Instructors

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Rachel Kaplan

Rachel Kaplan works alternately as an ecoSomatic therapist, writer, teacher, permaculture designer, activist and mother. She and her family live and work on a small urban homestead in Petaluma, CA which they call Tiny Town Farm. She has spent the last twenty-five years working with individuals and groups of people evolving strategies for personal and cultural regeneration, first as a community artist/activist, and now in her land and body-based repair work.  

Rachel holds two Masters degrees, one in InterDisciplinary Art and the other in Counseling Psychology. She is a permaculture designer, and an advanced somatic practitioner, with trainings in generative somatics and Hakomi body-centered psychotherapy. She co-authored Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (with K. Ruby Blume), and is currently working on a book with Anna Halprin about community dance rituals.  She writes frequently for local and national magazines and journals on the topics of sustainability and somatics. She can be found at www.urban-homesteading.org and www.RachelKaplanMFT.net.

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Delia Carroll

Conceived in Pennsylvania, born in California, Delia Carroll is a hardy pioneer species deeply rooted in the humus of Bay Area counterculture. She has a degree in the art of living and diverse skills within the business, artistic and familial realms. She is a devoted plant mistress, a high quality organizer and an agent for regenerative social systems. She aspires to awaken people to their own agency in the creation of a world based on the Permaculture Ethics of Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share.
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In 2009 she completed her PDC at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and the Permaculture Teachers Training at the Esalen Institute.  In the intervening years, Delia has continued to hone her teaching skills, acting as Teachers Assistant for well known Permaculture teachers Kat Steele, Benjamin Fahrer and Michael Kramer, as well as teaching Practical Permaculture in Albany CA’s Edible Landscape Project. She is a past producer of the West Coast Women’s Permaculture Gatherings and the Northern California Permaculture Convergences.   A current passion is The PlaceMaker’s TeaHouse, which explores placemaking as a form of permaculture activism.

She can be reached at delia.littlehill@gmail.com.

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Cassandra Ferrera

Cassandra Ferrera is dedicated to restoring our relationships with each other in community and to restoring our relationship with the earth.  She practices this by being a permacultural real estate agent who specializes in community building. Cassandra works with Green Key Real Estate www.greenkeyrealestate.com and co-developed a new vision for the first green real estate company in California.

Cassandra’s life has been deeply impacted by the dramatic onset of an auto-immune disease, which has completely revolutionized how she lives in her body and sustains her life.  Having directly experienced disease born of human folly and healing born of nature, she is even more dedicated to weaving a world of vitality and regeneration. Cassandra received her PDC  in 2009 at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and  went on to train as a Permaculture Teacher at Esalen Institute in 2012.    Cassandra also received training as a natural chef from Bauman College and an ayurvedic yoga teacher through the dhyana Center. Self taught student of astrology for 25 years, she created Cycle Wisdom Astrology during her Saturn return in 2000 and has been doing professional readings ever since.  Cassandra settled in Sonoma County in 2002 and now lives in a micro village with her awesome husband, two strong willed kids, and two lovely neighboring families.  She is committed to living the experiment of land based community and sharing resources with others.

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Kyra Auerbach

Kyra Auerbach has spent more than 25 years embodying skills essential to the transformation our culture deeply needs. She is the founder of GaiaWise outside of Occidental, CA where she lives micro-village style with her daughters and seven other residents. GaiaWise is the host site for Permaculture From the Inside Out as well Soror Luna, a woman's circle.  From the time she was a child working in the garden with her great-grandmother, she has honed her earthsteading skills, which she shares with small groups through a seasonal lens (www.gaiawise.net).

Kyra holds advanced degrees in Somatic Psychology (CIIS) and Sustainable Enterprise ("Green MBA", Dominican University).  She trained as a yoga instructor with Rodney Yee & in embodied voice with Silvia Nakkach & Chloe Goodchild.  Her interests include the neurobiology of trauma and wellbeing; creating an earth-centered economy; human communication and deep inner listening, and embodying cultural diversity (fermentation!).  She leans into practices of improvisational dance, ritual, singing/songwriting, tantra, collage, and poetry, in service of the flowering of joy, wisdom, ease & functionality in her relations and her home.

Guest Instructors