Four Shields of Wholeness Nature Retreats

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

— Mary Oliver

An Invitation into the Four Shields

Join Akua and Rob as they introduce the Four Shields — an ancient, nature-based map for remembering our wholeness and belonging. This short video offers a glimpse into the depth, ceremony, and presence at the heart of all Four Shields programs.

About the Program

The Four Shields of Wholeness is an ancient map of human nature, carried forward through oral traditions and rediscovered in our times as a guide to healing, wholeness and belonging. Rooted in the archetypes of human wholeness and the cycles of the natural world, the Four Shields invite us to remember the fullness of who we are — our joy and vitality, our inner depths, our clarity and resilience, and our vision and purpose.

Each of us carries within us childlike wonder, hidden wounds, undiscovered gifts, and a longing to meet the great Mystery that holds us. Yet in the helter-skelter of modern life, these dimensions often remain unseen, disavowed, or unattended.

The Four Shields offer a way to listen. To wander with your inner child. To tend the wounded places within. To touch the gifts that long to be lived. And to step into conversation with the Mystery.

For five days on Dharug and Gundungurra country, we will move through the shields in circle, ceremony, and solo practice, exploring how each dimension lives within us. The program is both personal and communal: a way to remember your own wholeness, to stand in circle with others on the path, and to enter into felt conversation with the more-than-human world.

Following the threads that seek to unfold you into a deeper wholeness, gather with us, around the fire, beneath the stars, in partnership with the more-than-human world. In sacred reciprocity with the land, tending the inner fires, and honouring the greater dreaming process that unfolds us all, we’ll walk together into the mystery of what it means to be fully human, fully alive, woven into the wider web of life.

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Why the Four Shields?

The Four Shields is not a new invention. With roots reaching back to the Mayan civilizations and carried forward across cultures and epochs, this map has long served as a vessel for healing, initiation, and belonging.

Reintroduced in modern times through the work of Hyemeyohsts Storm and the School of Lost Borders, the Four Shields remain the original nature-based framework for wholeness — simple, profound, and time-tested. Today, in an era of ecological unraveling and cultural disrepair, this map calls us again: to remember what it means to be fully human, fully alive, and woven into relationship with the Earth

During the Retreat You Will

  • Follow the living threads that draw you toward deeper wholeness.

  • Listen to the land as teacher, mirror, muse, beloved and kin.

  • Gather in council, where every voice is welcome and every story has a place.

  • Experience the alchemical power of ceremony to hold, heal, and transform.

  • Rediscover the beauty of wandering and the practice of full-bodied sensing.

  • Cultivate a remembering of your ecological niche in the web of life.

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The Four Shields offer a living map of body, heart, mind, and soul — a way to meet the land as teacher, tend life’s thresholds, and remember our deeper belonging

Program Format & Dates

2025 Dates

The next 4 Shields Program runs from 20th - 24th November, 2025.

Location: Ganbenang, NSW (details provided on registration)

Arrival: 12:00pm Thursday

Departure: 4:00pm Monday

Accommodation: Camping only, off-grid immersion in wild country. Tent, swag, or hammock

Self-Catered: Please bring your own food, snacks, and drinks for the entire program. A suggested shopping list will be provided as part of the full program welcome pack, which will also include detailed guidance on what to pack, how to prepare, and practical considerations for your time on the land.

Container: This is a drug- and alcohol-free program

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2026 Dates

Late Autumn: 28th May - 1st June, 2026

Late Spring: 26th - 30th Nov, 2026

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Meet Your Guides

Akua Gutierrez is a breathwork and shamanic healing practitioner as well as a wilderness solo guide. She leads earth based self- generated ceremonies that bring ancestral remembering and inner wisdom. Over the past 12 years she has been deepening her connection to self, others, and nature aided by ceremony as a tool for healing, celebration, and magic. She has also been facilitating the maidens camp for the Wise Women Gathering for the past four years celebrating and honouring the slow becoming from childhood to maidenhood. In doing so, she brings deep insight into the potency of ceremony and ritual where we gather during this transitional time of growth and transformation supported by our community. Akua is a mother of two divine boys, wife of a beautiful man and part of a soulful community in the land of the Darug andGundungurra people, the Blue Mountains, NSW.

Rob Engels 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 and supporting others to find theirs. As founder and principal teacher of the School of Awareness, he is dedicated to somatic and nature-based learning that restores embodied presence and sacred relationship with the more-than-human world.

A certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and lecturer in Somatic Ecotherapy with the Metavision Institute, Rob’s work opens doorways for people to remember their deeper belonging in the web of life. He is also co-founder of Wild Passage, guiding teens and young adults through rites of passage, and in 2021 established the Blue Mountains Men’s Group to nurture connection, kinship, and cultural repair.

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.”


— David Whyte

We offer a sliding scale to make this work as accessible as possible while also sustaining the program and supporting wider participation:

  • Standard Rate: $950

  • Supporter Rate: $1,250 — for those with the means to contribute more. This option helps fund places for those with limited financial resources.

By choosing the Supporter Rate, you are directly helping others access this program who might otherwise not be able to attend.

You can see recommendations on using the sliding scale here

Investment

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An Invitation

More than a retreat, the 4 Shields program is an initiation int the depths of you. It invites you over a threshold into a remembering of your deeper wholeness — of your childlike wonder, your soulful depths, your gifts, and your place in the circle of life.

If you feel the call, we invite you to join us for these five days of listening, remembering, and participation in the greater dreaming of the earth.

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Acknowledgement

We honour the legacy of deep listening and earth-based wisdom carried by First Nations peoples across the world, and pay our respects to the Dharug, Gundungurra, and Wiradjuri peoples, on whose ancestral lands we work, dream, and wander. We acknowledge their unbroken relationship with Country, their care for land, water, story, and spirit, and their guidance in remembering what it means to live in reciprocity with the more-than-human world.

We honour Hyemeyohsts Storm and the School of Lost Borders, who carried the treasure of the Four Shields map into contemporary practice, offering a way to reconnect with an ancient lineage of wholeness, initiation, and belonging.

And we acknowledge the more-than-human teachers — the earth, waters, winds, animals, and stars — who continue to guide us in spaces of deep listening.