We have moved from Nosara, Costa Rica to Ojai, California as of 7/14
Thank You Nosara, Hello Ojai!
2018 Programs – Remaining
Seminary of the Wild Programs – Visit this page.
=============================================
Animas Valley Institute Programs
Utah Canyoncountry Quest – April 2018
Guides: Rebecca Wildbear, M.S., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH Limit: 12
| 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.
No previous backpacking experience is required. (In fact, many of those who have quested with us have never before been camping or backpacking).
Participants are responsible for their personal camping gear, 3-7 personal lunches, and personal snacks. Details will be included in the preparation materials sent out after registering.
Questers are responsible for their own transportation.
=============================================
Soulcraft Intensive – May 2018 British Columbia
Guides: Gene Dilworth, M.A., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH. Limit: 18
| 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!
Pricing is show in USD and is the fee for camping. Upgrade to a private room $110 (CDN $145 approx) Tree House bunk $20 (CDN $25 approx)
Participants are also responsible for their own transportation to and from the program location.
Start/End Time: 1 pm / 1 pm
=============================================
Wild Mind Mirror Training – July 2018
Guides: Rebecca Wildbear, M.S., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH. Limit: 18
| Requires | application | backpacking | |
Accommodations | camping | |||
| prerequisite | retreat center |
Description:
Wild Mind Mirror Training
This program is designed and primarily intended for trainees in Animas’ Wild Mind Training Program, but other guides and human development facilitators are warmly invited to apply. The Council and Mirroring Intensive is a prerequisite for this program.
In our Council and Mirroring Intensive we primarily explore council as a soulcraft practice that supports our individual experience of soul encounter. The intention of the Wild Mind Mirror Training Program is twofold:
- to immerse ourselves in the practice of deep listening and mirroring; to uncover the archetypal themes that might frame another’s experience within the arc of their destiny and
- to cultivate the skills, sensibilities, and awareness that serve as the foundation for council leadership.
During this training, we practice detecting the greater story that pulses beneath the events of a person’s life. When our story is compassionately reflected through the skilled mirroring of another, we feel fully heard and able to experience ourselves in a larger and more meaningful context; we’re enabled to catch up to ourselves and perhaps leap into the next phase of our journey of individuation. An alchemical exchange occurs between the teller and the listener, an exchange that is magical and priceless.
We will work with themes such as Self-healing, psychospiritual death and rebirth, courting the Beloved, romancing the world, fear personas, subpersonalities, anima and animus, the four facets of the Self, the eco-soulcentric stages of development, other-than-human allies, underworld encounters, and archetypal symbols and themes.
We will study several principles and their application, including how mirroring is different from projection, transference, and interpretation; how analysis is different from loving; how to recognize the gestalt of people’s life stories; pattern recognition; framing; and talking the storyteller into his/her feelings.
In addition, we will immerse trainees in the way of council. Becoming a holder of Council entails a number of skills, including deep listening to self, others, and the group field; managing potentially problematic group dynamics and interweaving group themes; setting the stage with ceremony; creating the tone of the council; and beginning to embrace council as a way of life.
By the end of the program, you’ll more fully understand your gifts and potentials as a holder of council and how to manifest them in service to others.
=============================================
Wild Mind Training – July 2018
Wild Mind Training Residential – July, 2018
Guides: Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH Limit: 16
| Requires | application | backpacking | |
Accommodations | camping | |||
| prerequisite | retreat center |
Description:
The Wild Mind Training Residential is the core of the Wild Mind Training Program in the Nature Based Map of the Human Psyche. In this 5-day training, participants hone their skills in listening, tracking, deepening, mirroring, and creating invitations to help others cultivate their wholeness and heal their wounded and fragmented subpersonalities. We also practice the skills of council, dreamwork, and Shadow work, and further develop our understanding and use of the Nature Based Map of the Human Psyche. Included is an introduction to the use of the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel.
Designed for human development guides, the WMTP is a professional training in the use of the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche to support others to cultivate their innate wholeness and to acquire the skills of Self-healing.
The objectives of the Wild Mind Training Residential are to:
- provide training in the NBMHP model and in the skills of facilitating nature-based wholing and Self-healing
- support trainees in their personal cultivation of wholeness and Self-healing
- support the career development of professionals called to guide others toward wholeness.(Note that the WMTP is not a training in underworld guiding. Learning to facilitate the descent to soul is the mission of Animas’ Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program — SAIP). An application and acceptance into the Wild Mind Training Program is required for this Residential. Continuing Education Credits are available for an additional fee. Please inquire.
Click below for full application and full program description.
Mankind Project Wild Mind Intensive – Sept, 2018
Guides: Doug van Houten; Brian Stafford, MD, MPH Limit: 16
Description:
This Wild Mind Intensive is being produced exclusively for Mankind Project members. Sliding program fee for this program is $775-$1100
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.
Accomodations will be in shared tent cabins. Meals provided. You may bring your own tent, if you choose.
=============================================
Sonoran Desert Quest – November 2018
Guides: Rebecca Wildbear, M.S., Brian Stafford, MD, MPH Limit: 13
| 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.
No previous backpacking experience is required. (In fact, many of those who have quested with us have never before been camping or backpacking).
Mankind Project Soulcraft Intensive – November 2018
Guides: Doug van Houten, Brian Stafford, MD, MPH. Limit: 18
| 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.
Start/End Time: 1 pm / 1 pm
