2020 Programs
Wild Mind Intensive – February, 2020
February 19, 2020 – February 23, 2020
Cost: $665.00 – $925.00 Generous Scholarships are Available
Venue: Joshua Tree National Park
Guides: Brian Stafford, MD, MPH, Palika Rewilding
Limit: 16 participants
| Requires | application | backpacking |  |
Accommodations | camping | |||
| prerequisite | retreat center |
Description:
Based on Bill Plotkin’s book, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, this 5-day intensive is an experiential exploration of our human psyches as unique expressions of the universal forces and patterns of nature. We will work with what we call the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, which is, among other things, a comprehensive inventory of what can be right about a person, a “shadow” version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), mainstream psychology’s list of what can go wrong with people.
Our wild minds possess astonishing resources, untapped potentials and depths that we might not even know exist until we discover how to access them, cultivate their powers, and eventually integrate them into our everyday lives. In this intensive, we’ll access these depths and potentials — which we call the four facets of the Self, or the four dimensions of our innate human wholeness — and also the four sets of fragmented or wounded subpersonalities that form during childhood.
Rather than attempt to eliminate our subpersonalities (which is not possible) or to beat them into submission, we’ll cultivate the four facets of the Self and uncover the gifts of our subpersonalities. Our goal is to fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we’re capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community.
Discover:
- how to recognize and consciously cultivate the four facets of the Self — your innate human wholeness
- how to identify the subpersonalities that supported you in childhood and adolescence to adapt to the challenges of family and social life, but ultimately became barriers to your full and authentic humanity
- practices and guidelines for cultivating relationships between the Self and your subpersonalities, enabling you to heal your subpersonalities, discover their gifts, and foster Self-actualization
- how each facet of the Self provides essential resources for the underworld journey (the descent to soul), its radical transformation of personal identity, and for living as a visionary artisan of cultural evolution.
We’ll explore the landscape of the psyche through a variety of practices, including creative expression, self-designed ceremony, solo exercises while wandering on the land, group work, movement, voice dialogue, journaling, and deep imagery work.
Each participant is responsible for their own lunches, snacks, and tea. Breakfasts & dinners are group meals; participants will be divided into meal teams and each team will be responsible for purchasing and preparing a certain number of group meals.
Participants are also responsible for their own transportation to and from the program location.
Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
![brianstaffordpic-150x150[1]](https://www.animas.org/wp-content/uploads/brianstaffordpic-150x1501.jpg)
Brian Stafford is a guide to the wilderness of nature and soul. He was called out of academic medicine to serve as a guide to the depths and to serve as an agent of cultural awakening and transformation. He guides with humor, playfulness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be.
A native of Colorado and the former holder of an endowed chair and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, he is an avid outdoorsman, teacher, writer, mentor, partner, and parent.
He guides individuals and groups in the Colorado River Basin as well Nosara, Costa Rica, to the place they most long and fear to go – the numinous depths of their soul.
Brian currently makes his home in Ojai, California.
Palika Rewilding
Palika has been courting the moon and the wild miraculous blue green pearl to discover their ancient Mysteries and marry her living to them as long as she can remember. As Threshold Midwife she listens and tends at the edge of the village on the banks of undomesticated landscapes inner and outer, for pearls and shadowed gems within the psyche and hearts of the people whose hearts ache with longing to rediscover their enchantment with the living Earth. Tending with compassion, creativity and fierce love she guides the Soul sojourner to claim the shape and poem they are and thus recover their sacred participation with the animate web of life. Palika is deeply committed to the art of questions that matter, deep evolution of culture and consciousness, and supporting the metamorphosis of visionary artisans of possibility in these urgent times of the Great Turning. She is an inner and outer tracker, painter of mythos, regenerative designer, nurturer of native and edible landscapes, mother, kitchen witch and keeper of the feral feminine. She is grateful to listen to the voices of Elder Redwoods and coastal Oaks and offer sunrise praises to the Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz where she guides individuals and communities deeper into their ecocentric and soulcentric living.
Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree National Park is immense, nearly 800,000 acres, and infinitely variable. It can seem unwelcoming, even brutal during the heat of summer when, in fact, it is delicate and extremely fragile. This is a land shaped by strong winds, sudden torrents of rain, and climatic extremes. The park encompasses some of the most interesting geologic displays found in California’s deserts. Rugged mountains of twisted rock and exposed granite monoliths testify to the tremendous earth forces that shaped and formed this land. Arroyos, playas, alluvial fans, bajadas, pediments, desert varnish, granites, aplite, and gneiss interact to form a giant mosaic of immense beauty and complexity.
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Nature and the Human Soul: An Experiential Exploration of the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel – May 2020
Guides: Gene Dilworth, M.A., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
| Requires | application | backpacking | |
Accommodations | camping | |||
| prerequisite | retreat center |
Description:
Anchored in traditional four-directions wisdom, contemporary depth and archetypal psychologies, and twenty-five years of nature-based soul guiding, the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (SDW) is a new ecopsychology of human development and cultural transformation. It’s a blueprint showing how richly we can grow and mature when soul and nature are embraced as our wisest and most trustworthy guides. It includes an integrated set of developmental guidelines that can help every human mature into an adulthood of visionary leadership — precisely what we need in this century if we are to create a just, compassionate, and sustainable world.
