Walks to Wellbeing:
Nature Reserves

Join us at Bennachie Visitor Centre for the Autumn Season 2024! 

​

Join Dr Anna Dako every Friday morning as she leads you on a walk through the Bennachie hills. Discover new paths, landscapes and engage in a journey of self-therapy, as you engage in walking to wellbeing! This year, take the challenge to reconnect with nature and your Self. Rain or Shine! Join us! 

​

*

​

In this series of walks we will be getting to know the three steps of experiential immersion as the creative methodology of Felt Thinking and how to keep discovering different entry points into ecological connectivity in movement and reflection.

​

Each walk with be deeply connected to and inspired by Nature and we will strive to bring all the living and wellbeing-enriching aspects of the natural environment to our awareness and ponder over their deeper meaning as experienced in movement. We will be learning how to give the experience its voice and how to build a creative dialogue with the landscape’s distinctive qualities and the environmentally inclusive ‘whole self’.

​

In-keeping with the Bennachie Centre’s ‘Year of Stories’ theme, we will also be exploring the creative narratives that the walks inspire and learn how to live our own stories in new ways too! We will also round up every walk with some warming up tea/coffee time! 

​

On the Walks to Wellbeing we will focus on:

​

- Proprioceptive and interoceptive sensitivity and conscious movement

- Dialogical processes in relation to feeling, sensation, imagination, and functional movement

- Explorations into the inner landscape of the body through sensory awareness and meditative movement practice

- Skills of interoceptive and exteroceptive listening that support sensory homeostasis

- Being in the moment with reflexive voicing of the experience as a form of self-therapy

​

Contemplating movement to facilitate our own wellbeing is a very intuitive activity that involves all the sensual acuteness, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive awareness, embodied presence and a very open attitude toward listening, receiving, and being with whatever is, internally, externally, always transitioning. It is based on practicing one’s ability to move that emerges from our inner sensing and the visceral phenomena, as well as staying responsive to the external stimuli of the space or landscape, where movement shapes itself as a living conversation, a meeting ground between what is or what comes into being, at any given moment.

​

Felt Thinking is a body-based way of working with movement in somatic experience of the Self. It is a deep self-inquiry journey which brings the lived connections between Nature and the Self to the fore and which offers new insights to how we are in the world and how to remedy multiple imbalances.

​

You are welcome to simply come along to a few walks to try out the practice and engage in gentle movement explorations and open, supportive exchange. Alternatively, you can participate in the whole series as a training course in the method of Felt Thinking.

​

There is no prior experience needed! All are welcome! 

​

​

Please note: We are following COVID-19 safety guidelines. As such, social distancing measures will be in place throughout all walks. Additionally, all individuals participating in a walk are strongly encouraged to bring their own sanitising hand gel and are welcome to wear a face mask. All walks take place outdoors in areas where there is plenty of space for individuals to remain safely distanced.

​

We reserve the right to cancel any walk where there are insufficient numbers of participants (less than 3). Anyone who has purchased a ticket for a walk which is subsequently cancelled, can use the ticket for a walk of their choice at a later date.

​

​

When: 10am - 11.30am every Friday morning between September-October 2024.

​

​

Cost: £10 per session / £7 for concessions.