Wilderness Programs with Peter Scanlan

For all Animus Programs below, you can register online, except where indicated, at www.animas.org or by phone at 970-259-0585 or 800-4516327 (US only)

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Soulcraft Intensive, in Costa Rica,

With Guides: Peter Scanlan , Rebecca Wildbear
February 4 - 10

Luna Lodge - A secluded eco-lodge set in the pristine and captivating Osa Peninsula near Corcovado National Park in southwestern Costa Rica.

Guide Fee: $595 Lodging & Meals Fee: $660 for shared tent

Backpacking: No

Camping: Available
 

Location/Lodging Info: Lodging options vary. All prices include meals: $660 shared tent, $780 shared Hacienda Room, or $870 shared Bungalow. Private upgrades may be available. Please contact the Animas office for more information on lodging choice. IF YOU REGISTER ONLINE: you will only have the option to pay for tent lodging. Once we have received your registration, we will contact you to confirm lodging availability. Your registration is not confirmed until we have verified lodging availability. Roundtrip flight fee to Luna Lodge from San Jose, Costa Rica and back: $345. Please contact the Animas office for any questions.

Arrival Info: A roundtrip domestic flight between San Jose and Luna Lodge is available for $345. The domestic flight will leave between 8 and 10am on 2/4/12. With the check-in and baggage process, etc., you will likely need to fly the day before, 2/3/12 – unless you book a red-eye flight that gets into San Jose around 5am. Arriving in San Jose on 2/3/12, is highly suggested! The return flight on 2/10/12 will leave the Luna Lodge area early in the am - around 7 or 8am. Please do not book any connecting travel back to your home place before 1pm that day, (to allow time to arrive and check-in, etc.). Contact the Animas office for suggestions on where to stay on 2/3/12. There is a weight limit for baggage on the domestic flight of 25 lbs. The charter flight can also be taken one-way only should you wish to tag on additional travel in Costa Rica after the program or arrive to Luna Lodge by another method.

Rebecca Wildbear, M.S.

Rebecca is a wild-hearted wanderer and soul guide who supports people to open to their depths and to flower in relationship to the wild Earth. The prayer she lives is to love and embody the Mystery and the Wild as they sing each being alive, evoking their truth and beauty. Rebecca has worked as a therapist and wilderness guide since 1997, and has trained as a guide with AVI since 2002. As an Interdisciplinary Yoga Teacher and a student of Hakomi experiential therapy, Rebecca brings a body-centered approach to guiding. She received her Masters Degree in Counseling from Johns Hopkins University in 1997.

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July Animas Quest, in Washington,

With Guides: Peter Scanlan , Anne Hayden
July 11 - 22

Situated in the foothills of the North Cascade mountains, Skalitude's 160 acres are nestled in a secluded basin in the renowned Methow Valley.)

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 quest serves as a modern rite of initiation — not into any social, religious, or spiritual group, but into your own soul and deeper layers of true adulthood. As a rite of passage, the quest facilitates the transition through a major crossroads of life. These crossroads — leaving home, mid-life crisis, career change, loss of a loved one, divorce, a healing crisis, spiritual crisis, or retirement — can be quite disorienting and emotionally traumatic. But these unavoidable and pivotal shifts are often the necessary threshold of all post-adolescent personal development and initiation.

When you neglect the human need to periodically renew yourself, your life becomes hardened, dry, brittle. The Animas Quest is an opportunity to surrender the solidness of your life so that something new might sprout in its place. It is a chance to discover (or recover) your own unique animating essence, your personal puzzle piece of the Mystery, the gift that only you can offer the world, a necessary offering toward our collective navigation of this fragile planetary time of multiple crises and immense possibilities. During your quest, familiarity and comfort are left behind. Your old way of defining yourself is abandoned. The more-than-human world and the deep imagination become your guides.

Since 1980, Animas Valley Institute has been developing and enacting this modern counterpart to initiation and passage rites found throughout the world. The Animas Quest interweaves the practices of ancient traditions with the self-development tools of modern depth psychology and ecopsychology. Although we have learned much from native traditions, our programs are not imitations; they are distinctive and thoroughly modern, designed specifically for contemporary people of Western cultures.

The Animas Quest catalyzes the encounter with soul by temporarily displacing everyday consciousness through five primary means: (1) solitude for 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 of our quests take place over a total of 11 days, 8 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 are 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, psychonautical 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). As this is a drive-to-basecamp quest, you will be required to carry your backpack only as far out from basecamp as you decide to enact your solo three nights.

