Earth-Based Listening
A felt conversation between the body and the sentient earth
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
— William Blake
A Love Older Than Words
Across the span of deep time, humans evolved in intimate relationship with the more-than-human world, shaped by its rhythms, seasons, creatures and places. Yet, at the dawn of the sixth mass extinction, our severance from this intimacy has been described as our “original trauma” — a forgetting of a belonging that is in our bones, writ large in our growing estrangement from the living world and the relentless demands of the industrial dominator complex.
Earth-Based Listening is a practice of remembering. Through the doorway of the bodily felt sense, we enter into direct conversation with the animate world — listening not only to the Earth, but with and through the living body. As the boundaries of our habitual identity soften, relationship can deepen into a profound sense of belonging and participation: a palpable communion with the lands we wander and the more-than-human beings with whom our lives are entwined.
And what begins as listening can blossom into a deep sense of home coming. Beneath the familiar experience of ourselves as separate individuals lies an older intimacy — a recognition that we are not merely in relationship with the living world, but expressions of the same living fabric. Earth-Based Listening offers a way of entering this mystery through experience rather than belief: opening us to the depthless intelligence of Gaia, and to her grief and beauty, love and longing — a love older than words.
Join the Next Training
The next Earth-Based Listening journey begins February 2027
10 Sundays | Online gatherings + land-based practice
Earth-Based Listening in the World
A Day-Long Workshop with John Seed
Dreaming as the Earth
Saturday 21 November, 2026
Narara Ecovillage
This day-long program brings Earth-Based Listening into conversation with the pioneering work of John Seed, one of the founding figures of the Deep Ecology movement. Together we’ll spend a day in ceremony exploring what it means to listen and act from a deeper connection with the dreaming Earth. Weaving embodied conversation with the more-than-human world, poetry, council, medicine walk and sacred activism, we’ll honour the grief and love we carry for the Earth, listen for the deeper intelligence moving through these times, and begin to follow the particular thread of what is ours to offer.
Focusing as Earth-Based Listening
A webinar for The International Focusing Institute
Tuesday 27th October, 2026
Online
In this two-hour experiential webinar for the global Focusing community, Rob will introduce Earth-Based Listening as a contemporary expression of our innate human capacity to commune with the more-than-human world. Drawing on Gendlin’s understanding of the body as an ongoing interaction with its environment, we’ll explore how the bodily felt sense can become a bridge into deeper relationship with elder trees, ancient boulders, birdsong and the sentience of place. Along the way, Rob will introduce the Five Terrains framework, share stories from his own practice, and guide participants into a direct experience of Earth-Based Listening — opening into one of humanity’s oldest conversations through the living field of the body. For TIFI members.
What is Earth-Based Listening?
Earth-Based Listening is a contemporary practice rooted in our ancient human capacity for embodied intimacy with the animate Earth. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing and the Five Terrains model of somatic ecotherapy, it invites us to cross sequential thresholds — through the doorway of the body — into spiralling intimacy with the more-than-human world. With boulder, lichen, eucalypt, starlight and sky. With the inner parts that arise as protectors and wounded ones on our journey inward. And with the sacred dimensions of being that constellate the deeper fabric of human and more-than-human worlds. Ultimately, Earth-Based Listening can open a doorway into a profound sense of belonging — a homecoming into an embodied way of listening that can feel like wild prayer.
As a practice, Earth-Based Listening is a conversation that opens through the bodily felt sense — Eugene Gendlin’s term for the fuzzy, pre-verbal edge of knowing that lives in the body before it resolves into words. Sensed together with the more-than-human world, this felt sense becomes something more: a living language with which the voice of the earth can also be heard. In this light, Earth-Based Listening opens a doorway into sacred activism, where we listen first for the intelligence of the Earth and allow our actions to arise in response.
As the philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote, “What is learned by the body is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.” Earth-Based Listening offers an embodied knowing of our rootedness in the web of life — a felt wholeness that includes not only body and mind, but the animate earth. A knowing that can dissolve the lie of separation, gesture by gesture, session by session, until what remains is the plain, palpable fact of being, belonging and participation in the web of life.
