What if the land you’re drawn to holds a mirror to who you are becoming?
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Course Overview
Hello and welcome.
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Land & Body is a four-month slow-learning course for women seeking deeper connection, meaning, and belonging at midlife. The course has sold out six times, every time it has been offered. A small group of women from around the world meet monthly to explore their relationship with home, place, the natural world, the cosmos, and their bodies.
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Through contemplation, art, nature-based mindfulness, creative practice, and embodied awareness, the course supports women in reconnecting with themselves and with the land they feel drawn to. It is especially well suited for women navigating midlife transition who are seeking a slower, more grounded way of living and working.
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Live Zoom Classes
Starts: Sunday, Feb 22, 2026
Duration: 4 months, one Sunday per month
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
Language: English
Course Fee: $245 CAD/$185 USD (approx. $62 CAD/$47 USD monthly)
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.
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​What You Will Experience
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Each two-hour Zoom gathering unfolds as a shared, attentive practice. In the first half, women are invited to share reflections and creative responses from the previous month’s explorations. This creates a steady, supportive space for listening, witnessing, and presence, without pressure to explain or perform. Over time, this rhythm builds trust and a sense of shared language within the group.
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The second half introduces new material connected to the month’s theme. This often includes the work of women artists whose practices resonate with what we are exploring, offering inspiration and a wider creative and cultural context. These works are not studied analytically, but approached as companions - ways of seeing, feeling, and making sense of experience.
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Throughout each gathering, the natural world is an active teacher. We pay attention to what the land is showing us about rhythm, cycles, change, and belonging, and allow these observations to inform conversation and creative inquiry. Discussions move slowly and reflectively, with time for each woman to workshop ideas, share her process, and speak from direct experience, often guided by what the landscape itself is revealing.​
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​​Who This Is For
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 during life transitions
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Strengthen your intuition through focused 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 art or writing inspired by your relationship with the natural world
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Explore your connection to land, place, and belonging to uncover new insights
Light a Creative Fire This Season
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Connect with a supportive community of like-hearted women on a similar journey
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Feel re-inspired and creatively alive through the quiet, nourishing rhythm of the season
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​​Class Dates & Monthly Themes
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Feb 22, 2026
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)
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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. Using deep reflection techniques, explore the feelings and memories these places bring up for you. Discover the connection between land and body through the work of women artists, whose pieces speak to shared themes of identity, belonging, and transformation - helping you deepen your understanding and inspiring your own creative expression.
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March 15, 2026
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. Explore the natural concept of flow, and practice ways to bring its rhythms into your daily life.
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April 12, 2026
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 textures, shapes, and symbols the land offers to your awareness. Through mindful photography, drawing, and other creative practices, 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.
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May 3, 2026
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)
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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 handmade maps, you’ll weave your story into the larger story of the land, uncovering the paths and longings that guide you forward.​​​​
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​​​​Between Classes
​As you listen to the stories of others and return to the land again and again, you may begin to notice how place shapes your identity, memory, and belonging. This is an invitation to remember the landscapes that live within you - and to deepen your relationship with the living world around you.
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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.
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​​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.
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No artistic experience needed. Just a curious heart and a willingness to listen.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
What Women Are Saying
"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."
— Maya, British Columbia