4 Shields of Wholeness Program
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.
Why the 4 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.
Together, these terrains offer a living map for embodied healing, deep listening, and sacred reconnection. Each terrain illuminates a successive obstacle on the path to wholeness, while offering somatic and nature-based tools to tend the divide and support your return to deeper integration with self, land, and life.
Program Format & Dates
The next 4 Shields Program runs from 20th - 24th November, 2025.
Location: Ganbenang, NSW (details provided on registration)
Arrival: 2:00pm Thursday
Departure: 2:00pm Monday
Accommodation: Camping only, off-grid immersion in wild country. Tent, swag, or hammock
Self-Catered: Bring your own food, snacks, and drinks for the entire program
Container: This is a drug- and alcohol-free program
Meet Your Guides
This program is run in partnership with sister organisation, Ancient Ground, and will be guided by Rob Engels and Akua Gutierrez.
Rob Engels is a guide to the inner wilderness. A somatic psychotherapist, ecotherapist, and father, he has spent decades exploring the deep terrain of soul, soma, and psyche, walking his own initiatory path and supporting others to find theirs. Rob is a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, trained rites of passage and wilderness fast facilitator, and a teacher of Focusing, meditation, and somatic repression work.
He is co-founder of Ancient Ground, a sister organisation dedicated to the art of earth-based connection — the home of Four Shields work in Australia and a deep container for wilderness vision fasts.
In 2025 he also founded Wild Passage, a rites of passage organisation for young people that draws on eco-psychology, shamanic practices, and nature-based ritual to guide youth through life transitions, fostering resilience, self-knowing, and ecological responsibility.
As founder and principal teacher of the School of Awareness, Rob is dedicated to somatic and nature-based learning that restores embodied presence and sacred relationship with the more-than-human world. Drawing on depth psychology, myth, and ritual, his work supports both young people and adults to cross meaningful thresholds with care, reverence, and a deepening sense of the sacred.
Akua Gutierrez is a breathwork and shamanic healing practitioner, as well as a wilderness solo guide, who leads earth-based, self-generated ceremonies that awaken ancestral remembering and inner wisdom. Her work is rooted in presence, ritual, and a deep trust in the healing intelligence of nature and the human spirit.
Over the past 12 years, Akua has walked a path of reconnection — to self, to others, and to the land — guided by ceremony as a tool for healing, celebration, and transformation. She supports clients in one-on-one sessions to release blocked energy, shift outdated patterns, and access a more embodied, vital way of being. Her offerings are intuitive, somatic, and spiritually grounded. Akua also facilitates rites of passage and women’s circles that honour life’s thresholds — including menarche, motherhood, and intergenerational connection — with reverence and care. For the past four years, she has led the Maidens Camp at the Wise Women Gathering, supporting the slow, sacred becoming from girlhood to maidenhood. Through this work, she brings deep insight into the potency of community-held ritual and the transformative power of being witnessed.
As a wilderness solo facilitator, Akua guides nature-based rites of passage and vision quests for those navigating change, seeking clarity, or longing to return to their inner knowing. Drawing on the wisdom of the Four Shields, the medicine wheel, and sacred council, she holds space for others to be in direct relationship with the wild — and with themselves.
Akua is a mother of two beautiful boys, wife to a loving partner, and part of a soulful, earth-honouring community on Dharug and Gundungurra land in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
“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
Investment
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
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.
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.