A life-span model of development from infancy through authentic elderhood, the SDW presents eight distinct stages of life and shows how these stages are almost always independent of chronological age, biological development, cognitive ability, or social role. Rather, the movement from one stage to the next comes about through progress with psychological and spiritual tasks that are specific to each stage. The SDW presents an achievable vision of a contemporary way of life that holds soul-discovery and genuine contribution to the more-than-human community as its most central features and goals.
(If you are a previous Animas participant familiar with the 4-directions-based map of the Self and the sub-personalities — used on many of our programs — please note that the SDW is something quite different and complementary.)
During this intensive, we employ talks (with handouts), conversation and story telling, and experiential exercises on the land as we explore the SDW and its applications to education, parenting, rites of passage, psychotherapy, personal growth, and cultural change. You’ll discover how to use the SDW to clarify your own next steps of soul-infused development and learn a set of principles and practices by which you can align yourself with the lifelong journey of growing whole.
Pricing is based on shared rooms.
Participants are also responsible for their own transportation to and from the program location.
Start/End Time: 1 pm / 1 pm
Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Brian Stafford is a guide to the wilderness of nature and soul. He was called out of academic medicine to serve as a guide to the depths and to serve as an agent of cultural awakening and transformation. He guides with humor, playfulness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be.
A native of Colorado and the former holder of an endowed chair and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, he is an avid outdoorsman, teacher, writer, mentor, partner, and parent.
He guides individuals and groups in the Colorado River Basin as well Nosara, Costa Rica, to the place they most long and fear to go – the numinous depths of their soul.
Brian currently makes his home in Ojai, California.
Gene Dilworth, M.A.
Gene is dedicated to the project of rewilding the human spirit as an essential dimension of being fully alive in these times. By nurturing meaningful relationship with the more-than-human world and facilitating deep inquiry into the mystery of one’s true nature, he supports individuals to discover, re-member and live from the center of their soul-rooted sense of belonging to the world.
With degrees in ecology and ecopsychology, Gene has been guiding groups and individuals in transformative nature-based experiences since 1986. He has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in environmental studies and ecopsychology, has been a university academic administrator and has served in a number of administrative and leadership roles in educational and environmental organizations.
Gene lives with his daughter in Boulder, Colorado. He nurtures his own sense of wildness and wonder by exploring the Rocky Mountain foothills and courts his muse through music and poetry
University of Earth
Located at the edge of the northern Sierra Nevada’s Mohawk Valley along California’s Scenic Hwy 70, University of Earth’s campus is the perfect place for the “Great Work” of our times; the reinvention of self and society.
Nestled at the foot of an ancient sacred mountain landscape with nearly a mile of the National Wild and Scenic River, the Middle Fork of the Feather winding through its forty acres, students and visitors have the opportunity to explore and experiment with a fundamental concept of U of Earth; Nature as a primary teacher and healer.
Baltic Sea Quest – Aug 2020
Guides: Brian Stafford, MD, MPH. Sage Magdalene
| Requires | application | backpacking | |
Accommodations | camping | |||
| prerequisite | retreat center |
Description:
THE ANIMAS QUEST –
This contemporary Western embodiment of the ancient, pan-cultural vision fast is a dynamic wilderness rite for men and women seeking greater depth and clarity about life purpose and meaning. As a rite of initiation, the quest is a ceremonial descent to the underworld, in which you die to your familiar way of belonging to the world, uncover the passion and wisdom of your soul, and retrieve the gift that is yours alone to bring to the world, enhancing personal fulfillment and genuine service.
The Animas Quest catalyzes the encounter with soul by temporarily displacing everyday consciousness through five primary means: (1) solitude for three or four days and nights while (2) fasting (i.e., drinking water only), (3) being fully exposed to and enfolded within the forms and forces of nature, (4) enacting a series of ceremonies, and (5) employing a set of practices (soulcraft) that support you in crossing into the mysteries of nature and psyche.
Most often, our quests take place over a total of 11days, 8-11 of which are spent in the wilderness. Preceding your time of solitude are five full days of preparation activities that enhance your ability to benefit from the fast. The first two and a half days of these five may be held at a retreat center or car-camp before we journey to our wilderness base camp (or, on some programs, remain at our car-camp).
During the five preparation days, we work with dreams, poetry, deep imagery, ceremonial drumming and dance, dialogues with nature, the way of council, and other practices to help us slip out the door of our everyday lives and access our own deeper, wilder currents.
The heart of the quest consists of the solo: three days and nights without human companionship in nature, fasting, engaging in personal ceremonies, saying yes to the mysteries of soul, tending the true mythos of your life, praising and grieving, and birthing a vision. Upon your return to base camp, there are three days of reincorporation activities, preparing you to embody among your people what you received on your fast. The last of these three days takes place back at the retreat center or car-camp.
