Great Earth School
Empowering Genius Within
Pacific Northwest Cohort Enrolling Now!
Great Earth School is a holistic education.
This yearlong training provides leadership skills that are place-based, nature-informed and oriented towards building a culture of vitality. Through 4 in-person intensives, you receive an education designed to meet your particular capacities and gifts.
It is our core belief that everyone is born with a specific gift, and our life journey is to make this gift evident in the world. In a time when the demands of modernity are ever more invasive into all aspects of life, now more than ever, a holistic education is required to fortify the capacity to deliver one's gift.
About
The Great Earth School is an initiatory experience designed to give you the skills to discover and live into your purpose - what we often refer to as vision, gift, or genius. The foundation of the what we teach is rooted in connection with nature. Our ethos and philosophy is informed through this connection, as this connection naturally creates the context for vision to form.
Our mission is to prepare, educate, and guide you into your vision — the particular gift you are here to give to the world. The curriculum is designed to bring you into connection with what matters to you, and less 'about' things. The school is experiential, bridging your awareness into connection with community.
Intensives are 6-days in length (aside from the wilderness intensive which is 9-days) and can be considered an initiation into a specific art that provide you with the tools to understand your particular path. In each intensive there are core practices and experiences that occur in every intensive, building a strong foundation of practice.
The school actively questions current paradigms of education, culture, and spirituality, while looking towards our more ancient roots of relationship with nature to guide us into a viable future. This school will test you physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
In addition to the core teachings of each intensive, within all intensives we teach hands-on skills to bring you into connection with nature. This includes wilderness skills, permaculture, creative practices, service work in the community, and bundles of joy and play.
Take the first step towards the Great Earth School:
You will receive:
- 1:1 and group, facilitation and leadership skills rooted in Nature-Informed Leadership
- Rich understanding of biographical patterns that inform your vision
- Land-based community and culture building theories, models, and experience
- Relational practices you can bring into personal and professional relationships
- A learning community to grow within
- Wilderness skills such as shelter, fire, tracking, herbalism, and awareness
- Practice in ecological restoration, permaculture, agroforestry, and natural building
- A holistic set of skills to fortify your capacity to live you vision in the world
Each intensive has elements from all intensives, providing a holistic approach and spaciousness to integrate all lessons and practices.
It is a core belief at Great Earth School that to help one bring their gift to the world it is necessary to learn the skills of participating with the natural world through a gestalt of skills that bring the holy into the material world. For this reason, with every internal skill and practice, there is an associated physical skill.
Intensives Schedule
Cohort 1
Embodiment
May 5th-11th, 2023 — Boulder, CO
Wilderness
August 4th-12th, 2023 — Colorado
Relationship
November 10th-16th, 2023 — Boulder, CO
Leadership
March 22nd-28th, 2024 — Boulder, CO
Cohort 2
Embodiment
October 14th-19th, 2023 — Boulder, CO
Wilderness
May 18th-24th, 2024 — Colorado
Relationship
January 6th-11th, 2024 — Boulder, CO
Leadership
August 10th-15th, 2024 — Boulder, CO
Cohort 3
Embodiment
June 8th-13th, 2024 — Pacific Northwest
Wilderness
Aug 24th – Sept 1st, 2024 — Pacific Northwest
Relationship
January 4th-9th, 2025 — Pacific Northwest
Leadership
April 5th-10th, 2025 — Pacific Northwest
A letter from Darren
Dear Prospective Student,
Thank you for your interest in the Great Earth School. Truth is, I never imagined I would be teaching what you will learn. When I first made the commitment to walk a path of vision, I was filled with an insatiable hunger because I needed grow and heal myself. For nearly 20 years I have been refining the path of vision and how to guide others onto their path. With a team of teachers, I have woven together a holistic education that prepares you to move in the world with purpose, direction, and a deep knowledge of yourself.
For many of us, at a young age we had an uninterrupted connection to the whole of life. This was certainly the case for me, until it slowly was overtaken by modern education. Grade school, and even University taught me many ways of how to participate in the modern world, but utterly failed in giving me the tools to live in connection with the earth and to listen to the deeper instructions of my soul. I had to learn this elsewhere. Often times, in very unconventional means that required nothing short of full commitment for me to learn and grow.
What sent me back towards the landscape of my vision was my first of many classes at Tom Brown Jr’s. Tracker School. It was during the Standard course that Tom asked the class a series of questions that up until that point, I had never considered. It sent me towards my interior landscape. Since then I have worked in many different fields, from storytelling trainings in the corporate world to wilderness therapy for teens. The Great Earth School is a distilled training giving you the tools to live your vision regardless of what context you're working within.
Informed by the philosophy of the earth, the vision of our school is to remember through physical, emotional, and spiritual practices a culture of vision and leadership. Given the hundreds of years of disconnection from the earth, dismantling the conditions of modernity is an enormous task. Our approach to the challenges individuals face and to systemic challenges worldwide is through the lens of reclaiming our relationship with the earth.
If you’re seeking to have your ideologies reinforced, or experience a training of concepts, then this school is not for you. There are plenty of schools, trainings and workshops out there about purpose, manifesting your dream job, financial abundance etc. The Great Earth School is applied education every step of the way, bringing you through a series of rigorous initiatory experiences.
We are focused on remembering what it means to belong once again amongst the whole of creation and contribute your unique gift. My deepest desire is that the Great Earth School reaches those that want to live a life of empowered vision and rapture. If you feel the call, I will meet you there.
Darren Silver
