Cultural Emergence at Magical Farm Tasmania Sunday January 18th 2026

Written By Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

A day of social permaculture, forest therapy, breath, and life-systems practice in Southern lutruwita

There is a particular kind of tiredness that can’t be solved by more information, more headlines, or more urgency; it’s the tiredness of living inside systems that don’t feel aligned with life, and trying to keep your heart open while the world keeps asking you to harden, to choose a side, to simplify what is actually complex, tender, and interconnected.

This is why we’re gathering at Magical Farm for Cultural Emergence, an introductory exploration into how humanity can align with life systems, and how we can practice the kinds of relational, ecological, and community-based skills that help a radically weller and wiser world become more than a beautiful idea.

Hosted on the land at Magical Farm in Allens Rivulet, this workshop is designed as a lived experience: not a lecture, not a performance, not a day of perfect answers, but a day of re-patterning our attention back toward what actually grows trust, resilience, and real belonging.

What do we mean by “Cultural Emergence”?

Culture is what we repeat until it becomes normal.

Cultural emergence is the practice of noticing what is already trying to come alive beneath the surface, new rhythms, new forms of cooperation, new ways of meeting difference without collapse, and then learning how to protect it, feed it, and host it, so that life can do what life does best: adapt, regenerate, and evolve.

And because culture is relational, the “work” isn’t only inside our own minds; it’s also in our bodies, our nervous systems, our shared agreements, our capacity for presence, and the ways we design spaces where people can be human together again.

The guides

This day is guided by three practitioners whose work meets at the intersection of ecology, practice, and human repair:

Vari Gleeson — Social Permaculturalist, Cultural Emergence practitioner, and certified Forest Therapy Guide.
Perrie Kaminskas — breathwork practitioner and life systems designer at Regen Era Design Studio.
Emily Samuels-Ballantyne — creative director of Magical Farm and Regen Era Design Studio.

What we’ll do together

The workshop weaves together grounded practice and shared learning, including:

  • the social permaculture toolkit

  • collective movement and breath

  • forest therapy

  • regenerative living and permaculture skill share

  • life project design for homes, communities, and bioregions

  • future planning and imagination work for this Island.

In other words: we’ll be practicing the kinds of things that help us shift from activism as constant alarm into a deeper form of ecological intelligence, where we measure our effectiveness not only by what we oppose, but by what we can grow, by how many real alternatives we can build, and by how many practices become replicable because they are simple, human, and locally anchored.

The feeling we’re cultivating

We are not aiming for perfect harmony; we are aiming for a stronger kind of coherence: the kind that can hold complexity without panic, hold difference without demonising, hold grief without hardening, and hold hope without turning it into a brand.

If you’ve been craving a space where you can breathe again, where your body can remember what it feels like to be in relationship with land and people at the same time, where the political and the personal stop being split into separate rooms, then this day is for you.

What to bring and Bookings

Emily Samuels-Ballantyne https://www.magicalfarm.org
Next

A Year of Reweaving: Notes from The Island Almanac, 2025