Wild Mind Intensive - 2025

Name: Wild Mind Intensive - April, 2025
Start: 2025-04-30
End: 2025-05-04
Location: Animas Valley Institute

April 30 - May 4, 2025

Retreat Highlights

Identify - or clarify- your unique note in the symphony of life
Arouse your wild imagination and earthly senses
Encounter fierce and alluring aspirations of your soul
Recover and integrate the forgotten voices of your own wild psyche
Experience your conscious membership in the community of Earth
Join other visionary leaders in shaping a soul-infused future of the word

About this Retreat

Your Guides

Sara

Kent

Sara McFarland

Sara (she/they) is a healer of the Golden Web of Life, an Edgewalker singing the Frequencies of Soul, a ritualist in reciprocal relationship with the Holy in the Wild. As an improvisational singer, SoulStoryteller, and guide, she creates Fire Silk and Dreams Earth’s Web, in order to weave paths of golden threads into the underworld and between the worlds for others to follow. She tracks the Life – Death – Life energy of transformation and serves as a Death Doula to that which is dying- both in the personal as well as the collective. She is a Queer, both/and creature, welcoming of the exquisite multiplicity of Life beyond the Binary. Her capacity as a Gatekeeper allows her to presence the many manifestations of life (seen and unseen) blossoming beyond a human-centric perspective. She is a traveler with, a friend along the path – her work is both trauma-informed and compassionate, in service to healing personal and civilization trauma. She is also unafraid to be fierce, lovingly cutting to the heart of the matter – in service to ending the current Paradigm of Life-destroying-ways, as well as the dying that presages the renewal of Soul Initiation. Mystery, the Cailleach and the Dream guide her Muse to live a Soul-led life.

Kent Dobson

Kent Dobson is a defender of the ancient and hidden ways of relating to the ordinary mysteries of being alive. He's committed to helping others listen to the poetry of their own way of being and the potentialities latent in the contours of the heart. He's fascinated by the ways myth and symbol arise spontaneously from the psyche in wildly personal ways and in recognizable patterns that cross time and culture. He's a student of the evolving conversation around the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine. He was lucky enough to grow up in the woods of Virginia, among the hills and streams, as the son of Irish immigrants. He studied English in college and went to graduate school in Jerusalem, where he still leads pilgrimages. He's a former minister and musician, an author and podcaster, dream tender and companion-guide for individuals, and a trouble-maker for his own group wilderness intensives. Based in Michigan for many years, he's now settling into his new home in rural Georgia with his wife and kids, among pines and ferns and extended family.

Details of this retreat

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.

DHARMA TREASURE RETREAT CENTER

Located at the base of the Dragoon Mountains, this down to earth center offers an awe-inspiring setting for personal or group retreat. Our mission is to offer meditation instruction, and a natural sanctuary for all people pursuing spiritual development and awakening.

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Schedule

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!

Note: Schedule is approximate and may change