Guide Fee: $1395

Lodging, Camping, & Meals Fee: $595

Location/Lodging Info: Fee includes accomodations & meals at Skalitude and breakfast & dinner when in the wilderness + land use fees. Lunches, snacks, and tea/beverages are the responsibility of each participant while on the wilderness portion of the quest.

Arrival Info: TBA

Anne Hayden

Anne is a wilderness guide, mentor, and wild land steward. She supports people to follow their own mysterious soul-threads through her intuitive gifts of tracking the underground dream, inviting people to their honest edges with fierce, loving compassion. She has guided vision quests for 15 years, training first with wild lands, and then with Animas Valley Institute. An on-going student of Authentic Movement and embodied dream-work, she has a degree in Ecopsychology and a love for poetry and creative expression. Her life-long mystical relationship with nature began in the Colorado mountains as a child and was honed by her years of solitude in the Alaskan backcountry. It continues to source her in her island home in the Pacific Northwest, where she passionately gardens, restores wild habitat, and is an eccentric grandmother of two. She mentors people to ask difficult questions and do deep shadow-work in service to the Great Turning.

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Sweet Darkness: The Initiatory Gifts of the Shadow, Projections, Subpersonalities, and the Sacred Wound,
 

On Antelope Island, Utah

Antelope Island State Park, the largest island in the Great Salt Lake, is home to a roaming herd of 500 bison. Pronghorn and bighorn sheep also share the rangelands that overlook the desert lake. Travel to Antelope Island: If you are flying in, your destination is the Salt Lake City Airport. There are no shuttles available to the Island, so please let us know your travel information and we will help you to arrange car pooling with other participants.

With Guides: Annie Bloom & Peter Scanlan
September 24 - 28

SWEET DARKNESS is one of our most challenging programs, a truly intense intensive, a 5-day experiential immersion into nature-based Shadow work. The Shadow, of course, is the hidden, dark side of our psyches, with both its "positive" and "negative" aspects. During this intensive, we explore those sticky, difficult, and immensely rewarding dynamics that come up so often in life, like those overpowering emotional charges triggered by other people and by our encounters in the natural world.

We will ask, for example: What do you do when all of a sudden someone is laying the biggest PROJECTION you've ever seen right on your lap (treating you as if you’re the way they are without realizing that’s the way they are)? And what do you do if you believe them, for heaven's sake? And what do you do when you catch yourself projecting on others? Maybe while you are guiding, teaching, counseling ... or trying to love? Juicy, huh? We're going to work with these things in part by jumping into the cauldron with our own projections on each other. (Don't worry; no one will be required to jump into the hot seat).

Furthermore, we’re going to do some SHADOW WORK. You bet. How can you live a conscious existence these days without knowing we are all regularly conjuring up all kinds of monsters from the deep? We go off in search of soul or "the good life", say, or even the desire to contribute to the Great Turning as visionary agents of change, and before we know it, we have inadvertently opened the long black bag we drag behind us, and all these demons are climbing out. We know, however, that so much of our wholeness is hidden in that bag, the resources there unavailable for our soul work until we assimilate elements of the Shadow. And all our projections, of course, involve the Shadow. So we'll work with strategies for spotting, unmasking, and assimilating those dark shapes.

And then there are our Loyal Soldiers, Escapists-Addicts, and Wounded Children, our SUBPERSONALITIES that have been keeping us "safe" since early childhood by making us small. Our Loyal Soldiers, for example, are the ones who have been shoveling big chunks of our wholeness into that black bag so that we appeared acceptable to the powers that be. In order to access the Shadow and resource our soul work, we are going to have to break some old promises and change the nature of our alliance with our subpersonalities.

Furthermore, we might have to revisit our SACRED WOUNDS — our core vulnerabilities — that have kept us stuck in the Old Story, but that also provide the priceless opportunity, when we are ready, to remythologize our lives.

In short, we’re going to have to enter the initiatory realm of Sweet Darkness. A great deal of liberation and deepening can occur during this intensive as we attend with kindness to those aspects of self we usually hide.

An application is required for this advanced intensive. For an application, please contact the Animas office.

Guide Fee: $695 Camping Fee: $25

Location/Lodging Info: Camping Fee covers the cost of group permit fees. Lunches, snacks, and tea are the responsibility of each participant. Breakfasts & dinners will be divided amongst the group and each participant will be responsible for a group meal. Please contact the Animas office for more information.

Arrival Info: TBA

Backpacking: No