The Desert

compass of stillness

Erasmus+ training course
14. - 22. November 2025
Slovenia

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The Desert
Compass of stillness

This 7-day Erasmus+ training course invites participants into the desert, not as a physical landscape, but as a living symbol of the inner terrains we all traverse.

The desert, vast and quiet, evokes the personal moments of emptiness, pause, and stillness that often precede transformation. Within its silence lies both challenge and potential: the absence of familiar paths becomes an invitation to rediscover resilience, creativity, and connection.

By weaving symbolic, embodied, and creative approaches together, this training empowers youth workers and facilitators to become skilled companions in life’s transitional spaces. Those they support will gain resilience, inner resources, and creative ways of meaning-making.

The desert thus becomes not a place of despair,

but a vital threshold toward renewal.

Screenshot 2025-08-18 at 11.29_edited.jp

Source: The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans

Invitation into the Desert

"Where there is clutter, even valuable things lose their value.

Where there is too much, nothing stands out.

The essence of Japanese aesthetics is a concept called 'MA' (pronounced "maah")
the pure, and indeed essential, void between all "things."

The desert serves as a compass of stillness, a symbolic landscape where life’s noise and external expectations fall away. In its vast emptiness, we are invited to pause, slow down, and reorient ourselves. Like a compass pointing inward, the desert guides us to notice what truly matters, to feel our inner rhythms, and to reconnect with our own presence.

This project explores the Desert, a Somatic Compass as a guiding force for navigating life’s storms with compassion rooted in the body. Just like the pendulum movement, which swings between extremes before finding balance, our bodies and emotions continuously shift in response to life’s challenges. By cultivating awareness of these natural rhythms, participants will learn to return to a state of centred resilience.

Dance emerges as a language of renewal, allowing movement to arise from stillness and new stories to be carried forward.

The Psychology of Desert Periods

In psychotherapy, desert periods describe times in life when the familiar has fallen away, but the new has not yet taken shape. They often emerge during transitions such as entering adulthood, changing careers, migration, parenthood, loss, or recovery from burnout. Psychologically, these phases feel empty, stripped down, and uncertain—yet they are also fertile thresholds for transformation.

At first, the desert is experienced as loss. Old roles, relationships, or external structures no longer provide orientation, leaving a person with feelings of grief, confusion, or even panic. This creates a liminal state: a threshold space in which identity is unsettled, and the future is unclear. Such states are uncomfortable because they require us to sit with ambiguity and a lack of control.

However, the apparent emptiness of the desert serves a function. With the noise of everyday life stripped away, the psyche turns inward. Existential questions emerge—Who am I without my roles? What truly matters to me? Though unsettling, this questioning opens the possibility for deeper self-awareness and authenticity.

In the silence of the desert, hidden resources can surface: resilience, creativity, and a more grounded relationship to body and environment. Supported with care, individuals can discover that stillness is not stagnation but the soil of renewal.

Without guidance, desert periods can lead to despair or unhealthy avoidance. With support, they become essential stages of growth, a landscape where the old dissolves, and the new self slowly takes root.

The void is a state where the old has dissolved, but the new has not yet emerged. It can feel like emptiness, disorientation, or deep rest, but it is also a space of potential and transformation.

Methodology:

Somatics - Ecopsychology - Movement

Through the combined lenses of ecopsychology, somatic practices, and movement, this training explores how the “inner desert” can be embodied, felt, and understood.

Ecosomatic practices guide participants to perceive their own bodies as landscapes, where stillness and emptiness are not voids to be feared but fertile grounds for renewal.

Ecopsychology frames the desert as a mirror of the psyche, where solitude, sparseness, and silence allow space for clarity and deeper listening.
Somatic approaches provide tools to navigate states of suspension, teaching how to inhabit the body with presence even when life feels stripped bare.
Systemic work will allow participants to perceive transitional phases not only as personal experiences but as part of wider relational, cultural, and ecological systems. Using constellation-inspired exercises, hidden dynamics can be externalised, embodied, and re-patterned.
Imagination and imaginal work will serve as a bridge between inner and outer worlds. Through guided imagery, symbolic exploration, and creative expression, participants will access deeper layers of meaning, transforming emptiness into new narratives and possibilities.

Questions

What does “emptiness” or “pause” feel like in my body and mind?
What personal resources (resilience, creativity, intuition) emerge in stillness?
How do I relate to uncertainty, discomfort, or lack of control?
What fears or resistance arise in moments of stillness or pause?
What gives me a sense of grounding or orientation when life feels uncertain?
What does “renewal” or “emergence” look like for me after a period of pause?
How can I carry the lessons from this desert into daily life or my work with others?
What small actions or rituals help me navigate thresholds with awareness and resilience?

The intention of this project is to support ourselves in developing practical, somatic and relational skills for supporting individuals who are going through challenging/ transition moments.

The course welcomes participants from diverse professional and personal backgrounds (youth workers, educators, facilitators, mental health workers, artists, dancers) who are curious about using ecopsychology, somatics, and movement as methods for personal and social growth in the topic of luminal - transition spaces.

It is especially relevant for those working with people experiencing transitions, such as entering adulthood, migration, career shifts, identity changes, or recovery from burnout, and who want to offer meaningful support through embodied, relational, and creative practices.

Participants will be invited to:

Work with the desert metaphor as a container for liminality, identity transitions, and processes of individuation.
Engage in somatic regulation practices (breathwork, grounding, interoceptive, proprioceptive awareness) to navigate uncertainty and activate resilience.
Explore movement improvisation as a modality for expression and creativity.
Apply ecopsychological practices such as mirroring with natural landscapes, elemental awareness, and eco-reflection to externalise and reframe inner states.
Develop skills in holding transitional spaces: attuning to group dynamics, facilitating embodied reflection, and fostering relational safety.
Translate experiential learning into practical methods for youth work, education, and community facilitation.

