Our Vital Cycles courses offers an integrative perspective along with practical skills for creating regenerative designs for your soul and the soil, water, & plants you tend
Become Part of a Community! Join One or ALL of our Vital Cycles 2025 Sessions!
In 2024 we will be meeting the third weekend of each month March through June! See dates below and mark our calendars! Connect with us at [email protected] and and let us know you are interested here.
Vital Cycles weekends are like no other! This internationally recognized content deepens your understanding of self, place & planet.
Vital Cycles offers a broadened, deepened approach to the traditional Permaculture approach, designed to encompass a multiplicity of regenerative design patterns and practices. Our sessions include material on and integration of Human Ecology, the exploration of how our human bodies and consciousness reflect the natural world. We highlight emergent and less well-known authors, researchers and project planners working in varied facets of human and planetary health and healing. Our courses are small (maximum 25) which facilitates an intimate group with time for folks to share, connect and learn from each other, as well as physical space and opportunity for gaining practical hands-on skills.
Assess, design & tend integrated systems for rehydrating, revegetating & re-habitating our homes & communities; feed microbes, wildlife & yourself. Step into awe, slow down, create a wild vision for a future you want to be part of. Start where you are – join us for this deep journey amidst the rolling hills of Watsonville, CA.
Sessions will take place on the 3rd weekend each month March – June in Watsonville, California. Saturdays 9am – 7pm, and Sundays 9am – 3pm. Each weekend expect a deep weaving together of cycle restoration and healing through hands-on practice, singing, potluck, fire, and time to connect with yourself, the land, the critters and other humans.
We keep each session to 25 humans, so join early.
Vital Cycles 2025 Dates and Session Overviews TBD
BREAKING GROUND
patterns & principles, breath, ecotones & edges, stories, alchemical mandala, invisible structures
BREATHING SEEDS
soil, nourishment, carbon cycles, our gut and soil microbes, soil inoculants, compost strategies, fertility, biodynamics and celestial cycles intro, soil building practices, seeds intro
RADICAL ROOTS
water, sleep, earthworks, increasing water holding capacity, rain water harvesting, swales and berms, riverscape restoration, brush check dams
EMERGENCE
plant communities, movement, hedgerows, riparian planting, agroforestry, botany and pollination, “seeds of place”
Want to find out more? Email us at [email protected] to set up a time to connect, get to know us and our approach to Permaculture, Human Ecology, and Regenerative Design.
TESTIMONIALS
“Anne and Lydia have been my guides on a journey to a deeper relationship with the extraordinary beauty and complexity of the earth. They are wonderful, warm, gifted teachers and create a great learning environment. I send everyone I know to their classes.”
“Vital Cycles has transformed the way I see the world around me! Mind you, I felt I knew a lot about the environment and self care – and yet, after taking Vital Cycles I absorbed a way of seeing and living well with interconnectedness that I have used daily ever since! I think it is no accident that so much of what was taught stayed with me; Anne and Lydia’s skill at teaching complex material to living, interesting human beings is bar none; I was deeply touched by the way they met everyone right where they were at. Taking their class was one of the best self-care choices I’ve made, it’s still taking care of me two years later! Lately I’ve been really into what I learned about the water cycle and how my back yard fits in! Greywater reuse is happening!”
“I could not be more grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the Vital Cycle’s Signature Permaculture Design & Human Ecology Course. The course brought such joy and depth to my year. The journey of the course is very intentional and helped me move through cycles of learning, reflecting, and connecting in such an authentic and easeful way. The course material was consistently fresh, interesting, inspiring, and helpful both personally as well as professionally. And Lydia and Anne are such a gift to be around, their knowledge is awe-inspiring and their enthusiasm contagious. I wish for all to have the container of the course in their life to learn and grow this year and every year!”
What Makes Vital Cycles Lens So Unique
- We offer an expanded approach to the traditional Permaculture Curriculum that encompasses a multiplicity of regenerative design patterns and practices
- Spacious course format that integrates and includes material on Human Ecology, the exploration of how our human bodies and consciousness reflect the natural world
- Emphasis on ancient and emergent authors, thought-leaders, researchers and project planners working towards human and planetary health and regeneration
- Small intimate class size (max 25)
- Time for folks to share, connect and learn from each other. Singing, poetry and artistic expression is encouraged!
- Physical space and opportunity for gaining practical hands-on skills
- Start creating personal and planetary resilience with practical tools you can start using from our first day together.
- All this, in the company of humans, plants, and other beings that will inspire and bring on your laughter!
SESSION TUITION AND REGISTRATION
Contact Vital Cycles directly at [email protected].
ABOUT ANNE & LYDIA
Vital Cycles is an education and design partnership between Anne Friewald and Lydia Neilsen in Santa Cruz, CA, focused on engaging with and understanding ourselves as nature and how we can enact practices and functional systems towards planetary and personal regeneration.
They bring together extensive backgrounds in community health and permaculture education and activism. Their deep curiosity about the interconnectivity of the planet and her people inspires an integration of the health of the land and the health of the individual through their teaching. Anne and Lydia bring a positive action-based perspective that highlights skills, practices and resources necessary for growth, creativity, and vitality in person and place.
Anne Freiwald, MPH (right): Community health and earth activist, permaculture educator and regenerative life and landscape designer, with 29+ years focusing on human ecology & community resilience. Currently lecturing at Rachael Carson College at UC Santa Cruz on “Innovative Water Solutions for Food and Climate.”
Lydia Neilsen (left): PINA certified permaculture educator, landscape and habitat designer, specializing in water cycle restoration and passionate polyculture.
Vital Cycles also offers regenerative landscape design consultations as well as custom educational courses. Contact [email protected] for more information.
QUESTIONS
We are happy to set up a time to meet and discuss our program.
Contact us at [email protected]
How do we intentionally design our lives and landscapes in balance with natural and human cycles to create thriving selves, families, and communities in a vibrant, natural world?
