporting spirit-led approaches to sustainable living. He now works mostly with Quakers, Global Ecovillage Network and Living the Change, an international faith initiative for sustainable living.

Rachel Morrell

Whilst studying Psychology at Bournemouth University I was privileged to study Ecopsychology under Paul Stevens in my final year. This was like a light bulb switching on in my head as I felt the culmination of what I felt spiritually, saw in the natural world and what I knew to be true of the human mind. I am the Supervisor at Lakeside Care Farm for Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. We support children and young people with additional needs, and those who are at risk of being excluded/have been excluded from school, using forest school and animal/horticultural therapy. 

Nick Totton

I’m a body psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor in private practice, living in Cornwall for nearly six years now. I’ve been actively involved with ecopsychology since the 1990s, and wrote a book about it, Wild Therapy (PCCS Books) and co-edited another one. Vital Signs (with Mary-Jayne Rust, Karnac Books); as chair of PCSR I was involved in organising the first couple of Edge of the Wild gatherings, and have attended nearly all of them. I feel very committed to basing the work and the event in our own process, and the Dream Matrix is a great way to do that.