About Ancient Ground
Ancient Ground was born from a shared recognition: that many of the places where humans once listened, healed, and marked life’s thresholds have quietly disappeared — and that something essential is lost when the body, the land, and the sacred are no longer in conversation.
Founded by two long-time practitioners of earth-based, somatic, and ceremonial work, Ancient Ground exists to restore conditions where listening can happen again — slowly, relationally, and in living dialogue with the more-than-human world.
Meet Our Founders
Akua Gutierrez is a breathwork and shamanic healing practitioner, as well as a wilderness solo guide, who leads earth-based, self-generated ceremonies that awaken ancestral remembering and inner wisdom. Her work is rooted in presence, ritual, and a deep trust in the healing intelligence of nature and the human spirit.
Over the past 12 years, Akua has walked a path of reconnection — to self, to others, and to the land — guided by ceremony as a tool for healing, celebration, and transformation.
She supports clients in one-on-one sessions to release blocked energy, shift outdated patterns, and access a more embodied, vital way of being. Her offerings are intuitive, somatic, and spiritually grounded.
Akua also facilitates rites of passage and women’s circles that honour life’s thresholds — including menarche, motherhood, and intergenerational connection — with reverence and care. For the past four years, she has led the Maidens Camp at the Wise Women Gathering, supporting the slow, sacred becoming from girlhood to maidenhood. Through this work, she brings deep insight into the potency of community-held ritual and the transformative power of being witnessed.
As a wilderness solo facilitator, Akua guides nature-based rites of passage and vision quests for those navigating change, seeking clarity, or longing to return to their inner knowing. Drawing on the wisdom of the Four Shields, the medicine wheel, and sacred council, she holds space for others to be in direct relationship with the wild — and with themselves.
Akua is a mother of two beautiful boys, wife to a loving partner, and part of a soulful, earth-honouring community on Dharug and Gundungurra land in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
Akua Gutierrez
Rob is a guide to the inner wilderness. A somatic psychotherapist, ecotherapist, and father, he has spent decades exploring the deep terrain of psyche, soma, and soul—walking his own initiatory path while accompanying others to find theirs.
Through 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 a lecturer in Somatic Ecotherapy with the Metavision Institute, where he supports practitioners and seekers alike to remember their deeper belonging within the living web of life. Drawing on depth psychology, mythopoetic work, and deep nature connection practices, Rob’s work invites people to follow the intelligence of the body into wholeness and into a living conversation with land and soul.
A certified meditation teacher and Focusing trainer, Rob shares practices of embodied listening, mindfulness, and inquiry that open pathways into self-awareness, personal maturation, and transpersonal exploration. His work is grounded in decades of immersion in diverse wisdom and mystery traditions, including Kagyu-Nyingma Buddhism, non-dual teachings, and the Diamond Approach, reflecting a lifelong devotion to truth-seeking and inner freedom.
Rob is also a trained facilitator of the Kiloby Inquiry Method, a mindfulness-based approach to meeting depression, anxiety, trauma, and addictive patterns with compassion and clarity. In 2021, he co-founded the Blue Mountains Men’s Group, honouring his commitment to fostering spaces of connection, kinship, and cultural repair.
Rob lives, works and wanders on Dharug and Gundungurra country in the Blue Mountains. He’s the father of two girls who are the apple of his eye.
Rob Engels
“Thank you Rob and Akua, for a life-changing experience…In the depths of ceremony with life, and Mother Earth as my teacher, I touched places of deep remembering. Thank you for the gift of slowness, stillness, spaciousness, reverence and respect and for holding such a gentle yet fiercely loving…container for our noticing, our remembering and our healing to unfurl. An unforgettable and life-changing gift on the path of becoming. Deep gratitude.”
—Peta, NSW