Alex Balfour, Wild Comms & Marketing

Brief Bio: I'm a Brit living in New York City, and since 2021 I have had the honor of working alongside Victoria Loorz and the Center for Wild Spirituality. I began by bringing my 10+ years in entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and leadership consulting to support organizational growth, contributing to strategy, operations, marketing, and program development. Today, my role focuses on communications and marketing, helping steward the voice that invites people into the journey of Seminary of the Wild Earth.

Alongside this work, I’m a Life & Leadership Coach, Eco-Spiritual Guide, and performance artist (currently devoted to clowning, as a practice of embodied creative living).Through my Rewilding Studio I offer coaching, group work, workshops, and retreats that support creative and spiritually devoted leaders in rewilding their lives, creativity and leadership.

Tell us a bit about who you are and how you came to this work.

I've always been an edgewalker seeking a radically aligned & expressed life. Growing up internationally in a family of radical change agents, and as a missionary kid, I was exposed early to the fragility of life and the world’s fault lines and power of fully devoting your life to what you believe in. I learned to embody love for the margins early on, but it was not yet fully rooted in relationship with my own soul, body, land, or the living world.

For many years, that intense hunt for purpose, belonging and meaning took the form of both all or nothing sacrifice and also wanderlust working in international development, humanitarian and philanthropy work. I lived as an expat across several African countries and the US, working in anti human trafficking, human rights, health, relief aid, and social entrepreneurship. I was deeply devoted, but my longing was largely oriented outward and needed to be useful and noble, shaped by a desire to help, to prove myself, to find meaning, and at times to escape myself.

My soul led rewilding journey began when my body demanded attention through pain. Through a period of deep healing, long held trauma surfaced and led me into somatic therapy and embodiment work. This became a lived initiation into the truth that body, psyche, and soul are inseparable, and that real aliveness comes through listening rather than striving or saving.

At the same time, dreams, myth, archetypes, and depth psychology opened the imaginal world as a guide. I began to see how cultural, patriarchal, and religious conditioning had shaped my search for meaning through service while eroding trust in instinct and inner knowing. Rewilding became a slow undoing, a series of small identity deaths, and a return to parts of myself that were never wrong, only unclaimed.

When the pandemic reached New York City, I had just left my church community and felt deeply alone. In that season, I encountered the work of the Center for Wild Spirituality and entered the Seminary of the Wild Earth program. Through that journey, my spirituality was expanded & integrated to living relationship with body, land, and imagination.

Later, on a pilgrimage in Ireland with the Center, reconnecting with my Celtic ancestry and encountering the ocean in a deeply healing way clarified my conviction in the power of intentional relationship with nature. What began as a personal healing path gradually became a larger shift in worldview, rooted in unlearning inherited spiritual frameworks and reclaiming belonging through relationship rather than performance or belief.

Share a bit about the lands who raised you, and how your own connection with the natural world has influenced your path? 

I was raised between many landscapes. My early years were shaped by life as a missionary kid in West Africa, time in inner cities like Amsterdam and Bogotá, and quieter places in the UK. I especially remember in England, the willow tree outside my childhood home, summer blackberry bushes, and a small creek where my brothers and I played for hours.

Although I loved being outdoors, nature was still separate from my theology until my late twenties. I remember attending a large Christian conference and feeling desperate to hear from a distant God. Something told me to leave the conference, and go to a nearby park, and strangely I did! There I sat with the trees and felt so much sadness, until a quiet presence meet me. I heard the trees say they were proud of me. I did not have language for it then, but I felt deeply seen, loved, and met in a way I had wanted for so long.

Years later, after leaving the church and losing my inherited foundation of faith, identity, and belonging, nature became my most consistent companion. Long hours in New York City parks, weekends alone upstate in mountains, and daily relationships with trees and water held my grief and slowly I was able to receive a love I had never been able to receive.

These relationships reshaped my spirituality and my understanding of belonging, not as something abstract or human centered, but as relational, embodied, and alive within a wider web. I now know my life is about participating in that web of love.

Why do you believe a practice of spiritual connection with the earth is important for our time?

I believe a spiritual connection with the Earth is essential for this time because we are now living with the consequences of dominant religious, cultural, patriarchal, and political systems that taught us to see ourselves as separate from nature. That worldview has shaped a world marked by ecological collapse, cultural loneliness, and spiritual disorientation. It prioritized transcendence over presence, extraction over relationship, and productivity over listening and care, and we are now facing the cost of those choices.

Many modern responses fall short. The wellness industry can focus on optimizing or consuming, while therapeutic approaches focus on individual healing without the reciprocity with the Earth, and activism is many times motivated from fear and urgency without a felt sense of belonging within Earth’s living systems, missing deeper connection that sustains care and commitment over time.