The Origin Story
The name Earth-Based Listening emerged mysteriously during a solitary ceremony on Dharug and Gundungurra Country. I have come to understand it as a name offered by the Earth herself, drawing together a constellation of practices I had already been exploring with the more-than-human world. The outer details of what happened were relatively simple, but their inner impact was seismic.
Standing on a mist-covered ridge above Hat Hill Creek near my home, I felt an inexplicable pull at my ankles, as though something were drawing my attention toward the ground. Looking down, there was nothing remarkable there — grass, and soil and ferns. Yet the gravitational pull persisted — and a knowing that something was down there.
Instinctually, I reached down and an image appeared, clear as day in my mind’s eye: a shallow stone bowl lying on the earth. I gathered it up and held it open to the sky, palms turned upwards in a gesture that carried a sense of reverence. For a time, I simply stood that way, offering the bowl to the mist and the earth and the sky.
Then, as if in response, rain began to fall into the bowl. Filling it until it spilled over. And with it came a direct knowing in the body.
The bowl revealed itself as the bodily felt sense — a window of knowing, perceiving and listening. And the falling rain was the voice of the Earth, pouring into that well of listening, known intimately through the body.
And with that recognition came three words: Earth-Based Listening. Spoken directly into the field of my awareness, and now shining there like the sun in the sky.
Beneath the words was a deeper sense that something had come into form. The practices I had been exploring through Focusing and somatic ecotherapy belonged together in a tapestry: a way of listening through the body that could open into living dialogue with the Earth and the more-than-human world. Deeper yet — that the body was an aperture through and within which the voice of the earth could be heard.
Earth-Based Listening has continued to unfold from that encounter — a remembering of something ancient and older than words, perfumed with unbridled intimacy — a contemporary practice rooted in our ancestral capacity to listen, to belong, and to participate with the dreaming earth.
EBL in Practice
Earth-Based Listening follows a simple sequence of practices called the Five Terrains, which support the process of tuning into the voice of the earth. The first terrain, Trailhead, slows the pace and crosses a threshold, marking an exit from ordinary, hurried consciousness, into sacred space where a deeper listen can unfold..
Meadow softens the nervous system through slow sensory attunement — connecting with the world around through touch, scent, sound, sight — until the body settles into a deeper field of presence.
Forest turns gently toward whatever inner parts arise along the way — the sceptic, the wounded one, the busy mind — greeting each so they no longer crowd the listening. This work also helps to metabolise the felt sense of being separate from the earth, with each inner part constellating a world view and felt experience of isolation and severance.
And in Mountain, having arrived at a kind of inner stillness, awareness is invited to rest on a being or a place — a tree, a stone, a stretch of water, an entire hillside.
From this stillness, something fuzzy and barely-there can begin to stir in the sentient well of the body— the first murmur of a felt sense, forming at the edge of perception. To stay with it, gently and without forcing, is to enter into conversation: an exchange that can deepen, over time, from a first tentative meeting into something far more expansive.
Topographies of Listening
No two sessions of Earth-Based Listening are ever the same, but certain experiences seem to recur often enough, across different landscapes, in people with very different life experience, to suggest they are not accidental. Drawing on several years and more than a hundred field recordings, a recognition map has begun to emerge, so far incorporating approximately 17 experiential themes — a set of signposts on the journey: each inviting us into a way of being, listening and participating that feels timeless. Below are a few examples, spanning the nearer reaches of the practice to deeper regions, moving in an alchemical spiral from relational encounter toward transpersonal ground. This is a partial map of terrain that continues to unfold — charted in the living field of those who practice it.
Meeting
The direct encounter with a being on the land — a Eucalypt, sandstone canyon, body of water — met as a living presence. Something of its history, origin or its inner life is mythopoetically offered. From the prehistoric origin story of a boulder to the dreaming memory of an Elder tree.
Blessing
Benediction from the land. A felt sense of being seen, honoured and gifted by the more-than-human world. The earth turns toward us with something that feels like grace and we bask in a field of unconditional love.
Mythopoetic Calling
Visual and somatic glimpses of one’s soul purpose, reflected and encountered on the land. Facets of one’s place and purpose in the web of life recognised in the mirror of the more-than-human world. Here we dive into the subterranean rivers of what David Whyte describes as the truth at the centre of the image we were born with.
Love
Love arising in and through the land — sometimes intimate and personal, arising as a feeling for or from a being, sometimes vast, flowering and boundless. A sense of sweet preciousness spills over into an ocean of intimacy.
