Can you imagine a life where you no longer feel suffocated by the weight of your grief?
Empowerment Retreat
~ Earth skills, soul healing and joyful ceremony ~
Tuatapere, New Zealand
March 1-7, 2026
Value $1999.99
First Four People to Sign up get Special Price
25% off!
$1497
Step into a transformative 7-day retreat designed to reconnect you deeply with nature, community, and ancient skills. Camp under pristine skies of the south island of New Zealand, while learning fire making with bow drill, weaving with flax to make baskets, and cordage making. Move your body with yoga and dance, immerse in joyful ceremony, and nurture your mind through solo nature time and contemplative journaling. Enjoy nourishing meals, detox from technology, and awaken to the wonders of wide-angle vision and fox walking. Limited to a small group, this immersive experience invites you to reclaim your spark, rejuvenate your spirit, and connect to the earth in a supportive and vibrant community.
Here, you won’t find hotel luxury or curated comfort, and you won’t need it.
Because true relaxation and healing happen in nature.
The earth regulates your nervous system.
The sky softens your mind.
The fire awakens your strength.
The simplicity around you invites you to breathe again.
It is a myth that you can only rest in comfort.
Out here, under open skies, you rediscover how good simplicity feels.
How deeply the body relaxes without noise, screens, or pressure.
How quickly you feel safe, held, warm, and alive, even with less.
Nature is not “dirty.” Nature is home.
This retreat is a transformational journey...
from scattered to centred,
from stressed to grounded,
from hiding to showing up,
from tired to powerful,
from disconnected to fully alive.
You will arrive as you are...
and leave with more clarity, more confidence, and a deeper sense of who you truly are.
You will remember your strength, your intuition, and your place in the great web of life.
This experience is not just a break...
this is a return
to your body,
to your truth,
to your joy,
to the Earth.
Join us if you’re ready for a retreat that Balances you from the inside out.
A retreat that empowers you, strengthens you,
and reminds you what it feels like to be vibrantly, Beautifully, Imperfectly human.
“It was the perfect way to spend a week: learning new skills, connecting to self and others through nature's wisdom”
“It was actually kind of life changing for me!”
“The retreat was so healing”
“Life changing and soul nourishing!”
"This has taught me how to find peace even in the midst of difficulty”
"I am beyond grateful for how Carleigh’s expertise, stories, practices, vulnerability and overall calming nature have influenced me in a way that will stay with me forever.”
Tired of zip-lines, escape rooms, or silent retreats?
Join us for a week of earth skills, soul healing and joyful ceremony!
Here Are Just A Few Examples of Items in Our Itinerary
Basket Weaving From Local Materials: Everyone makes a basket to take home!
Foraging: Discover edible and medicinal plants under our feet!
Shelter Building: Experience working together to build a fort that could save your life!
Nature practices to support aliveness: Connect with the Earth and discover practices that promote vitality and well-being.
Movement and bodywork.
Fire making: Bow and drill method, fire structures and firewood gathering and preparation.
Ceremony, full of intent and simple in nature.
How to cultivate reciprocal relationships.
Journaling as exploration, reflection and integration
Solo time in nature
Secure your special price now!
Meet Your Retreat Guides
Karina Gerzabek
Karina is an earth-based instructor, storyteller, and natural fiber artist who grew up immersed in a life shaped entirely by nature. Born beside the fire and raised in the wilderness, she has never known a separation between learning, living, and the natural world. Her childhood was one of freedom, guided not by classrooms but by seasons, landscapes, and the rhythms and songs of the Earth.
Karina wrote her first book at the age of nine, a children’s story honoring the natural world, and by thirteen she was already teaching through the camera, creating her first instructional videos on weaving with plant fibers. She began her formal training at the Tracker School with Tom Brown Jr. and continued learning from mentors, experts, and Indigenous knowledge holders across the globe. Her journeys have taken her through the rainforests of Asia, across North America’s gatherings and festivals, and into diverse ecosystems where she deepened her understanding of natural materials and ancient skills.
Today, Karina is an international Survival Mastery teacher and trainer, sharing both practical earth skills and the deeper awareness that comes from a life lived in direct relationship with the land. She has been part of Earth Living Mastery since the day she could walk, not as an observer but as someone who lived the teachings long before she taught them. Over the years, she has led live and online seminars, trained students in multi-year initiation programs, and supported countless people on their path of reconnection and resilience.
Karina is also a dedicated natural fiber artist, working especially with flax. Her weaving, from bags to baskets to intricate functional pieces, reflects her quiet precision and the deep bond she holds with the land. She teaches weaving both in New Zealand and internationally, helping people rediscover the beauty and usefulness of traditional craft in a modern world.
As a member of the next generation of earth-connected mentors, Karina brings a fresh, grounded, and deeply lived perspective to every class she teaches, embodying a life where Earth, skill, and spirit are inseparable.
Franziska Gerzabek
Franziska is a wilderness teacher, healer, and earth-based mentor whose life’s work is rooted in restoring the ancient bond between humans and the natural world. Trained directly by Tom Brown Jr. and certified as a Survival Mastery instructor, she carries forward a lineage of deep nature connection, spiritual awareness, and practical earth skills that guide people back into belonging.
For more than 25 years, Franziska has been teaching live seminars, online programs, festivals, and multi-year initiation paths. Her experience spans 1:1 coaching, community intensives, and the long-term mentoring of individuals who chose to live in nature for one to three years—supporting them through profound personal, emotional, and spiritual transformations. Known for her clarity, empathy, and grounded presence, she leads people toward their inner strength while helping them reconnect with the Earth and with their own soul.
