Events

May 15-19, 2012 in Utah with Animas Valley Institute guides Gene Dilworth and Geneen Marie Haugen. 

This five-day experiential -- in the kaleidoscopic stone temple of southern Utah -- is an invitation to discover who we become when we approach the world as if everything is alive, intelligent, and filled with imagination and purpose. And it's an invitation to discover how we might re-wild the world, and our own imaginations, when we engage in wild conversations with the Sacred Other -- conversations, in other words, with the mysteries we might call soul, spirit, anima, animus, cosmos, beloved, or muse. In those conversations, we might discover something about the particular genius we bring to a hungry world, a hint of our mytho-poetic identity.

This year, Conversations will be held in the magical, sandstone labyrinth of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where we will be pilgrims in communion with spring-fed waters, petrified sand dunes, willow, dragonflies, lizards, and Moon. We will tend the holy mystery at the core of our lives with soulful practices and ceremonies designed to arouse our conversations with the Sacred Other -- in both its luminous and shadowy guises. These conversations might include symbol or poetry, dream or dance, mysterious offerings or lyrical gestures. The Milky Way Galaxy and the ancient stone will help guide us into what ecophilosopher Joanna Macy calls deep time -- a felt-sense of our embeddedness in the cosmic unfolding of life, and perhaps a felt-sense of the necessary soul-infused artistry that we each contribute to the great unfolding. 

The guides will mindfully track themes, archetypal images, patterns, and numinous encounters from both your dayworld and nightworld (dream) experiences, and then offer deliciously alluring (or perhaps exquisitely challenging!) invitations for you to further engage the conversation with Mystery. Self-designed ceremony (with assistance from the guides) will help deepen the atmosphere for your encounter with Mystery - in the language of Mystery. Perhaps a Sacred Other will flirt with you, or perhaps she (or he, or it) will throw off her mossy robes and show you a glimpse -- or a full view -- of the precious treasure that you, and only you, carry as an offering to your people, an essential offering to the world's evolving story.

This experiential program is limited to 16, and is appropriate for change-agents, artists, educators, therapists, and others seeking immersion in the intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche, for those longing for greater depth of connection with the Sacred Other, for those longing to ceremonially tend the temple of the holy Earth, and for those with curiosity about soul in a participatory, animate cosmos.