Forage & Meditate with Leo the Barefoot Forager

Mindful foraging and meditation on the canals and marshes of East London

There’s something quietly radical about bending down to pick your own food. In a world of delivery apps and supermarkets, foraging brings us back to something ancient, embodied and real. It sharpens our senses. It slows our pace. It reminds us that nourishment isn’t manufactured - it’s growing all around us.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Join Leo, known as the Barefoot Forager, for a guided walk blending wild food discovery with practical mindfulness. You won’t just listen, you’ll taste, touch and explore.

Spring in the UK is an especially generous season. Expect to discover vibrant ingredients like:

• Wild garlic
• Sorrel
• Nettles
• Chickweed
• Cow parsley
• Garlic mustard
• Violets
• Primrose flowers
• Hogweed
• Alexanders
• Dandelion
• Wood avens,
• Ground ivy
• Ox eye daisy
• Clover
• Pine needles
• St George’s mushrooms

You’ll get to taste some homemade foraged tasters along the way. These are very seasonal and change from walk to walk. Past menus have included:

• Lacto fermented cashew “cheese” sliders
• Hawthorn Ketchup and Nettle hummus crackers
• Wild Garlic and Nettle tear and share pastries
• 30 Ingredient salad w/wild rose vinegar dressing
• Hedgerow summer rolls
• Cleaver's spring tonic
• Nettle soda
• Magnolia petal sushi
• Violet jelly mushroom sweets
• Elderflower cream “cheesecake”

We’ll end the session with a grounding meditation, integrating the sensory experience of the walk. After learning to see the landscape differently, we pause. We breathe. We let the nervous system settle. The result is a felt sense of connection — not just to nature, but to ourselves.

This is an invitation to taste the season, to learn practical skills, and to remember that the natural world is not somewhere else. It’s here. And we are part of it.

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Where will we forage?

We will send you a meeting point once booked, which will be close to Hackney Wick station and take a route along the canal north towards the Hackney Marshes and woodland before finishing near the Princess of Wales pub.

Your Facilitators

Barefoot Forager Leo

Leo is a professional forager and mindfulness enthusiast. Growing up in a city, he found his passion for foraging by learning the plants in people's front gardens and city parks. An interest became an obsession, and he found himself spending all his time researching history, identification and wild nutrition.

Keen to share his passion, Leo began to run wild food courses in woodlands and urban areas across Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and Surrey. He has taught thousands of people how to identify plants, trees and mushrooms, and he shares his knowledge of cooking, fermentation, and preserving wild ingredients.

Through foraging, Leo deepened his connection to nature, but there was more to discover. Slowing down the mind allows you to focus more intentionally on the natural world. Leo began to explore his internal experience through insight and open awareness meditation practices. Studying the works of teachers like Joseph Goldstein, Diana Winston and Adyashanti, he brings formal mindfulness into digestible practices of daily life.

With his hands-on and interactive courses, Leo combines foraging and meditation to deepen our senses and explore what it means to be human.