Gillian offers holistic mentorship and consulting whether you’re in need of support towards regenerative community design, guidance in communicating with land and plant medicine, coaching in yoga and meditative practices, or healing within a psychotherapy space.
Gillian Kapteyn Comstock
Educator • Land Steward • Co-Founder
Gillian Kapteyn Comstock, MA, is the founding co-director of Metta Earth Institute and the Metta Earth project, which integrates regenerative farming, contemplative practices, community living, and sustainability education. Gillian offers mentoring, program facilitation, and leadership trainings.
As a holistic psychotherapist, certified permaculture designer, and advanced yoga guide, she synthesizes disciplines to support cultural renewal. She is dedicated to creating sanctuaries for others to experience vibrant presence.
With a passion for discovering the wild in mind, body, and earth, she has led yoga retreats, wilderness quests, and trainings in nature sanctuaries around the world.
For the last dozen years Gillian has intertwined this work with grounding in regenerative agriculture and focalizes this in the care of gardens and greenhouses, carbon farming and grazing processes with Icelandic sheep, Milking Shorthorn cows, and heritage breed chickens, as well as the growing and wildcrafting of herbal teas and medicines.
For more than two decades she has been a participant in the Assisi Institute community, which engages in a highly dynamic interdisciplinary investigation of Jungian psychology, creative process, mythology, and the new sciences.
A mother of three adult children and grandmother of five, Gillian has lived a life immersed in cooperative community, the gift economy, and innovative social processes resonate with natural systems and wild nature.
Schedule with Gillian
• Once you have scheduled, please note that if you cancel within 24 hours, we are unable to refund.
• In regards to the fees, we want to honor the diversity of financial needs. Please contact us, and we will be able to work with you to determine a sliding fee and/or barter.
Refresh in the luminosity of our co-creative leadership.
Embodied Improvisation & Co-Creation
As we each find our connection to a sense of place, whether in wild land or in our home sanctuary, the invitation is to engage in the multimodal richness of embodied practices of improvisation to deeply connect with the beings of nature. With our body as guide, we explore creating a space for interdisciplinary theater processes. These lead us to experiment with emergence and co-creation. Movement, collage, drawing, painting, mandala, toning, percussion, and song stir original ritual making. In response to personal and global emergency, these practices activate our imaginations. They allow us to create solutions, innovations, and new ways of being. Awakening change, a possible and luminous future emerges.
Regenerative Living
Find a nature sanctuary, a garden, or a wild haven. Intermingling caring for the earth with creative purpose, integrate practices of permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and indigenous remembering. Living in community with the nature beings, engage in processes to transform the rich and abundant harvests from the land by learning the origins of foods and the ways to make food medicine for healing. Brewing and sipping herbal teas, enjoy tea ceremony with the natural beings around us. With the multi hues of local, organic corn grown bake cornbreads to complement soups made also with locally grown and harvested beans. We can send you some of these ingredients, if need be, harvested from Metta Earth’s organic, biodynamic, and nutrient-dense soils, and guide you in the preparing. With closeness to nature’s elements of water from the well, earth from the gardens, fire from the wood stoves, air from the mountains, and the space of mindfulness, we become alchemists of the wild and are nourished in the richest, most healthy way.
Contemplative Practice
Winter is wonderfully protected and a deepening time for contemplative practice. In the flow of each day, we dive into the knowing of the body for contemplative practice, feeling the rhythm of inwardly guided movement and breath. With the warmth of beeswax candlelight, we find curious companionship with the inner beings and guides. We also invite many other pause moments and attunement processes in the day to help us center in this deep knowing. Opportunities for guided yoga, meditation, and other contemplative practices enrich the days.
Leadership, Activism & Social Justice
Observing and aligning with wild nature, the great natural intelligence of Earth and Cosmos perhaps will touch and guide us. With this approach as an essential devotion, we explore essences of activism. We invite ways to guide the processes of the Wild Ensemble for Luminous Leadership. In returning to our diverse worlds, we may infuse the waters of W E L L into the sacred vessels of our lives—projects each of us alone and together can originate for social justice and leadership.
Plant Medicine
As essential in the global crisis as food security, plant medicine and herbal healing hold a core place in alleviating suffering. As economic and social systems destabilize, collapse, many traditions of plant medicine knowledge bring great healing potential and offer an abundant contribution to well-being.
Wild Herbs, Foraging, & Sustainable Wildcrafting
Cultivation of herbs in gardens
Mushrooms & fungi
Herbal Tea Harvest & Preparation
Herbal salve and oil preparations
Vinegars, infusions, decoctions
Wilding
Deep connection with nature and re-skilling in regenerative processes brings greater sensitivity and healing into agricultural enterprises.
Forest Ecology
Edible Food Forests
Mushroom Cultivation
Natural First Aid and Wild Medicinals
Wild Food Foraging for Edibles
Natural Fiber Crafting: Cordage & Baskets
Backcountry Food Preservation
Wilderness Ethics
Ecopsychology Principles
Chaos & Creativity
Plant & Animal Communication
Regenerative Community Living
Community resiliency is a response to the growing social and environmental crises facing our world. Sustainable community design and practice provides a rich immersion experience to explore whole and healthy communities. Activating systems of economics and governance, biomimicry and natural design, land stewardship, and social justice rejuvenates our communities with deeper sustainability.
Cultural Cosmologies: A Study of Past & Present Cultures in Deep Connection with Nature
Designing with Nature
Core Processes Of Community Building
Visions, Missions, & Covenants: Refreshing Social Structures
Intentional Community Models: Ecovillage, Community Land Trusts, & Cohousing
Transition Towns
Regenerative Economics: Coops, Barter, Guilds, & Gift Economies
Creating Authentic Ceremony & Ritual
Creating Sanctuary, Group Safety & Ethics
Communication Processes: Co-Listening, Non-Violent Communication, & Way of Council
Leadership Models
Forms of Activism
Power, Privilege, Oppression, & Rank
Yoga Meditation
Yoga is rooted in the understanding that everything is interconnected – earth, water, fire, air, space, soil, animals, plants, cosmos, and all beings. Activists stretch body and mind to soften and expand edges, building resilience and flexibility. Practices of yoga and meditation at the river, in the forests, the gardens, and with the animals bring integration of person with Earth. These practices enrich the experience of life. When we are quiet inside, our eyes are open to the vibrancy that surrounds us. This is an opportunity to embody these practices and the contemplative ways of nature, wildness, and farm life.
Morning Yoga & Meditation Practice
Embodiment Principles & Processes
Breathing Practices: Hive Mind, Breath of Joy, & Sounding Breath
Sitting, Walking, and Work Meditations
Drishti Eye Gaze, Earth Savasana, & other Metta Earth Yoga Practices
Deep Ecology & Yoga Philosophy
Green Yoga as Environmental Activism
Circle Yoga & Partner Yoga
Posture Practices with Nature: River, Trees, & Rocks
The Arts
The Arts teach us how to access flow states of awareness. Becoming comfortable with improvisation, spontaneity, and surprise expand our options for creative problem solving. These are essentials in innovating solutions for the tough challenges of our times.
Authentic Movement
Wild Sculptures
Earth Mandalas
Poetry & Wild Mind Writing