Team
Sebastiana Black
Sebastiana Black is an ecotherapist and Internal Family Systems therapist working in private practice in Suffolk and Norfolk. She runs IFS in Nature groups on Foxtail Meadow and in Norwich and has experience in running expressive arts and mindful self-compassion groups and courses since 2010 in the UK and Europe.
She is the co-founder and director of Ecotherapy East social enterprise and facilitates wheel of the year rituals on Foxtail Meadow. She is engaged in community development, actively contributing towards regeneration of the natural world and healing our disconnection from nature through our own inner work. She has special interest in contemplative practice around poly-crisis. She enjoys songs and poetry, running in the wild, tending trees and deepening her Buddhist practice. www.sebastianablack.co.uk
Robert Black
Rob is an integrative counsellor, supervisor, ecotherapist and expressive arts therapist, working in private practice. He worked at Norfolk Mind charity as a trainer of Mental Health First Aid, Mindfulness, Self-Compassion and Active Hope courses for a decade.
Rob has a keen interest in transpersonal and Jungian therapy and has offered trainings to NHS psychiatry staff. He co-founded Ecotherapy East and enjoys making difference by increasing biodiversity on the land he helps steward.
If not spotting birds in Suffolk, Rob enjoys travelling, vision questing and exploring shamanism.
www.robertblackcounselling.co.uk
Andy Narracott
Andy is a green-fingered nature-lover who has travelled and worked across the world as a water and sanitation specialist. Since crossing the threshold of 50 years on this earth, he has leaned into soul skills such as ritual and ceremony, mentoring the youth, conscious eldering, and relating to the invisible world of ancestors and the sacred. As a trustee of Ecotherapy East, he runs meadow immersion events in his Norwich community. He delights in growing and fermenting food, foraging and cooking.
Alexander Walker
Alexander has lived in Kessingland for over 40 years. To wind down from working as a G.P. he found that vegetable gardening served as a valuable connection with earth and to other parts of himself. An interest in stress management led him to a meditation practice and he’s been a member of the Suffolk Coastal sangha (Thich Nhat Hanh) for 15 years; now meeting at the Harmony Centre near Bramfield. Another strand in him joining the meadow community has been Joanna Macy’s ‘Work that Reconnects’ (WTR).
The second part of the spiral of WTR is ‘honouring our pain’ which led him to Norfolk Grief Tending. Rob was at a workshop of theirs that he attended 3 years ago. A WTR workshop at the Harmony Centre was where he met Sebastiana.
Coming to community days at Foxtail Meadow has been a delight; marking the ‘Wheel of the Year’, walking the labyrinth, working on the land with others, followed by easy conversations under the willow. He feels a sense of ‘refuge’ when walking on the meadow and is very fortunate to have joined this openhearted community.
Tessa Hays
Tessa has spent her working life involved in education ranging from pre-school to tutoring A ‘level students, whilst also bringing up her own children. She has always been interested in alternative forms of education in a system which she sees as increasingly narrow and setting many young people up for failure.
She has recently moved to the Suffolk countryside enabling her to enjoy the beautiful Foxtail Meadow and the activities which Ecotherapy East provide. She loves being part of the EE community and team and feels blessed to have met so many compassionate and interesting people, particularly during the’ Wheel of the Year’ celebrations.
She is especially interested in finding ways to integrate people who often find themselves alienated, and on the margins of society. Tessa has always recognised the natural world as an extraordinary leveller where society’s habit of labelling individuals becomes especially irrelevant.
She is also very keen to provide opportunities for children and young people to experience interaction with Nature in a way that a technology-filled world is currently too often denying them.
Tessa loves all types of literature and the way it can give voice to the story which everybody carries within them.