Jackie Lowe Stevenson is a woman who wears many hats. A clinical social worker by trade, she currently teaches at The Gestalt Institute and Case Western Reserve University. She is also a “medicine woman” of sorts, and is drawn to the power and potential of women. Jackie's forte is building a community with a deep reverence for nature.

Jackie believes that there is nothing more powerful than doing healing work outdoors. She is quick to explain that research has shown we are affected by the energy around us. “If we are in a place where everybody is nervous, then we will probably get nervous too. When we are in nature, a strong, balanced energy field, it causes us to slow down and be more alert. When we are alert and in the moment, we have a greater ability to sort through our issues at the time.”

Jackie's office, it seems, is boundless. It extends from inside her house and outside into the Chagrin River Valley, which surrounds it with open land, a creek and abundant trees. This is the perfect setting for Jackie's most popular workshop: “Wolf Creek: Preparation for the Practice of Medicine Women Ways.” Designed for women only, it comprises five weekends of camping, cooking, fire building, vision questing and quiet fellowship. The participating women also take pleasure in activities such as drumming, singing and making masks out of plaster, all incorporating the growth experience.

“Women are part of a rich history of matriarchy stretching back to our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and back,” Jackie says. “The old ways are in our bones so that we possess a knowingness about the power of healing and living on the earth. This healing way of life requires different skills than we use in modern life.

“I really wanted to create a safe space for women to reconnect with nature,” continues Jackie, “to reconnect with their own more primitive instinctual natures and experience support from like women.” The diversity of participants in Wolf Creek is impressive. The experiential workshop has seen women from all professions and faiths, both younger and older women alike.

Each weekend has a different focus, and the fifth weekend culminates in a vision quest, an exercise based on Native American spirituality. Questers strike out on their own for twenty-four hours, intuitively drawn to a site where they will spend their time praying or meditating. Jackie explains, “They are encouraged to spend time slowing down, paying attention, seeing what comes to them, asking for a vision. Usually the message comes in the form of a symbol such as a butterfly landing on their hand. This symbol, or vision, from nature might be a message that it is time to lighten up or change.”

Jackie also conducts a nature-based Native American sweat lodge ceremony. “The ceremony purifies the body and the soul, and helps one prepare for life. Even building the lodge is part of the process,” Jackie explains. The utmost respect is paid to “Mother Earth” during the building of the small structure in which the “sweat” occurs. Jackie has learned the traditions and intricacies involved in the creation of a sweat lodge. The building is a feat of engineering on its own, and the rituals that make up the process reflect a deep reverence for maintaining nature's balance.

A past participant says of her Wolf Creek experience, “I have felt an amazing centeredness since returning from Wolf Creek. I have been confident and excited about being a woman again. I reconnected with parts of being a woman that I had covered over or lost touch with.”

Jackie explains that Wolf Creek has the ability to empower women in particular. She asserts, “Women intuitively resonate with nature. It isn't about conquering or controlling, but respecting nature on its own terms. Nature has its own personality, power and essence. Programs at Wolf Creek help women become comfortable in nature, getting to know how to live in harmony with something that they may have previously considered too vast, uncomfortable or unfamiliar.” She continues, “Nature is sort of like a family. There's so much beauty in nature, and it helps soften people's edges. In the process, a lot of magic happens.”

For more information on her next Wolf Creek Training or Jackie Lowe Stevenson's individual sessions, please contact her at (440) 247-2217 or by e-mail at jls82347@aol.com, or visit her website www.spiritofrelationship.com. Her husband, Herb Stevenson, conducts similar men's workshops. His website is www.medicineofmen.com.