Rachel Schmidt, BSW, PLC
Rachel Schmidt, BSW, PLC
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What if the land you’re drawn to holds a mirror to who you are becoming?
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WELCOME TO LAND & BODY
Have you noticed how some places feel different - alive with beauty, meaning, and a quiet sense of wonder? Landscapes that fill you with joy or gently bring back memories of a season, a moment, or someone important in your life? Sometimes these places call us to pay attention - to slow down, notice, and reflect on what they reveal about ourselves and our lives.
Land & Body is a four-month creative series exploring the intimate connection between land and body, and how that connection shapes your sense of identity, home, belonging, and the future you are being called toward.
Through time in nature and learning from women artists, poets, and writers, the series encourages women to follow the land’s invitation, moving at their own pace, noticing what’s around them, and trusting the process.
This is a course designed to leave you feeling inspired, nourished, and more connected to yourself, to others, and to the land.
COURSE OVERVIEW
Live Zoom Classes. Join from wherever you live!
Starts: Sunday, Sept 27
Duration: 4 months, one Sunday per month
Language: English
Dates:
Sunday, Sept 27
Sunday, Oct 25
Sunday, Nov 22
Sunday, Jan 3
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST/1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST
Overseas: Evening Class, match your time zone to Vancouver BC Canada
Course Fee: $325 CAD + .05% GSTax (approx. $242.18 USD, $212.82 Euros)
Class Hours: 8 hours total, including a private gallery page and ongoing connection with the instructor and women in the course. One Sunday per month, supporting a slow-learning and integration-based approach.
What You Will Experience
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Each gathering is a chance to slow down and listen to your body, your heart, and the land around you. You’ll notice the changing seasons and the rhythms of wind, water, and light, and feel how time in nature brings calm and clarity.
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In each class, we’ll explore your creative practice and the reflections that arise from your time in nature. This helps you reconnect with what matters most - your values, your dreams, and the parts of yourself quietly asking for attention. Along the way, you’ll build meaningful connections with other women exploring similar questions and walking a similar path.
We’ll draw inspiration from women artists, poets, and writers, as well as from the natural world. By the end, you’ll feel more connected to yourself, clearer about your next steps, and ready to follow what’s calling you.
This program is for you if you want to:
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Come Home to Yourself
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Feel more grounded, calm, and clear
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Strengthen your focus, attention, reflection, and presence
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Experience moments of clarity—glimpses—that reveal who you are becoming
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Reconnect deeply with nature in a way that transforms how you see yourself
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Create meaningful work inspired by your relationship with the natural world
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Explore your connection to land, place, and belonging to uncover new insights
CLASS DATES & MONTHLY THEMES
Sunday, Sept 27
Belonging to Place: Noticing Where You Feel Most at Home, and Why
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST/1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST (Overseas Sunday Evening)
Begin by noticing and connecting with the places where you feel most at home - places that are also alive with wonder and possibility, and may serve as doorways to something new you’re seeking. Explore the feelings and memories these places bring up for you. Discover the connection between land and body through texture, colour, patterns and cycles - helping you deepen your understanding of self and inspiring your own creative expression.
Sunday, Oct 25
The Land as Teacher: Listening, Presence, and Uncovering Wisdom
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST/1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST (Overseas Sunday Evening)
Learn to pay close attention to the quiet messages and stories the land offers through thoughtful and careful observation. Develop your ability to listen deeply and be fully present as you spend time in nature, discovering a new language that brings fresh insights and guidance around tension points and feelings of misalignment in your life. Work with the concept of flow, and create ways to bring its rhythms into your daily life.
Sunday, Nov 22
Listening to the Land: Symbols, Textures, Stories in the Natural World
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST/1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST (Overseas Sunday Evening)
This month centres on perception—the symbols the land offers to your awareness. Through creative expression like mindful photography, drawing, collage or any form that speaks to you, you’ll develop a visual language that helps you catch glimpses not only of place but also of what you are searching for within yourself.