A spiritual orientation with the Earth restores connection. We protect what we feel connected to, and love grows through attention, reciprocity, and care. This relationship is mutual. Many people feel lost or disconnected, and returning to relationship with the Earth offers a sense of belonging, meaning, and nourishment for the soul.

The wisdom we need now will not come from a few people with the right answers, but from returning to listening to our bodies and souls, to one another, to our communities, and to the more-than-human world as an interconnected whole. This return to relationship shapes how we respond to uncertainty and collapse, grounding us in connection, care, and belonging in a time of profound change.

In your experience, what are some of the barriers or challenges individuals or communities face in developing a deeper connection with nature?

In my experience, one of the biggest barriers to developing a deeper connection with nature is the belief that it requires leaving where we live to access “real” or pristine wilderness.

Living in NYC, I carried the assumption that meaningful connection with nature was "out of the city", and meant I needed to escape the city for more expansive, dense, nature landscapes. While safety, noise, and crowding can be real challenges, I’ve learned that depth of connection comes less from location or vast exposure and more from the quality of attention, presence, and time, even on my own block with a single tree! And actually, NYC itself is a richly diverse bioregion, shaped by rivers, coastlines, forests, and ancient stone beneath the streets, something I hadn’t known before.

By prioritizing regular time outdoors without an agenda, on my own without stimulation, walking my dog, lingering with trees, and noticing the river, the wind, and seasonal shifts, I’ve had some of my most mystical and meaningful experiences of connection within the city. Including an encounter with a rabbit in Central Park that had not been sighted in the park for several years, an invasive and poisonous vine that I sensed I shouldn't touch but I admired, and then later mirrored my own shadow work. And an ongoing relationship with the tree outside my fire escape that began during the pandemic.

More broadly, many of us are conditioned into dissociation and disconnection. Hustle culture, patriarchal systems, capitalism, and extractive ways teach us to override our bodies and relate to the earth as a backdrop or resource rather than a living relationship. We are rewarded for speed, certainty, and productivity, often at the cost of our own souls.

Ultimately, I believe the deepest barrier is not access but courage and permission to first slow down, make time, feel, and practice listening. While cities bring additional challenges like distraction and pace, relationship grows the same way anywhere, through attention, patience, and repeated presence.

What practices (big or small) can help heal our disconnection from the natural world?

My ongoing weekly practice is a solo wander for at least an hour in a park or by the river. This became a foundational anchor during my time in the Seminary of the Wild Earth program. I treat this time as dedicated listening, noticing what I am drawn to without an agenda. I allow myself to be drawn rather than directed. Even brief moments with a tree, a bird overhead, or a sunset over the Hudson can become profound when approached as sacred.

I also do seasonal offering practices, where I choose one being and offer a small daily gesture for thirty days. This practice reliably resets my relationship with the natural world. It helps me release the impulse to extract insight and return instead to consistency, care, and reciprocity. Also from the program!

What are you looking forward to offering as a team member here?

I feel deeply honored to help support this container and fellow edgewalkers as they step from wilderness into like hearted community. I am grateful to help create a space where people feel safe enough to release the need to know, unravel their experiences and questions, and make themselves available to the journey week by week, not alone, as they move through exile, disorientation, grief, creativity, and emergence. The very real terrain of rewilding. It is a privilege to help tend the conditions where listening, imagination, and belonging can take root.

Can you share a story of a meaningful encounter with the Holy Wild personally?

I was on a beach in Florida where my parents live, arriving with big soul questions during a season of religious deconstruction and healing from spiritual trauma. I had been slowly rebuilding my capacity to trust after years of fear, judgment, and disconnection/ distrust from my body and intuition.

As I stood at the edge of the water, I felt a quiet whisper from the ocean inviting me to enter, almost like a baptism, but one rooted not in dogma, rather in release, mystery, and belonging.

I walked into the sea alone, listening. I felt called to let go of old beliefs, fear of judgment, and the rigidity of a faith that had taught me to distrust my own knowing. The waves seemed to invite surrender, to be held and renewed, to trust a different way of being shaped by love, wisdom, and the rhythms of the living world. It felt like a sacred conversation unfolding between my body and the water, between my questions and the waves.

As I went under the water and surfaced again, I suddenly found myself surrounded by a school of fish moving gently and in unison around me. The moment felt unmistakably alive and loving, as if I were being accompanied by a wider intelligence. I wept, held by the water, aware of a sense of divine presence not above or separate, but all around me, within the sea itself.

Since then, each time I enter the ocean, I return to that vow to listen, to surrender, and to stay in relationship. That encounter taught me that the Holy Wild is not distant or abstract. It is intimate, responsive, and already in conversation with us, waiting for our presence and attention.