Custom programs & Retreats

for Individuals, groups, organizations & Institutions

Custom Programs & Retreats for Individuals, Groups, Organizations & Institutions

Nature-based programming designed for your context, your community, and your season.

Wild Rhythms offers experiential programs for retreat centers, colleges, conservation organizations, and other institutions whose work touches wellness, ecology, human development, or meaningful transition. Each engagement is custom-designed and scoped to a clear project — not an ongoing retainer, but a well-crafted experience (or series) with a beginning, depth, and integration.

Programs can be delivered on-site at your location, hosted here in Colorado, or in a hybrid format. All design, facilitation, and participant materials are handled by Deb. You receive work that is grounded in nearly 30 years of professional practice and doctoral research in nature connection.

Partnership Offerings

Single Immersion

One half-day or full-day experience designed as a complete arc — arrival, deepening, and integration. These are not workshops in the conventional sense. They are designed encounters, crafted specifically for your group and context. Works well as a standalone event or a meaningful addition to an existing retreat, conference, or program series.

Includes:

Pre-event design consultation
2–6 hour facilitated experience
Participant materials
Follow-up integration resource

Best for: Staff retreats, volunteer or donor events, conference sessions, community programming, one-time seasonal offerings

Seasonal Residency

A structured arc across one season — typically three to four touchpoints over 90 days. Each session is part of a coherent through-line, giving participants something more sustaining than a series of unrelated events: a thread they can follow through the season. Can be delivered on-site, fully virtual, or in hybrid format.

Includes:

Intake and design session
3–4 facilitated experiences
Participant materials for each session
Closing integration resource
Brief outcomes summary for your reporting

Best for: Semester-length college or graduate programming, retreat center seasonal series, conservation or land trust cohort programs

Annual Programming Partnership

A full year of co-designed programming — four to six seasonal engagements scoped together in a single agreement at the start of the year. Your organization gains programming continuity and calendar certainty. Deb handles all design, facilitation, and materials. This is a named relationship with a practitioner whose work is academically grounded and experientially proven — not a retainer, but a commitment to a year’s arc.

Includes:

Annual co-design session
4–6 seasonal facilitated experiences
All participant materials
Year-end review conversation

Best for: Colleges and universities, land trusts and foundations, retreat centers building a signature annual nature-based program

Bespoke Retreat Offering

A private, place-based retreat shaped by the land and the questions you carry

For individuals, pairs, or small groups who want to step away from daily life and into a quieter conversation with the living world, I offer bespoke private retreats throughout Colorado. These retreats unfold in the landscapes that call to you, or in Boulder, CO, and are shaped around the season, your questions, and what the land offers in return.

Each retreat is a hand‑built container: spacious, intimate, and guided by field-based practices that open perception and deepen your relationship with the more‑than‑human world. We follow what emerges and let the land help us find our way.

Retreats may be designed as half-day, full-day, or multi-day immersions. Pricing reflects the depth of the work, the length of our time together, and any travel or lodging needed to meet you where you are.

This offering is for those who want a private, lineage-rooted retreat that moves at the pace of weather, breath, and wild knowing.

Every program begins with a conversation about your participants, your context, and your goals. The following are examples of experiential frameworks Deb draws from ~ each adaptable to your time frame, location, and group:

All partnerships begin the same way ~ with a conversation, not a contract. The process is designed to be low-friction and clear.

Step 1 ~Reach out

Please submit the form below, with a brief description of your organization and what you’re imagining. No detailed brief required.

Step 2 ~ Consultation call

A free 20–30 minute call to hear about your needs, your participants, and your context. No obligation.

Step 3 ~ Written proposal

Deb will follow up with a written proposal — scope, format, pricing, and timeline — tailored to your situation.

a few doors in…Every program is designed from scratch for your context:

Communicating with Nature and Animals

What if the world has always been speaking and we simply forgot how to listen?

This is the heart of Deb’s work: the practice of genuine, reciprocal communication with the more-than-human world. Animals, plants, landforms, weather, the quiet intelligence of a particular placeand all carry information, invitation, and relationship, if we develop the capacity to receive it. These programs move participants beyond the idea of nature as backdrop and into direct experience of a world full of voices, perspectives, and presence.

Through solo practice and group exploration, participants develop real perceptual skills — not metaphor, not projection, but attentive, humble, two-way exchange. What does it mean to live in genuine conversation with the living world? This work doesn’t just answer that question. It changes the question entirely.

Nature-based Spiritual Arts

The sacred doesn’t require a pilgrimage. While faraway places carry their own magic, the capacity to sense the holy in the world right outside our doors — in the soil underfoot, the birds moving through the yard, the light shifting through an ordinary afternoon — is available to us anywhere, and may be the more essential practice. Through nature communication, reflection, and group exploration, these programs invite a direct encounter with the life force moving through everything, everywhere.

Our Wild Essence

What does our culture actually mean when it calls something wild? Too often the word carries a shadow – unruly, out of control, inappropriate. In these programs, we reclaim it. Through a blend of arts-based practice, ecopsychology, natural history, and experiential education, we explore our wild selves in relation to the beauty and mystery of the living world. Solo time and group activity weave together as we move into this inquiry, always rooted in the particular place we find ourselves.

The Nature of Creativity

Your creative patterns can often be a mystery to us. The muse may strike at odd or inopportune times. Some of us work slowly and steadily on a project while others may work more intensely for short periods of time. Through various outdoor, arts-based activities, this workshop will allow participants to explore the creative cycles in nature and find them reflected within. Participants will leave with a solid understanding of their own natural rhythms of creativity and a deeper appreciation for the rhythms of creativity in the world around us.

Nature Journaling

A blank page in nature is not a record-keeping device. It is a threshold.

Drawing from Deb’s signature Wild Page™ Sacred Nature Journaling practice, these programs invite participants into journaling as a sacred act of reciprocity…a living dialogue between the self and the more-than-human world. Through observation, sensory awareness, writing, drawing, and color, participants discover that the page is not where you document what you saw, but where the land gets to speak back.

This practice is not about artistry or polished words. It is about presence. And it is accessible to all ages, all experience levels, and all relationships with the natural world.

Dancing with the Land

The land has always been moving. Long before we named it dance, the grasses were swaying, the creek was turning, the hawk was tracing arcs against the sky. These programs are an invitation back into that conversation — to let the body remember what the mind has been trained to overlook.

No dance experience is required. What is required is a willingness to step outside, pay attention, and let what you find there move you — literally. Through solo practice and group exploration, participants discover the rhythms already present in the living world and find them echoed in their own bodies: the pulse, the breath, the instinct to respond.

This is not performance. It is participation in something that was already underway.

“Deb’s presentations have inspired and supported the work of many of our members and environmental educators across as the state. Her presentations are engaging, informative, and fill an important niche in the field. She consistently receives rave reviews from our conference attendees and is a presenter our attendees look for year after year.”

Katie Navin, Director, Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education

“I’ve worked side by side with Deb Matlock for over 15 years, co-presenting and planning countless nature hikes and training workshops for volunteer naturalists and the public. She is without a doubt one of my favorite collaborators: fun, smart, dynamic and always brings fantastic ideas that never would have occurred to me!”

Dave Sutherland, Interpretive Naturalist

“Deb is a gifted presenter. She makes connections on all levels and engages all who participate. We need more thinkers like Deb Matlock!”

L.D., Boulder, CO

“Deb Matlock is a skilled facilitator who connects with the audience by asking thought-provoking questions and allowing ample space for self-reflection. She is intuitive to the needs of the group and goes above and beyond to create a lasting experience.”

J.F. Longmont, CO