Belonging
A deep somatic sense of homecoming — the body recognising its home, its origin, and kin in the more-than-human world. A feeling of being deeply held, self-complete and rooted to nourishing ground.
Earth-Oriented Ontology
A radical reorientation of perspective, in which the earth appears to witness and celebrate herself through the attuned awareness of the practitioner. The human becomes Gaia’s organ of perception and a stage on which the bounty of being is known, held and celebrated.
Merging
A dissolution of the boundary between self and earth. A melting into, and becoming, the ground of Gaia — what was once felt as separateness grows porous, permeable and transparent like vapour.
Sacred Activism
Intimations from Gaia on how we might serve in times such as these. The earth reveals not only her beauty but speaks too of her grief, her longing and her dreaming for how we might each walk the path ahead.
Kenosis
A process of self-emptying where the mind enters a deep stillness, and images of self, identity and personhood begin to soften and dissolve. The falling away of the one who listens, leaving only the listening itself and a stillness that feels prayerful.
Why Now?
We live in a time of ecological, cultural and spiritual unravelling. The old maps that once oriented us are fraying — and yet ancient maps remain, each pointing us back to a remembered wholeness, plotting pathways back to intimacy with all of life.
Earth-Based Listening is one such map, offered through the soil of the body to meet times such as these. Its medicine flowers at different dimensions of experience.
On the first, it is simple balm in an age of loneliness and fragmentation — a felt, somatic remembering that we were never separate from the earth to begin with.
On the second, it invites us into a form of sacred activism, in which the inimitable wisdom of Gaia is repositioned front and centre in how we act, serve and show up in the world.
At the dawn of the sixth mass extinction, amid the polycrisis of ecosystem collapse and cultural unravelling, it is an invitation from deeper ground.
Lineages
Earth-Based Listening represents a weaving of many different lineages, each bringing its own gifts to this work. I honour the many teachers that have offered their wisdom, and the many landscapes in which it took root.
Focusing — Eugene Gendlin’s paradigm of deep bodily knowing, and the primary methodology through which Earth-Based Listening unfolds. Deep gratitude to my teacher, Jo Kennedy, and to Adrian Harris for his original work on Focusing in nature, and for many rich conversations.
Deep ecology — the work of John Seed, Arne Naess and Joanna Macy, whose Spiral and Work That Reconnects share a deep resonance with the arc of Earth-Based Listening. Their insistence that we are the Earth defending herself runs like a current beneath this practice.
Shinrinyoku — the Japanese practice of forest bathing, cultivating slowness, sensory immersion and therapeutic presence in the more-than-human world. Its gentle, unhurried attunement to breath, sound, scent and touch feeds directly into the Meadow terrain, softening the nervous system and preparing the body for deeper listening. Gratitude to my teachers at the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy for lighting the way.
The Four Shields — a pan-cultural map of human wholeness carried forward through the School of Lost Borders in the sweet medicine of Pinion Country in the High Sierra. I am deeply grateful to my teachers who showed me how to open and to dance within the temenos of nature-based ceremony.
First Nations earth-based ways of knowing — I honour the enduring legacy of love, kinship, law and reciprocity stewarded into the world by First Nations peoples around the world. With particular gratitude and respect to the Dharug, Gundungurra and Wiradjuri peoples, on whose unceded lands this practice has taken shape and found its name.
Process Work — Arnold Mindell’s process-oriented psychology and its exquisite attentiveness to what is trying to emerge at the edges of awareness, in dream, body and symptom alike. Its practice of following subtle, barely perceptible signals toward greater wholeness informs the way Earth-Based Listening attends to the fuzzy edges of the felt sense as it moves between body, psyche and land.
The Diamond Approach — A. H. Almaas’s contemporary path of spiritual inquiry into the essential and non-dual dimensions of Being. The Diamond Approach has offered an embodied language to recognise some of Earth-Based Listening’s deeper transpersonal territory, where the felt sense opens beyond the personal into something universal.
The Earth herself —beneath and beyond all human lineages is the oldest teacher of all. Earth-Based Listening arises from Gaia herself — teacher, mirror, muse, mother, healer, kin and sentient being with her own dreaming, knowing and process of becoming. All of this is in honour of you, beloved.
