Natural Living Skills
Expand your natural building skills, learn cob-building and build a cob bench, create an earthen floor, make your own natural plasters and practice artfully applying to finish a beautiful natural cob meditation chapel. Come for the weekend or stay for the full workshop for more hands-on experience. Just 25 miles southwest of Portland, Oregon. Enjoy the quiet and beautiful pastoral setting and get a taste of community life. Camping, daily yoga classes and delicious vegetarian meals included.
Hands on Natural Building Experience
Hands on practice with several finishing processes on a recently built cob structure. The workshop includes working with exterior natural earthen plasters for preservation and artistic expression, install an earthen floor and build a cob bench. You will work with different earthen mixes using sand, clay soil natural oils and pigments that preserve and bring luster to wall finishes. Get a taste of all the techniques in the weekend workshop or gain more hands-on experience and finish the project in the full 6-day workshop.
Beautiful Natural Setting outside Portland, Oregon
The workshop will take place at Ananda Center at Laurelwood, a yoga and retreat center, 40 minutes from downtown Portland. Daily guided meditation and yoga included. Registration is limited to allow personalized hands on instruction. The building site is set on a lovely hillside with views of the coastal range and spectacular sunsets, starry night displays and a fun camp fire circle guaranteed! Enjoy the feeling of deep friendship that comes from building and working together and the family environment of our center with residents, interns and guests.
Instructor Pablo Loayza from Natural Living School
Pablo Loayza comes to us from Natural Living School, located in the foothills of the Sierras at the Ananda Village in Nevada City, CA. At Natural Living School, students learn to construct affordable, naturally built cottages and structures, gain experience and confidence to simplify their lives and create the potential for self-sufficiency. The Natural Living School is also a full service natural build and design company. Pablo apprenticed with Cob Cottage Company in 2010 and has been teaching and creating natural buildings ever since. Check out the Natural Living School site to see some of his latest projects!
Facilitator: John Gorman
Check out the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/AnandaGreenBuilders and if you have questions about the workshop, contact at (503) 516-7789
The Benefits and Beauty of Natural Building:
Building with earth encourages one to fully reevaluate how a living space should feel. Our eyes are opened to the beauty of a wall covered with clay plaster, alive with subtle variations of texture, color, and light. Cob and straw-bale walls impart solidity and shelter in a profound way. Structures and surfaces built by hand convey that they were built by people, for people, thus creating a nurturing experience for the sheltered. In contrast, modern industrial materials and design hide the humanity of the creator and frequently expose inhabitants to toxins. Until we are experience an alternative to sterile flat walls covered in plastic paints, we don’t really know what we are missing.
-See more at: http://anandalaurelwood.org/program/cob/#sthash.ueTqXIPU.dpuf
Natural Living School 
When exactly is this workshop? Is this open to youth (13-14 year old) with parents? The Facebook page is pretty old, has postings from 2013!
Hi Silvia, All of our workshops are open dates. You can come for a minimum of one week, or as long as four weeks. The cost is $400, whether you join us for a week or stay for a month. During each month we will cover a different phase of the building process. It is outlined above. We are open to having families join in. After all we are a family business. The cost is the same per person. Their is a break if the child is under 10yrs old. Blessings