Workshop List - Spiritualities of Resilience: Aligning with Earth

Workshop List
Spiritualities of Resilience: Aligning with Earth
May 30, 2026
Hartford International University for Religion and Peace

1) Wilder Sanity and Resilience Through Sacred Play with Nature
Katharine Houk

DESCRIPTION: We will gather in an outdoor space to explore our relationship with nature’s creativity through a process of rooting ourselves, gathering materials, and assembling ephemeral creations which will ultimately be returned to the wild. Our bodies respond to outdoor spaces even before our thoughts do, because we are part of nature's living, sacred dance. Our time together aims to sharpen our attention, expand our senses, deepen our breathing, calm our minds, and open our hearts. Nature’s deep organization and consistency awaken us to an intelligence that we share with the more-than-human world, the holy, the real. Gathering bags and small journals will be made available to participants. No art background is required. Dress for the weather.

BIO: Katharine Houk works and plays as a community minister and creator with paper, fiber, and the written word. She is leader of Sanctuary Without Walls (www.sanctuarywithoutwalls.org) which offers Circles of Care: emergent havens fostering creativity and eco-spirituality.

2) A Loving Response to How Your Body Responds: Movement and Breath Practice for Groundedness, Courage, and Renewal.
Jennifer Dyhana Nucci

DESCRIPTION: Please join me for movements and breathwork that free and open your body and heart for meeting these times with centeredness and tenderness. Together, we will gently practice skills for the capacity and ability to be serenely grounded amidst the rising tides and intensities of these times. Recentering our embodiment again and again for living with grace and clarity.

Bio: In over 30 years as a Yoga and Meditation Educator, Somatic/Trauma/Emotional Release Therapist, Non-Violent Communication Instructor, Facilitator, Herbalist, and Artist, Jennifer has learned to hold reverence and gratitude - for Earth, for Life, for community care and healing connection - at the center.

3) Eco-Grief as a Pathway to Regeneration
Alia Stewart-Silver

DESCRIPTION
This experiential workshop invites participants into communal practices of eco-grief — making space to honor our sorrow, fear, outrage, and overwhelm in response to the ecological crisis — before turning toward the resourcing presence of the ancestors, future generations, and the living earth. Drawing on practices from Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects and nature-based ritual, we are invited to honor our pain for the world as a pathway back into a deepened sense of belonging and participation within a larger story of life and kinship.

BIO: Alia (she/they) weaves together the diverse threads of her background as a licensed psychotherapist, rites-of-passage guide, restorative justice circle-keeper, grief tender, gardener, daughter, sister, kin. She is the founder of Soul Rooted Healing Arts, a counseling practice rooted in holistic, integrative, and relational approaches to human development, and co-founder of The Seeds, an organization exploring the intersection of individual, communal, and ecological worlds.

4) Meditative Walk with Nature 
Regan Stacey

Description: This workshop invites you fully out into connection with land and water, creatures and wind. We will take time to slow down, drop into our bodies, awaken our senses, and connect with the natural world on a guided contemplative walk through the HIU forest along the Park River. 

Bio: Regan Stacey is a mindfulness meditation teacher and forest therapy guide whose passion is to reconnect humans to nature for personal and planetary well-being. She is the founding director of the Forest Therapy School for those wanting to go deeper in this practice.

5) Voices from the Wild: A Tree Council
River Strong and Heron Martin

DESCRIPTION:
This gentle but powerful outdoor experience invites participants to wander, find a tree they feel drawn to, and share their feelings — grief, hope, fear, wonder — openly and with their whole being: to bring their heart into the wild living community around us. After this period of deep listening, the group reconvenes to reflect together on what the land, and the trees, have to say. No prior experience with nature-based practice is needed, only a willingness to show up and feel.

BIOS:
River Strong is a teacher, environmental consultant, outdoor educator, and heart guide.
Heron Martin is a carpenter, energy efficiency expert, and nature mystic, a poetic soul who loves inviting people into the sacred wild.