Commitment to Outcomes

As part of the Erasmus+ training, participants are expected not only to engage in the 7-day learning process but also to create and share an outcome afterwards, bringing the methodology into wider practice and visibility. This outcome can take a form that best suits each participant’s context and skills, for example:

Designing and facilitating a workshop in their local community or organization.
Writing and publishing a reflective article, blog post, or report that shares insights from the training.
Producing a short video or creative piece that communicates key learnings.
Developing other innovative formats (artistic, educational, or digital) to disseminate the experience.

By committing to this follow-up, participants ensure that the training does not remain a personal journey only, but becomes a resource for their communities and professional practice, strengthening the impact of the project beyond the course itself.

We aim to have 28 participants from Slovenia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Slovakia and Romania.

Participants must be over 18 years old and have a communicative level in English so that they can participate fully in the program.

Application link

Join the Desert

Important notice before applying:

This training is not a psychotherapy training and does not qualify participants to provide psychological treatment. Instead, it offers an experiential, non-formal education process rooted in ecopsychology, somatics, and movement. Participants will be guided to explore their own experiences of transitional spaces—the “deserts” of stillness, uncertainty, and change—through embodied and creative practices.

By engaging personally with these methods, participants will:

Deepen their understanding of the psychological and embodied dynamics of transitional periods.
Gain practical tools for creating safe, reflective, and movement-based spaces in youth work, education, and community contexts.
Develop greater empathy and compassion, learning to accompany others with sensitivity and presence during their own moments of uncertainty or transformation.

The training thus focuses on experience-based learning that enhances both professional facilitation skills and personal awareness, strengthening the capacity to offer meaningful, compassionate support in non-clinical settings.

The training course is open to people of all experience levels. However, being open and interested in investigating this approach is important. We expect you to participate in the whole program.

Also, prepare for an intensive experience with at least 6 hours of physical activities every day!

Our work primarily centres around somatic movement practices, somatics, contact Improvisation principles. Participants must be comfortable with giving and receiving touch as a means of learning.

Clarification on Course Purpose:

Please note that this training is not meant to replace psychotherapy or serve as a method of healing. Instead, it provides a learning opportunity for individuals to gain a better understanding and experience which they can later share.

Practical information

This training course is funded through the Erasmus+ Programme, travel costs up to a specific maximum allowed amount will be fully reimbursed.

Slovenia: 28 EUR (56 EUR for Green Travel*)

Italy: 211 EUR (285 EUR for GT*)

Spain, Slovakia, Romania, France, Germany: 309 EUR
(417 EUR for GT)

more info

Travel reimbursement

Venue information and location

Food and insurance

FAQ

Application

The Desert team

Magdaléna Takáčová

Živa Jerman

Nayeli Špela

Magdaléna is a dance movement therapist working in a private practice. Body, movement, touch and sound are the main entrance points to the realm of the soul. She is amazed by the capability of the human being to overcome even almost unbearable situations and therefore her aim is to empower her clients and guide them on their journey to their own resources and resilience.

Main inspirations on her journey come from movement, nature, contact improvisation, deep listening and shamanism.

"The desert is for me a place where we all come at a certain point in our lives. First it may seem very dry, with no life, no orientation, no support. But as much as it is dry, hot and illusional that much it is full of life, fresh breeze at night and full of hidden water reservoirs. When we find ourselves in the desert it may feel like a chaos, loss, breaking down everything of what we were certain about. It can burn us down or it can give us an opportunity to transform and grow. Having a guide during the times of desert may be crucial so we invite you to feel, sense and embody the quality of giving support and being supported so you can, from your own embodied experience, support others on their journey through the desert."

Živa is an anthropologist, manual therapist and researcher of somatic practices and contact improvisation.

Her field of activity focuses primarily on developing and maintaining sensitivity and awareness towards oneself, fellow human beings and the environment, finding organic, creative and non-violent ways for the coexistence of differences and their mutual enrichment, which enables continuous transformation and personal growth.

She uses work with the body, touch and awareness of space as the basic tools of her practices.

"I am drawn to the spaces of pause—those thresholds of emptiness where time suspends and possibility opens in many directions. In these moments, we stand at the edge of choice, invited to listen inwardly while attuning to the quiet currents around us. Emptiness becomes not a void but a fertile ground, where inner voices and outer forces converge, whispering the shape of what might come. My work inhabits these intervals of suspension, where certainty dissolves and clarity emerges not through control but through trust and attunement. It is an exploration of emptiness as presence, of stillness as possibility—an invitation to dwell in not-knowing, to honour the pause, and to let the next step arise gently, like a horizon out of silence."

Nayeli is a psychologist working privately as a therapist with a Gestalt experiential psychotherapy approach. She has been a trainer in the field of non-formal education for more than 15 years. In the somatic and dance field, she is deeply inspired by contact improvisation, which has shaped her exploration of movement and its somatic approach beyond the dance studio. Having been actively engaged in the practice since 2017, she continues to investigate how this form expands her view on life.

"As a therapist and psychologist, I see liminal spaces as a winter of our lives. Scary and lonely if not supported by our own resources, but also by the nurturing environment. I believe we can learn how to welcome those winters and see the potential of their presence.
When nothing is moving, there is still something in motion.
When we do not know the direction, we can seek the possibility to enlarge our presence on now and learn to regulate our inner storms. When you do not know where to go next, try to see what is really here and welcome it as a companion instead of an intruder.

If someone can stay in stillness with you, well, this is just a gift to be embraced.