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Wild Christ, Wild Earth, Wild Self: An Introduction to the Seminary of the Wild
Guides: Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Seminary of the Wild
Place of event: Old train station Luzna/ former USSR army base. Ventspils region, Targale parish, Luzna. Beautiful and silent place in the middle of the woods, 400 meters from the Baltic Sea.
Living in equipped tents (cozy tents for one person, equipped with mattress, nightstand and light). In the territory dining hall, fully equipped showers and WCs. Map of the place
Costs: 880€ – 1880€
Event description: This introduction to Seminary of the Wild offers an experiential, nature-based journey of apprenticeship into the wild mysteries of the creation, and an invitation into deeper participation in the restoration of the world, tikkun olam.
For those who long for a more soul-infused life and who yearn to find ways to reconnect to the natural world as a person of faith during a time of deep cultural unraveling.
- A re-enchantment of the natural and wild world and a re-visioning of your deep belonging to this world by reconnecting with your senses, body, emotions, imagination and the earth.
- A re-wilding of the Christian story deconstructing the barriers, the processes of domestication, and distortions that have tamed and suppressed the Earth-based vision of the Christ.
- A re-claiming of your own prophetic voice as a leader engaged in transforming culture during this age of ecological reformation.
- An invitation to embark on your own journey of wild discipleship, expanding your capacity to connect directly with the Holy and follow the radical call of Christ discerning the voice of God, Self and Nature.
For more information about Seminary of the Wild, visit www.seminaryofthewild.com
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Soulcraft Intensive – November 2020
Guides: Gene Dilworth, M.A., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
| Requires | application | backpacking | |
Accommodations | camping | |||
| prerequisite | retreat center |
Description:
The Soulcraft Intensive is our popular five-day experiential plunge into the wild depths of Soulcraft; a synergistic set of nature-based practices designed to evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter. Your soul is your true self, those qualities that most deeply define and express who you are and the unique gift that you were born to bring to the world, a world so much in need of the socially transforming contributions of initiated, actively engaged adults. To encounter the soul is to discover the mystical image you were born with, which reveals the path to your greatest personal fulfillment as well as the essence of your true service to society (the cross-cultural wisdom traditions say these are one and the same). Soulcraft practices spring from nature-based cultures, modern depth psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage—to comprise a truly contemporary Western path to soul discovery and soul initiation. For a full discussion, see Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche.
The Soulcraft Intensive is highly experiential and—well—intense. We alternate between practices utilized in group, practices explored in solitude in nature, and sharing and deepening those experiences in small groups (5 to 9 people each). There is a Soulcraft guide for each small group, providing you with a fully individualized experience. What you discover through one practice is carried into and amplified by what you learn in the next. By the end of the intensive, you will understand yourself and your place in the world from a more soul-oriented perspective, be clearer about the gifts you were born to bring to the world, and have new skills to enrich your life and to defend the health of the more-than-human world.
Soulcraft practices include:
- Soulcentric Dreamwork
- Deep Imagery Work with Animal Guides
- Talking Across the Species Boundaries
- The Way of Council
- Soul Tasks in Nature
- Self-Designed Ceremony
- Shadow Work
- Soul Poetry
- Sacred Wound Work
- Synchronicities: Working with Nature’s Signs and Omens
- Befriending the Dark
- Ecstatic Trance Drumming and Dancing
- many others!
Participants are also responsible for their own transportation to and from the program location.
Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Brian Stafford is a guide to the wilderness of nature and soul. He was called out of academic medicine to serve as a guide to the depths and to serve as an agent of cultural awakening and transformation. He guides with humor, playfulness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be.
A native of Colorado and the former holder of an endowed chair and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, he is an avid outdoorsman, teacher, writer, mentor, partner, and parent.
He guides individuals and groups in the Colorado River Basin as well Nosara, Costa Rica, to the place they most long and fear to go – the numinous depths of their soul.
Brian currently makes his home in Ojai, California.
Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree National Park is immense, nearly 800,000 acres, and infinitely variable. It can seem unwelcoming, even brutal during the heat of summer when, in fact, it is delicate and extremely fragile. This is a land shaped by strong winds, sudden torrents of rain, and climatic extremes. The park encompasses some of the most interesting geologic displays found in California’s deserts. Rugged mountains of twisted rock and exposed granite monoliths testify to the tremendous earth forces that shaped and formed this land. Arroyos, playas, alluvial fans, bajadas, pediments, desert varnish, granites, aplite, and gneiss interact to form a giant mosaic of immense beauty and complexity.
Gene Dilworth, M.A.
Gene is dedicated to the project of rewilding the human spirit as an essential dimension of being fully alive in these times. By nurturing meaningful relationship with the more-than-human world and facilitating deep inquiry into the mystery of one’s true nature, he supports individuals to discover, re-member and live from the center of their soul-rooted sense of belonging to the world.
With degrees in ecology and ecopsychology, Gene has been guiding groups and individuals in transformative nature-based experiences since 1986. He has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in environmental studies and ecopsychology, has been a university academic administrator and has served in a number of administrative and leadership roles in educational and environmental organizations.
Gene lives with his daughter in Boulder, Colorado. He nurtures his own sense of wildness and wonder by exploring the Rocky Mountain foothills and courts his muse through music and poetry.
