About
Cedar Wood
Filmmaker, wilderness guide, and a person still finding his way.
Brandon Wood, also known as Cedar.
Practice & Training
- Ceremonial Wilderness Rites of Passage Guide, Rites of Passage Council
- Transilience preparation and integration training with Laura Dawn
- 3 years co-facilitating plant medicine ceremonies
- Fifteen-plus years in experience design, service design, and organizational transformation
- Independent documentary filmmaking practice
From experience design to human transformation
I spent more than fifteen years in experience design, customer experience, service design, technology, organizational transformation, and facilitation. I learned how people move through systems, organizations, products, and moments of change. Much of what we call strategy is really the practice of paying close attention to human beings.
Alongside that career, I was building another practice entirely: documentary filmmaking, photography, storytelling, long stretches of time in wilderness, ritual, ceremony, and my own personal transformation.
For a long time I kept those worlds apart, treating one as professional and the other as private. Over time, I came to understand the first as an apprenticeship for the second. Everything I learned about listening, research, complexity, and designing the arc of an experience became part of the craft this work needs.
What happens when the experience that needs to be redesigned is your life?
That question became the bridge. It is the one I now sit with alongside other people: with a camera, in a circle, on a ridge at dusk, or at a kitchen table weeks after something significant happened.
MY LIFE STORY
Here is the part I used to leave out. I have spent much of my life inside some form of addiction.
It began with food. I grew up in a family where overeating was simply how things were, and unhealthy food was always within reach. Sugar became my first comfort. Alcohol came later. Porn came quietly after that. And underneath it all sat two habits nobody could see from the outside: lying to keep the peace, and people pleasing to stay safe.
Each one started as a way to get through the day. Together they kept me performing a version of myself that looked fine and felt far away from fine.
The way out has been slow, and it is still going. Years of self-reflection, honest conversation, ritual, time in wilderness, and the daily practice of telling myself the truth. I am on a continual journey of self-growth and self-discovery, and I expect to be for the rest of my life.
This is why I can sit with other people in their hardest chapters. I know the architecture of avoidance from the inside. I know the courage it takes to stop performing, and the quiet that opens up when you finally do.
On the name
Brandon Wood is the name I was born with.
Cedar Wood is the name I grew into.
Cedar is the name that increasingly feels connected to the work I am here to do: work rooted in nature, story, presence, transformation, and relationship.
Both names are part of my story.