Sunday, Jan 3
The Land That Calls You: Mapping the Terrain of Longing and Resonance
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST/1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST (Overseas Sunday Evening)
Close the season by exploring your personal geography of belonging and yearning—the places you’ve come from, where you are now, and the steps ahead. Through the creative practice of making handmade maps, you’ll weave your story into the larger story of the land, uncovering the paths, longings, and invitations that will guide you forward into a fuller, more alive expression of your life.
BETWEEN CLASSES
Between monthly sessions, you’ll spend time in the natural world exploring your connection to the landscapes that are calling you, and record the changes and shifts that are happening for you. You can use any medium to do this - creative writing, photography, painting, sketching or simply wandering and observing the ecosystem around you.
WHO WILL LOVE THIS
This course is for women who want to come home to themselves, to slow down, find presence and beauty in everyday life, and reconnect with the rhythm of the natural world. For those who feel drawn to a creative life and long to deepen their art and self-expression through relationship with nature.
No artistic experience needed. Just a curious heart and a willingness to listen.
Facilitator
Rachel Schmidt, BSW, PLC
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✨ I created Land & Body for women who feel more alive around certain landscapes, and are interested in understanding why. This course is for you if you've walked through a forest and felt wonder, stood at the edge of the sea longing for something, or you are searching for a home you can’t quite name.
Land & Body is a four-month creative exploration of how the landscapes we love—and the ones that call to us can mirror, move, and transform us. Through nature-based mindfulness, contemplative practices, and creative work, we’ll explore the living relationship between place and psyche, body and belonging.
I use nature-based mindfulness, Psychosynthesis, and contemplative arts to support women in reconnecting with the deepest parts of themselves—often through their connection to the natural world.
My studio is located in a forest in British Columbia, Canada, surrounded by 150-year-old trees. I hold a degree in social work and bring over 30 years of experience in the helping professions. I’m also certified in Psychosynthesis, a depth-oriented coaching approach that honours the whole self. A mother, artist, and activist, I feel most at home in nature - especially when paddling my kayak across a quiet lake beneath a sky full of stars.
With a background in counselling, teaching, holistic wellness, and the visual arts, I bring together these threads to create rich, reflective experiences like Land & Body. These online gatherings are deeply connected spaces where women come home to themselves through their relationship with land.
Reviews
Kind words from women
"This course felt less like taking a class and more like entering into a conversation with the land. Rachel creates such a thoughtful and gentle space that I found myself noticing things I had walked past for years. It has changed the way I spend time outdoors."
"I discovered a new way of being present, not just with nature but with myself. The practices opened up a longing for something more meaningful in my daily life, and what that might look like. Rachel is an amazing facilitator and created a safe and trusting online space, blending her background in counselling and contemplative arts. Highly recommend this course."
Dalhia, 41
"This course completely shifted how I experience nature and myself. Learning to listen deeply to the land opened up new insights I hadn’t expected. It’s helped me find calm and clarity during a very difficult time. This is one of the best courses I have ever taken."
Mykalya, 47
"Land & Body helped me see how life moves through landscapes and through myself - in rhythms and flows I had not noticed before. By tuning into these natural patterns, I gained a clearer sense of how to move with life instead of against it. It’s a powerful way to understand change and find balance."
Gemma, 35
Tza, 62
A Glimpse Inside: Land & Body Contemplative Art Courses
What happens when we slow down enough to listen to the land and our own bodies? This gallery showcases the creative artifacts and inner expressions from women who chose to step away from their daily roles to meet themselves at a more elemental level.
Through nature-based mindfulness and quiet, contemplative practice, they bypassed the busy analysis of everyday life and allowed a deeper intelligence to surface. What you will see on the next page are the tangible traces of their four-month journeys — artistic reflections of women learning to experience themselves not just as onlookers, but as a rooted part of the living world. Click below to explore their shared stories of land, self, and belonging.
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