FOREST TUNING
What happens when we stop moving through the forest - and allow the forest to move through us?
Forest Tuning is a 3-hour guided eco-immersion into the forests of the Mendocino Coast. An adventure through the senses designed to awaken new ways of seeing, listening, moving, and relating to the living world. We don’t teach people about the forest. We help the forest become a teacher again.
SCREEN-FREE · SENSORY · IMMERSIVE
Select Your Date Below to Register:
“I felt deeply supported to simply be myself. Forest Tuning gave me the confidence to let go, find my center, and connect with the forest in the way I had been seeking.”
A Different Way Into the Forest
Most of us have learned to move through nature—to hike it, photograph it, identify it, exercise in it, or admire the view.
Forest Tuning asks something different:
What happens when we enter a place with the intention of building a relationship with it?
We slow down.
We put away our devices.
We listen.
We move together.
We make sound and become quiet.
We notice the rhythms already happening around us and experiment with joining them.
At times we move as a group.
At times we wander alone.
There may be drumming and singing, stillness and laughter, movement and reflection.
Every Forest Tuning is different because every forest, group, and day is different.
No experience with meditation, movement, or singing is necessary. There is nothing to perform and nothing you are required to believe.
What We Practice
LISTEN · MOVE · SOUND · SENSE · WANDER · CONNECT · REMEMBER
Through the experience, we explore:
- embodied awareness and meditation
- rhythm, movement, voice, and song
- sensory and perceptual exercises
- periods of silence and solo exploration
- listening and attunement to place
- group practices and shared reflection
- reciprocity, gratitude, and stewardship
The intention isn’t to arrive at a particular experience. It’s to become quiet and attentive enough to notice what is already there.
Join Us On the Mendocino Coast
Each Forest Tuning explores a different carefully chosen place along the Mendocino Coast. Experiences are intentionally kept small so that we can move slowly, listen deeply, and remain responsive to the forest and one another.
The exact meeting location is shared with registered participants before each experience.
Custom Experiences
Forest Tuning can also be created as a private experience for individuals, families, friends, teams, and small groups. We’ll work with you to shape an experience around your group, the landscape, and the occasion.
Is This Forest Bathing?
Forest Tuning shares with forest bathing the practice of slowing down and becoming more present in nature, but it is a different experience.
Forest Tuning is more participatory and communal, weaving together embodied meditation, movement, rhythm, voice, silence, solo exploration, and group practice.
Rather than following a prescribed way of experiencing nature, we create conditions for each person to discover their own relationship with the living world.
“I loved how comfortable I felt around everyone. Having the opportunity to open in this way with others felt very sacred and meaningful to me.”
Where Deep Ecology Meets Cultural Ecology
Forest Tuning draws from two complementary ways of understanding our relationship with the living world. Deep ecology recognizes humans as participants within nature rather than separate from it. Cultural ecology explores how people and place shape one another through culture, creativity, community, and the ways we live with the land.
Forest Tuning brings these ideas into direct experience through embodied practice, rhythm, song, silence, and sensory exploration — inviting us to move beyond observing nature and begin participating in relationship with it.
Forest Stewardship
People protect what they have learned to love, and they love what they have taken the time to truly know.
We receive enormously from the forests: the air, water, habitat, beauty, shelter, and living systems that sustain this place.
Forest Tuning grew from the belief that stewardship begins with relationship.
When we give a place our time, attention, curiosity, and care, our relationship with it changes. The forest stops being scenery and becomes something we participate in.
Our hope is simple: to help people learn to listen to the places they inhabit.
“I found myself processing a deep grief and feeling the grief of the fallen trees around me. I realized it was the anniversary of my mother’s passing, and I felt held by the land, as though she felt my grief as I felt hers. It was a powerful experience of connection and oneness.”
A Glimpse Into Forest Tuning
Photography by Julia Lehman & contributions from participants.“Aeon and Lavender work beautifully together, bringing their knowledge, experience, and skills to create sacred, safe space for participants to expand their capacity to see, feel, and hear the voices of the forest.
I have been able to tune in more deeply to the natural world around me and feel a connection of both giving and receiving. A sense of belonging, gratitude, and peace is more present with me now.”
Forest Tuning Guides
Lavender Grace Kent
A Mendocino Coast artist, cultural ecologist, and community storyteller.
Rooted in a lifelong relationship with the forests and coastline she calls home, she weaves rhythm, intuitive frame drum, song, movement, storytelling, and place-based practice to deepen connection between people, nature, and community. Through Bee Bold Alliance and her community arts work, Lavender brings creativity and cultural ecology together to inspire more regenerative relationships with the living world.
Aeon Karris
A community activator, deep ecologist, author, and founder of Know the Self Academy.
For nearly three decades, her work has explored self-mastery, embodied awareness, community, and our relationship with the living world. Through meditation, movement, rhythm, and nature-based practices, she creates experiences that invite people to expand their perception, listen more deeply, and cultivate a more conscious relationship with themselves, one another, and the places they inhabit.
Aeon and Lavender discovered that although their paths were different, they had each spent much of their lives listening, singing, moving, and learning in relationship with the natural world. Forest Tuning brings their practices together in a shared exploration of what becomes possible when we learn to listen to the places we inhabit.
FOREST TUNING IS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN
Know the Self Academy designs immersive learning experiences that cultivate self-mastery, ethical leadership, and deeper relationship with the living world.
Bee Bold Alliance is a Mendocino Coast network cultivating regenerative relationships with the natural world through conservation, education, art, and community.
Forest Tuning changes the way you pay attention to a place … even a forest you think you know can become new again.
Awaken your senses.