Wilderness Vision Fasts & Rites of Passage
Nature-based thresholds for healing, wholeness, and belonging
Welcome to Ancient Ground
Ancient Ground is a home for earth-based connection, soulcraft, ritual, and belonging. We are dedicated to the art of crossing thresholds — the sacred passages that lead us deeper into relationship with the living earth, our communities, and the archetypal depths of being.
Rooted in the ancient map of the Four Shields of Wholeness, and held in the lineage of the pan-cultural wilderness vision fast, our work invites people to step into ceremony, encounter the wilds within, and return with a deep remembering of the gifts that they alone can give.
“Sometimes you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests,
questions that can make or unmake a life.”
— David Whyte
Programs & Offerings
4 Shields Nature-Based Retreats
5-day wilderness immersions weaving circle, deep ceremony, and solo time on the land. Rooted in a pan-cultural map of human wholeness, these retreats invite you to encounter nature-based archetypes through the four dimensions of your being — body, heart, mind, and soul. Working in partnership with the more-than-human world, and guided by practices of deep listening, you are supported to remember your place in the wider web of life and to open pathways of healing, belonging, and renewal.
Wilderness Vision Fasts
A pan-cultural practice found across time, geography, and cultures, the vision fast (sometimes also referred to as a vision quest) is a timeless wilderness vigil and rite of passage. It weaves solitude, fasting, and deep nature connection into a threshold where healing, the marking of major life transitions, vision-seeking, soulcraft, and deep self-encounter can unfold in intimate relationship with the land. With ancient roots, the vision fast offers urgent medicine for the times we are in, supporting you to step beyond the familiar confines of the life that no longer entirely fits you. Enter the Mystery and reinhabit your deepest place and purpose in the web of life.
Training in the Four Shields
For those called to guide, these trainings offer a deep initiation into the art of holding thresholds. You will learn the Four Shields of Wholeness model, the practices of council and mirroring, and the skills to guide rites of passage and vision fast ceremonies for others. Rooted in ancient wisdom and carried into present-day practice, this pathway prepares guides to hold transformative spaces with depth, safety, and reverence.
Trainings will commence in 2027. Expressions of interest are now open.
Why Ancient Ground?
We live in a time of ecological and cultural unraveling. The old ways of orientation are fraying, and yet ancient maps remain — maps that show us how to live in wholeness, how to honour thresholds, and how to walk in belonging with the more-than-human world.
Ancient Ground is a place to gather around these maps, to remember our kinship with the living earth, and to walk together through the passages that renew life.
As guides, we weave a unique skillset of advanced shamanic practice, deep somatic attunement, ecotherapy training, qualifications in depth work, dream work and trauma-informed space holding — all held within decades of lived experience in conversation and ceremony with the more-than-human world. Our work tends the sacred, and the soul-centric fires within, in service of all life
Meet Your Guides
Akua Gutierrez
Co-founder, Ancient Ground
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.
Rob Engels
Co-founder, Ancient Ground
Rob 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 their own.
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. A certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and lecturer in Somatic Ecotherapy with Metavision Institute, he passionately opens doorways for people to remember their deeper belonging in the web of life. Drawing on depth psychology, myth, and deep nature connection practices, his work supports people to follow the wisdom of the body into a deeper embodied sense of wholeness, and a living conversation with the sacred.
As a certified meditation teacher and Focusing trainer Rob shares practices of mindfulness and self-inquiry that open pathways into self-awareness, personal growth, and transpersonal exploration. His work is grounded in decades of immersion in diverse mystery traditions—including Kagyu-Nyingma Buddhism, non-dual teachings, and the Diamond Approach to embodied spirituality—reflecting a lifelong pursuit of Truth.
He is also a trained facilitator of the Kiloby Inquiry Method, a groundbreaking mindfulness-based approach to healing depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction. And in 2021 he co-founded the Blue Mountains Mens Group, honouring is commitment to hold spaces for connection, kinship and cultural repair.
Join the Circle
Stay connected with the work of Ancient Ground. Sign up to receive news of upcoming retreats, vision fasts, and trainings, along with occasional reflections on earth-based practice and sacred thresholds.
Follow Our Broader Work
Ancient Ground is co-stewarded by Akua and Rob, who also guide their own streams of practice and teaching.
School of Awareness — Rob’s programs in somatic inquiry, ecotherapy, and earth-based listening
Akua Earth — Akua’s offerings in embodied ceremony, ancestral healing, and women’s wisdom
Acknowledgement
The work of Ancient Ground arises from many lineages of wisdom and practice. We honour the enduring guidance of First Nations peoples worldwide, who have carried earth-based ways of knowing across countless generations. With deep gratitude we acknowledge Uncle David King, Dharug Elder, for sharing some of his wisdom with us, and the Dharug, Gundungurra, and Wiradjuri peoples on whose unceded lands much of our work takes place.
We honour the Four Shields of Wholeness, traced by Hyemeyohsts Storm, a Northern Cheyenne elder, to Mayan cosmology, and carried forward through the beauty and bounty of our friends and mentors at the School of Lost Borders, who have tended the vision fast ceremony and the maps of wholeness, keeping them alive for our times.
And beyond all human lineage, we acknowledge the land herself as teacher — the mountains and waters, the standing ones and the stone people, the winged and the wild — who continue to shape and guide this work. From the wild Pinyon and Juniper of the High Sierra Nevada, and the brooding slate landscapes of North Wales to the radiant sandstone cradles of Wollemi, you have made and unmade us. We honour the many beings who have held, heeded, tended, and nurtured us through the years, and the countless conversations that have unfolded on, as and with the land. It is in this living reciprocity that our practice takes root and continues to grow.