Half Day & One Day Experiences

Welcome & Vision

Welcome to Panya Forest!

Located along the rim of the Sri Lanna National Park, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, we are a slowly flowering community dedicated to regenerative agroforestry, ritual farming, seed-saving, natural building, ethnobotany and the preservation of endangered wisdom traditions. Below are some details we hope might better explain our vision and how you might be a part of it.

Panya Forest: A Place for Remembering

Within the forests of Northern Thailand an ancient future is re-emerging.

Panya Forest offers refugees from modernity an opportunity to engage again with natural co-existence by adhering to the original, foundational principles of respect and reciprocity, agreements all in-tact peoples of the world were once well-versed in before the advent of so-called “civilization”.

Here, skills necessary for all living beings are all learned experientially through communally embodied practices that return villagers to a relational existence rooted in myth, meaning and shared responsibility.

Working closely with nearby indigenous communities, Panya Forest seeks to be a bridge between the world of land-based peoples of culture and economic/technologically-rooted friends from urban settings. Being uniquely situated on 12 acres of forest resting on the edge of Himalayan foothills, we strive to reimagine what post-modern life can be.

We believe our lives can be ethically designed in ways that meet the basic needs of modern people with care for the land serving as the central guidepost for all important decision making.

Embracing uncertainty, met with a generous allowance for mistake-making, we explore how humans can embrace the wild in ways that don’t require them to destroy delicate ecosystems nor abandon all modern conveniences while still operating in alignment with the Original Laws of right reciprocity, respect and a dedication to a time beyond now.

Children (and adults) are unschooled here. Education at Panya Forest is not offered linearly, preferring instead to start precisely in the middle, where everyone already is, in alignment with the natural rhythms of our hearts, the sun, the moon, the seeds in the ground, wind, rain, etc. Everything here happens at the appropriate time, designated by the needs of Spirit and Soil.

Seemingly logical interpretations of “the way things are” merge here with ever changing animistic undertones in an effort to return community members to a place of shared, inter-species, intergenerational remembrance. A reorientation of time surfaces thus, as no clocks, no WIFI, no televisions, etc. block views of eARTh and sky. Teachings and inspirations arrive via riddles, impromptu prayers, unexpected dances, meandering metaphors and initiatory Stories sung spontaneously round the fire under blankets of origin-stars.

Panya Forest is a safe space for refugees of all kinds. It is a place of peace where farmers, grandmothers, poets, artists, musicians, bored teenagers and underappreciated chefs are all exalted and honored as the esteemed keepers of wisdom and visionary hope they are. It is a place where community conflict is not avoided but actively addressed in proactive, life-serving ways. The realities of modern life are not ignored here, the needs for financial abundance, and other post-modern necessities are all explored in tandem with neglected ancestral skills. All decisions are made with consideration for the well-being of future generations, both human and more-than-human.

The goal is to aid in the re-emergence of life-serving, ancestral memories by enabling the coming together of enough appropriate conditions for the regeneration of wisdom. As any seed saver knows, such unlikely events do in fact occur. When the right soil meets the right water, the right amount of sunlight, etc. and is met at dawn each day with the right old-time songs and pulsing ancestral rhythms, seemingly extinct seeds can, and do miraculously reappear.

At Panya Forest, we believe people are like plants. Even though modern education has given rise to a tragic atrophy of human creativity that has resulted in the genocide of countless languages and colorful ways of seeing and being, That Which originally birthed the original, all-but-forgotten visionary educations of the past still exists, patiently waiting for the right time to breathe life again into the dormant seeds of nearly extinct cultural excellence, in new ways, in ancient, never-before-seen ways.

“It is not enough to save heritage seeds. The culture of those people to whom each seed belongs must be kept alive along with seeds and their cultivation. Not in freezers or museums but in their own soil and our daily lives.”

— Martín Prechtel