Somatic Ecotherapy: Wild Reverence is a five-month experiential training that weaves together the intelligence of the body with the healing power of the natural world.
Rooted in somatic inquiry and ecotherapy, this program offers an immersive journey into embodied presence, nature-based practice, and relational healing.
Designed for practitioners, guides, and facilitators, this training supports anyone who feels called to work with others in partnership with the more-than-human world.
Through guided practice, experiential learning, and spacious inquiry, you’ll gain practical tools to hold space for transformation — in yourself and in those you guide — within the wider field of ecological relationship.
Cultivate the depth, awareness, and embodied presence needed to hold space for complex human experiences in relationship with land, body, and psyche. This training supports you to work with the whole person — through sensation, perception, imagination, and relational presence — rather than technique alone.
This is not a passive or purely theoretical course. You’ll engage in live, guided practices, nature-based ceremony, somatic explorations, and reflective dialogue — all within a community of like-hearted participants and skilled facilitators.
Whether you’re a therapist, coach, facilitator, or space-holder, this program offers a professionally enriching pathway — one that deepens your own embodied awareness while equipping you to support others from a deeper place of presence and care.
Somatic Ecotherapy is not your typical classroom. It opens a doorway into the teachings of wild spaces — where the body becomes compass, and relationship with the more-than-human world unfolds as a living source of wisdom.
Whether you’re guiding individuals or groups, this program invites you to slow down, awaken your senses, and learn how to enter into conversation with place.
Through immersive practices, nature-based ceremony, and the shared container of your learning cohort, you’ll deepen your capacity to listen — to body, land, and field — and to guide from that listening.
At the heart of this program is the Five Terrains Framework — a poetic, developmental pathway designed to guide you into somatic regulation, imaginal healing, and deep ecological reconnection.
Over the course of five months, you’ll journey through these terrains in a narrative arc that moves from wild ceremony to embodied conversation with place.
Each terrain offers not only a thematic focus, but a set of practices that awaken the body, attune you to the land, and deepen your capacity for presence and inner listening.
The threshold of initiation. We enter through ceremony, intention, and sacred orientation — slowing down, opening to mystery, and listening with the whole body.
A soft landing. Through breath, grounding, and sensory presence, we soothe the nervous system and begin to attune to the subtle language of the living world.
The realm of shadow, memory, and myth. In relationship with the land, we meet the hidden, wounded, or exiled parts within — calling them home through embodied listening and sacred imagination
The terrain of belonging. Here we remember our place in the web of life through Earth-based practice, deep time, and reverent witnessing — softening the edges of self into something vaster and more relational.
The edge of the known. While lightly touched in this training, this terrain opens toward transpersonal space — where soul, silence, and sacred unknowing begin to stir. It is an invitation into awe, presence, and surrender.
Drawing on the depths of the Five terrains framework, this training invites you into a sustained, embodied relationship with the practices, the land, and the field of learning held by the group.
Over five months, you’ll move through a carefully held arc of inquiry and experience, designed to support both personal integration and the development of your capacity to guide others.
What unfolds is not a linear curriculum, but a living process — one that asks you to listen closely, move at the pace of the body, and allow relationship with place to shape how the work is received and expressed. This shared container becomes the heartbeat of the training, grounding everything that follows.
At its core, Somatic Ecotherapy: Wild Reverence is a shared journey — a sacred container where all participants begin together, rooted in relationship, reflection, and deep listening.
The program unfolds through:
16 live Zoom classes exploring somatic and ecotherapeutic principles
3 immersive ecotherapy walks to embody the work through lived, land-based experience
The poetic arc of the Five Terrains Framework, guiding you through a soulful narrative of remembering, reconnection, and rewilding
This shared foundation creates a rich, cohesive learning community — a place to be witnessed, to listen, to remember.
This training is for those called to hold transformational space for people to awaken through embodied connection with land and the more-than-human world.
It is designed for therapists, coaches, facilitators, and space-holders who feel drawn to the work of cultural repair and relational healing — and who wish to embody the practices of somatic ecotherapy before offering them to others.
Through this program, you’ll cultivate a living, reciprocal relationship with the Earth while learning to hold space with grounded presence, trauma sensitivity, and ecological reverence. Immersive teaching is paired with experiential practice, mentorship, supervised facilitation, and reflective inquiry — ensuring that your understanding is both embodied and skillfully applied.
By the end of the training, you will have developed the presence, confidence, and discernment needed to guide somatic ecotherapy experiences in service to others, the Earth, and the living web that holds us all.
This training invites you into an earth-based way of holding space, where attuned presence holds the entire field.
Through immersive practice and mentorship, you’ll strengthen your capacity to guide others with your feet placed reverently on the earth, allowing the land to become an active partner in the work you offer.
What’s included:
This training is for those called to be of service in this turning of the wheel — to offer crucibles of healing, growth, and reconnection on the land, in partnership with our more-than-human kin.
This training is for you if:
Whether you’re feeling a deep pull or a gentle curiosity, we invite you to take the next step into Somatic Ecotherapy: Wild Reverence.
Step onto the path — and let’s walk it together
Rob Engels is a somatic psychotherapist, ecotherapist, and guide to the inner wilderness. He brings decades of lived inquiry into the deep terrains of psyche, soma, and soul — walking his own initiatory path while accompanying others to find theirs.