Together with her husband, she co-authored the book Erdverbunden (Earth Connected), a heartfelt and practical guide to returning to a life in harmony with the natural world. In 2000, they also founded and hosted Europe’s first German-speaking Guardians of the Earth Festival, creating a gathering that continues to inspire earth stewardship, community, and a renewed sense of responsibility for Mother Earth.
Today, Franziska teaches in New Zealand and across Europe, guiding people worldwide to rediscover a connection that is older than culture itself: the connection between Earth, spirit, and the living breath that moves through all things.
Carleigh Fairchild
Carleigh Fairchild is a healer, an earth-based instructor, and storyteller whose life has been shaped by a deep, lifelong relationship with the land. From early experiences on farms and in wild places to solo backpacking 500 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, she has devoted herself to learning how humans can live in respectful, collaborative relationship with the more‑than‑human world. Over the last 25 years, her love of homesteading, gardening, basket weaving, and fire-making has evolved into a path of teaching and healing that helps others remember that nature is not separate, but home.
At 13, Carleigh began formal earth-skill studies at the Tracker School, founded by Tom Brown Jr., and later apprenticed in Washington State in survival skills, ethnobotany, basketry, and hunting. Her dedication led her to one of the most challenging survival experiences on the planet: 86 days alone in the wilds of Patagonia on the survival series ALONE (an experience she repeated twice as a participant on Seasons 3 and 5). There, with no camera crew and only what she could source from the land, she relied on her skills, intuition, and connection with Earth to meet every basic need, deepening her understanding of resilience, belonging, and what it truly means to be in relationship with the natural world.
Alongside her wilderness training, Carleigh has spent years studying NIASZIIH healing, a lineage that weaves body, spirit, and earth into an intuitive approach to transformation. As a certified NIASZIIH bodywork healer and long-time student and teacher with wildernessFusion, she brings a healer’s perspective into everything she offers, seeing survival, skills, and nervous system regulation as inseparable threads in the same tapestry. Her work supports people in finding quiet stillness in a fast-paced world, tending their nervous systems, and building inner and outer resilience through direct connection with the land.
Carleigh is the founder of Human Nature Connection LLC, where she offers retreats, mentorships, basketry workshops, and nature-based programs that blend earth skills, community, and healing. Living and teaching in Western North Carolina, she works with individuals, families, and groups both online and in person. Helping outdoorsy, heart-led people deepen their relationship with themselves, each other, and the Earth so they can grow into the humans their hearts know are possible.
Your Accommodations
Settle into simple, cozy, earth-honoring accommodations that keep you close to the land while still feeling held and cared for. The camp is intentionally rustic and comfortable, inviting you to remember how good it feels to live with less and feel supported by the elements around you.
Tent camping
You will stay in shared or individual tents, set up on the land so you can fall asleep to the sounds of night birds, wind, and insects, and wake with the first light of dawn. Sleeping mats and simple bedding keep you warm and supported, while the open-air setting helps your body and nervous system downshift out of “indoor life” and into a slower, more natural rhythm.
Outdoor fire-heated bath
One of the sweetest luxuries on this retreat is the outdoor fire-heated bath: a simple tub warmed by wood fire beneath, open to fresh air and sky. Imagine soaking in hot water at the end of a full day, muscles unwinding as you watch the steam rise and the stars appear, feeling both primal and deeply cared for.
Composting toilets
The camp uses clean, well-maintained composting toilets designed to be odor-free and easy to use, with clear instructions provided when you arrive. Using composting toilets supports a low-impact, earth-honoring way of living; it closes the loop with our waste, conserves water, and turns a basic daily need into an opportunity to live more in alignment with the land.
Meet The Land
Our Retreat Land is in the Far South of New Zealand's South Island
Hidden in one of the most remote corners of New Zealand’s South Island, our land lies near Tuatapere, the gateway to the Fiordland National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage area known for its vast, untouched wilderness. Here, the natural world still feels raw and unrestrained, shaped by wind, ocean, forest, and time itself.
Surrounded by native bush and far from any modern infrastructure, this place offers a purity that is increasingly rare. There is no mobile reception, no internet, no electricity, only the quiet presence of the land. This natural radiation-free environment allows the body and mind to settle, to breathe, and to enter into resonance with the living world in a way that is almost impjossible elsewhere.
For countless generations, coastal Māori lived and gathered in this region, harvesting the rich offerings of the sea and moving inland to rest, work, and prepare food. Their presence is still felt in the land, in its silence, its stories, and its deep sense of continuity.
The landscape itself holds a gentle power. Small rivers flow through the bush, bird calls echo through the valley, and the forest seems to breathe with you. The isolation creates a cocoon of clarity where distractions fall away and the senses open. It is a place where inner and outer stillness meet, where the noise of the world fades, and where something ancient comes alive again.
This land is not just a course location, it is an ally, a teacher, and a sanctuary.
A place where you cannot help but arrive in yourself.
A place where the Earth remembers you and where you remember the Earth.
Secure your special price now!
Join This Empowerment Retreat!
Ready to step into a transformative 7-day retreat designed to reconnect you deeply with nature, community, and ancient skills. Camp under pristine skies of the south island of New Zealand, while learning fire making with bow drill, weaving with flax to make baskets, and cordage making. Move your body with yoga and dance, immerse in joyful ceremony, and nurture your mind through solo nature time and contemplative journaling. Enjoy nourishing meals, detox from technology, and awaken to the wonders of wide-angle vision and fox walking. Limited to a small group, this immersive experience invites you to reclaim your spark, rejuvenate your spirit, and connect to the earth in a supportive and vibrant community.
Value $1999.99
First Four People to Sign up get Special Price When You Pay In Full
25% off!
$1497
Have Questions?
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