“Oh, not to be separated,
shut off from the starry dimensions
by so thin a wall.
What is within us
if not intensified sky
traversed with birds
and deep
with winds of homecoming?”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
The Ten Week Introductory Training
For those who feel the call to inhabit this kind of conversation with the earth, a ten-week online training begins in February 2027 — a slow, guided introduction to Earth-Based Listening for anyone drawn to this work, with no prior experience in Focusing or ecotherapy necessary.
This training is designed as an open door. Whether you’re a seasoned meditator, someone who already feels deeply at home in the more-than-human world, or someone who has struggled with formal mindfulness practice and longs for a deeper relationship with the Earth, you’re welcome here. No prior experience is required.
Over ten weeks, you'll be guided step by step into the foundations of Earth-Based Listening: learning to sense the bodily felt sense, meeting the Five Terrains as a map for the journey, and gradually opening into direct, felt conversation with the more-than-human world.
Format: Sundays, 9–11am (Sydney time), online via Zoom, each of us gathering locally on the land near our homes — be it a garden, local bushland, park, or balcony.
Dates: 7, 14, 21, 28 February · 14, 21, 28 March · 11, 18, 25 April 2027 — ten sessions across twelve weeks, with two integration weeks built in for rest, practice and letting the learning settle.
Curious to experience Earth-Based Listening first?
Join a free experiential taster on Sunday 24 January 2027 — an opportunity to encounter the practice from the inside before the 10-week journey begins on 7 February.
The Ten Week Arc of the Training & Beyond
The training moves in the same sequence the practice itself moves in — through the terrains, and gradually into embodied dialogue with the Earth. These ten weeks offer a foundation, opening the doorway for practitioners to seed the practice through their own life, on the lands and with the beings that call them. Beyond the training is a growing community of practitioners who continue to gather on a monthly basis, each on the land where they live, for Sunday morning practice, listening and council — something that is becoming something of a dirt church — a space for deep listening, sharing of story and a movement to connect to the sacred the earth.
Week 1 — Wild Council
Gathering and honouring our intentions for the journey ahead. An introduction to the Five Terrains framework, and to Focusing as our primary window of knowing.
Week 2 — Trailhead
Practices drawn from somatic ecotherapy for opening ceremonial space and crossing the threshold into the temenos of listening itself. This week also introduces The Spiral; the intentional movement of awareness that informs our work.
Week 3 — Meadow
Nature-based practices for nervous system regulation and slow, sensory embodiment — the art of arriving fully in the body before we ask it to listen.
Week 4 — The Felt Sense
Introducing the bodily felt sense, and making first contact with it. Here we learn how to connect with a somatic window of knowing that opens us into living conversation with the earth together with inner parts that can emerge as obstacles on the journey.
Week 5 — The Spiral
Deepening contact with the felt sense — finding the handle, the word or image that names what's there — with an audio recorder as companion on the land.
Weeks 6-10 — Deepening
From here, the practice deepens into Forest work — meeting and tending the inner parts that arise on the journey — and into Mountain, where we learn to invite the felt sense of a being, and to stay with it as it unfolds: the art of surrender, of tumbling, of being carried. The training closes with a glimpse of the wider map of Earth-Based Listening's dimensions, offered as an invitation into the journey ahead.
“With the guidance of Rob, wild council and the beings holding me on the land, I’ve been able to traverse inner terrains to deeper parts of Self. It’s been healing and alchemical. My connection to the living pulse of the natural world has been amplified and I feel rooted in belonging.”
— Chez, TASWhat’s Included in the Training
Ten Sunday gatherings held live on Zoom, with each of us joining from a place on the land close to home. Each session weaves teaching, council and guided practice, allowing the learning to unfold experientially through the body.
10 Live, Online Classes, On the Land
10 Guided Earth-Based Listening Sessions and 1 x private session
Each week you’ll be guided step by step through an Earth-Based Listening practice — from ceremonial threshold and sensory attunement, through working with inner parts, into the deeper listening itself. Over time, these doorways become a pathway you can follow for yourself. In addition, you’ll receive a 1hr private guided Earth-Based Listening session with me to get a deeper feel for the process and to work through individual questions or challenges.