Through his work with Ancient Ground, Rob offers earth-based pathways of healing, listening, and initiation that restore embodied presence and sacred relationship with the more-than-human world. He is a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and founder of the Somatic Ecotherapy Guide Training, mentoring practitioners to remember their deeper belonging within the web of life.
Drawing on depth psychology, mythopoetic process, somatic practice, and rites of passage traditions, Rob’s teaching invites students to follow the intelligence of the body into wholeness and into living conversation with land and soul. His approach is deeply experiential, grounding learning in psychological and somatic depth, sensory presence, and the mythic imagination.
A certified meditation teacher and Focusing trainer, Rob shares practices of inner listening and somatic inquiry that deepen self-awareness, human wholeness, and transpersonal exploration. His work is informed by long immersion in diverse wisdom traditions, including Kagyu-Nyingma Buddhism, non-dual teachings, and the Diamond Approach — reflecting a lifelong devotion to truth and inner freedom.
Rob is also a senior facilitator of the Kiloby Inquiry Method, a pioneering paradigm in trauma-informed healing that works directly with emotional repression — a factor increasingly recognised as underlying many difficult-to-treat conditions, including anxiety, chronic pain, addiction, and depression. In 2021, he co-founded the Blue Mountains Men’s Group as part of his commitment to fostering connection, kinship, and cultural repair.
He lives, works, and wanders on Dharug and Gundungurra Country in the Blue Mountains of NSW, and is the father of two girls who continually remind him what it means to love and belong.
| 2026 | Start Date | End Date |
|---|---|---|
| Course | Wednesday 4th November 2026 | Wednesday 21st April 2026 | Holiday Break | Wednesday 16th December 2026 | Wednesday 20th January 2027Wednesday 20th January 2027 |
| Weekly Zoom Class | Wednesdays 6pm – 8.15pm AEST | Optional Retreat | 4th June 2027 | 7th June 2027 |
| DETAILS | FEES |
|---|---|
| Full Price | $5,520 |
| Early Bird Price (10% discount) | $4,980 |
| Alumni Price (15% discount) | $4,692 |
Metavision Alumni: Discount available to graduates
Deposit: $500 is required to hold your place, this is deducted form the total cost.
Early Bird Price of 10% is available to students who enrol before the 30th September 2026 (Does not apply to the retreat)
Payment plans are available enabling students to pay fees monthly installments.
| DETAILS | FEES |
|---|---|
| Full Price | $5,520 |
| Early Bird Price (10% discount) | $4,980 |
| Alumni Price (15% discount) | $4,692 |
Metavision alumni: discount available to graduates 1-2 year programs (not alumni 15% conjunction with early bird pricing. 1- or 2-year programs not apply to the retreat)
Early Bird Price of 10% is available to students who enroll before the 30th of Jan 2025 (Does not apply to the retreat)
($150— credit card fee may be applied) secure your place in the course
Payment plans are available enabling students pay fees monthly installments.
If you’re curious to experience this work before stepping into the full training, we invite you to watch our masterclass with Rob Engels — an introduction to somatic ecotherapy as a lived, embodied practice.
If you feel the call — whether to step into your own healing or to guide others — we invite you to step into this journey of body, land, and soul.
Somatic Ecotherapy arises within a continuum of earth-based wisdom carried across cultures and generations. We honour the enduring guidance of First Nations peoples worldwide, whose relational ways of knowing land, body, and spirit continue to shape this work. We acknowledge the Dharug, Gundungurra, and Wiradjuri peoples on whose unceded lands much of this teaching takes place, and give thanks to Uncle David King for his generosity of spirit and wisdom.
We also honour the Four Shields lineage, traced by Hyemeyohsts Storm to Mayan cosmology and carried forward through the School of Lost Borders and the vision fast tradition.
Ecotherapy and embodied listening do not emerge from a single source, but from a living stream of nature-connected cultures who have understood that healing unfolds in relationship — between body and land, psyche and place. Beyond all human lineage, we recognise the land herself as teacher, in whose living reciprocity this work continues to deepen.
No prior experience in somatic work or ecotherapy is required. This program is open to both practitioners and those on a personal healing path. The training allows you to enter at the depth that feels right for you, with guidance and support provided throughout.
Yes. The training is specifically designed for therapists, coaches, facilitators, and space-holders who wish to integrate somatic and nature-based approaches into their work. The training emphasises trauma sensitivity, ethics, embodied presence, and ecological reverence.
No. All practices are designed to be accessible in local parks, gardens, beaches, bushland, or other nearby natural spaces. The work invites relationship with place, rather than requiring any particular landscape or level of remoteness.
No. The retreat is a powerful invitation for deeper integration and community, but it is optional. Certification does not depend on attending the retreat, and the full training can be completed online.
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Metavision Institute is deeply grateful to the traditional custodians for their continuous custodianship and care of this unceded land and, specifically, Turrbal Country on which we live and work.
Read more about our Reconciliation Action Plan
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Provider Number: PRV14327
CRICOS Provider: 04454D
Our higher education courses are not offered to international students studying in Australia on a student visa.
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