The School of Lost Borders offers outdoor experiences and training which cultivate self-trust, responsibility, and understanding about one’s unique place within society and the natural world. Its programs provide guided opportunities, perspectives, teachings, and much needed self-reflection time in a non-judgmental yet challenging environment. Our purpose is to encourage the skills and attitudes necessary to discover, affirm, and authentically share one’s unique gifts.
For millennia, many – even most – traditions and cultures supported and guided individuals through life transitions. Such transitions include the movement from childhood and adolescence into adulthood, stepping into roles as teachers, leaders, and healers, dealing with illness and loss, and facing death. It was understood that without a meaningful framework, guidance, and “witnessing” of these transitions, the energy surrounding them could easily turn into self-destructive ways – for the individual as well as the families and communities in which they lived. With the necessary support, these challenging times of change became initiations – empowering, humbling, strengthening, and making sacred. Modern people face these universal life transitions, along with many others relating to relationships, work, and the challenges of a complex and fast-paced modern world.
Our work also brings people into direct and immediate contact with the natural world. Wilderness and wilder places are not simply a backdrop for our work; it is fundamental. Researchers are increasingly recognizing two related facts. A disconnection from the natural world has negative consequences for human health and development, and direct and immediate contact with the natural world promotes health and development. Among the documented benefits of wilderness and nearby-nature are stress reduction, fascination and appreciation for the environment, a sense of competence and self-esteem balanced with a sense of trust in oneself and in the world, a more mature morality and care for others, and a sense of awe, wonder, and sacredness. Direct contact with nature also leads to greater commitment to positive environmental action. By fostering re-connections with the natural world, the School’s programs not only offer the benefits of healing and initiation; they also promote a deeper bond with the natural world. This bond leads to stronger and more sustainable motives for environmental responsibility.
The School of Lost Borders draws on pan-cultural traditions in order to support and guide individuals through life transitions and initiations and into deeper contact with the natural world as well as their own innate humanness.
We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them:
we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them,
but to find out the way to do them the most good.
The truest solitude is.....an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.
Thomas Merton- New Seeds of Contemplation
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