A companion handbook to support the ten-week journey and your ongoing practice. It brings together the core teachings, the Five Terrains, practical invitations and field-based guidance, giving you something tangible to return to as your own relationship with Earth-Based Listening deepens.
Earth-Based Listening Handbook
Journey alongside a small cohort of people drawn by a similar longing for deeper relationship with the living Earth. Council, shared reflection and witnessing create a relational field in which discoveries can be spoken, questions explored and the practice deepened together.
Like-Minded Community
For those who feel called, an optional four-day wilderness retreat offers the chance to experience Earth-Based Listening together on the land — through council, solo practice, ceremony, contemplation, campfire and breaking bread beneath the open sky. The retreat is costed separately from the ten-week training.
Optional Wilderness Retreat
The ten weeks are an introduction, but the practice is designed to travel with you. You’ll leave with a simple embodied pathway for returning to conversation with the more-than-human world — one you can continue exploring on your own land, in your own way, long after the training ends.
A Practice to Carry Forward
Training Investment
This ten-week journey is an invitation into intimacy with the animate Earth — developing your own Earth-Based Listening practice to carry with you into the world and into each wander on the land. Over our time together, you’ll become familiar with the inner and outer terrains of the practice: learning to settle, sense, listen and enter into deeper relationship with the more-than-human world.
The intention is that, by the end of our time together, Earth-Based Listening feels like a pathway you know how to walk for yourself — one you can return to wherever you are, and continue deepening long after the training ends.
Your investment includes:
Ten live, land-based online gatherings
Ten guided Earth-Based Listening practices
A private one-to-one Earth-Based Listening session with me
The Earth-Based Listening Handbook and supporting practice resources
A small community to journey alongside for the ten weeks
$1,150 AUD
Payment plans available.
“Earth-based listening brought solace and holding during a transitionary and initiatory period of my life. Each week Rob guided us with embodied wisdom and grounded practices, enabling a deeper listening, leaning in and relationship between body, breath and Earth. Treasured Earth allies have been found, offering comfort and invitation to return, to meet myself and the Earth again and again.”
— Kirsty, SAPrivate Earth-Based Listening Sessions
For those who'd like to work with me more personally, private one-to-one sessions and small-group Earth-Based Listening Experiences are also available — in person in the Blue Mountains, NSW, or online, guided remotely from the land near you.
One-to-one sessions offer a chance to be supported into an unfolding practice of your own. We can work with the practice of listening itself, as well as with specific challenges that arise along the way — an inner critic that won’t step aside, a nervous system slow to settle, or a felt sense that remains just out of reach.
They can also simply be an opportunity to enter a full, unhurried Earth-Based Listening experience: a direct conversation with a being or place of your choosing, alongside someone who knows this territory well.
Private groups are available for friends, colleagues, therapeutic or professional communities, and other small groups who would like to experience Earth-Based Listening together. These can be shaped as a single experiential gathering or a longer journey into the practice, either in person or online.
To book a session with me, click the link below and choose either
1:1 Session With Me in Person or via Zoom
About Rob
Earth-Based Listening has become one of the great loves of my life. It is a practice I return to again and again — a way of coming home to the body, entering into relationship with the living world, and listening for what might be revealed when we become quiet enough to hear.
I’m a somatic psychotherapist, ecotherapist and Focusing trainer, and co-founder of Ancient Ground. I’m also a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and principal lecturer in Somatic Ecotherapy at Metavision Institute, where I train practitioners in the Five Terrains model that underpins Earth-Based Listening.
Earth-Based Listening has emerged slowly through the meeting of Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, many years of ecotherapy practice, and some thirty years of listening and wandering on the land. Over the past several years, I’ve made more than a hundred field recordings of my own Earth-Based Listening sessions — from the sclerophyll forests of the Blue Mountains, to the pinion country of North America and the slate landscapes of North Wales.
I’m currently writing a book drawn from these recordings — a living cartography of what becomes possible when we listen through the body to the more-than-human world.
I live, work and wander on Dharug and Gundungurra Country in the Blue Mountains, Australia. And I’m the father of two girls, who continually remind me what it means to love and belong.
Join the Next Training
10-Week Earth-Based Listening Foundational Training
Sundays, 9–11am (Sydney time)
7 February – 25 April 2027
Online, via Zoom
No prior experience required.
