ANIMAS GUIDES

David Abram

David is an ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist, and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He authored the award-winning book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. David’s work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory experience, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray appear often in such journals as Adbusters, Orion, Environmental Ethics, Tikkun, Parabola, and The Ecologist, as well as in many anthologies in a host of disciplines. Named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, David lives with his family in New Mexico, where he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication, and in the rejuvenation of oral culture.

Bill Ball, M.Div, M.S.W.

Bill has been associated with AVI for 20 years, when he enacted his first Animas Quest. He has since trained with AVI through the Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program and served 5 years on the Board of Directors. Bill has also been a practitioner of Vipassana meditation for almost 20 years and is a leader of a vibrant and growing Buddhist community in Durango, CO, where he grew up and currently lives. In the early '80's Bill obtained a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Master degree in Social Work from Rutgers University. Bill's guiding incorporates a diverse blend of practices, cross-pollinating Soulcraft skills with a focus on radical acceptance of experience in the moment and a deep awareness of our interconnectedness with a co-arising world.

Annie Bloom

Annie Bloom has been guiding with Animas Valley Institute for 13 years. Her gift is to break open our wild hearts to the numinous beauty we each carry in the fertile seed of our souls. Her passion lies in mirroring our individual and collective destinies as held in the luminous stories brought back from solo time on the land. In her Salt Lake community, Annie gently and fiercely supports people in their awakening and individuation through her 26-year practice in BodySoulWork, wilderness pilgrimages, and ceremonial leadership. She has been in deep communion with and apprenticeship to bison since she was 18 and first encountered them while working on a ranch in Wyoming -- their presence constellating the ever-unfolding mystery lying at the center of her being and informing the deepest expression of her guiding.

Lauren Chambliss, M.A.

Lauren Chambliss is a vision quest guide, mentor and writer. Her deepest commitment is to help people dive into the wild, mystical undercurrent of soul and spiritual connection, to bring grief back into life, and old ways back to new. She has first-hand experience with the power of dreams to enrich, challenge and inspire a fully-lived life. Her early experiences in Africa and Northern Europe birthed a lifelong interest in other cultures' unity with the natural and spiritual worlds. She is the mother of three vibrant children and steward of 200 acres of verdant land at Rune Hill Retreat Center, in Spencer, NY.

Cristin DeVine, M.Ed., M.F.T.

Cristin DeVine is a psychotherapist, teacher and wilderness guide. She is passionate about tending soul and helping individuals to discover and bring their unique gifts into the world. Cristin has been guiding wilderness rites of passage with adolescents and adults for eleven years. Her study and practice of primitive skills has led her from the Yup'ik regions of Alaska to the deserts of Utah, and now to her home in Northern California. As a dance instructor using Neuromuscular Integrative Action, Cristin brings a body-centered and integrative approach to guiding.

Len Fleischer, Ed.D.

Len is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor of education and counseling. A longtime practitioner of meditation, he is engaged with the confluence of awakening, mindfulness, compassion, and action, a place where soul, spirituality, and social justice can be on intimate terms. Len guides adolescents and adults to the transformative truth of their authentic identity and community. He believes the natural world mirrors our potential for sacred balance as well as the challenges of storm, struggle, passion, and love.

Geneen Marie Haugen

Geneen grew up a little wild, in companionship with water, woods and the Milky Way - an intimacy that has deepened with time. She is a wilderness explorer, a guide toward the mysterious terrain of psyche, and a writer whose work appears in numerous anthologies, including American Nature Writing and Going Alone: Women's Adventures in the Wild. She is a perpetual student of myth, eco-psychology, and of the inscrutable, undomesticated Others, and has been exploring the intertwined mysteries of nature, imagination, beyond-human intelligence and non-ordinary perception for 25 years. She is committed to the world-shifting potential of the generative human imagination in collaboration with Earth, and is currently a doctoral student in Philosophy, Cosmology, Consciousness and Ecology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Mary Marsden

Mary brings her compassionate heart and grounded presence to work in the fertile terrain of the human psyche and wild nature. She is dedicated to fashioning vessels into which our old ways of being may courageously dive and drown in the rising waters of our souls longing to live. She is trained in the Hakomi Method of body-centered psychotherapy and weaves mindfulness and embodied movement practices into the quest journey. AVI-trained vision quest guide, front yard gardener and backyard archer, Mary has a private counseling practice and lives with her wild and precious teenage daughters in Boulder, Colorado.

Jim Marsden

Jim Marsden is a passionate explorer of the inner and outer wilderness and partners with people and the natural world to reveal the sometimes subtle pathways that illuminate, appreciate, and nurture the life of the soul. In his "other" work over the past 15 years, Jim has held a variety of business management positions in a Fortune 100 high-tech company and now focuses his professional efforts on personal and organizational transformation.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.

Bill Plotkin has been a psychotherapist, research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), rock musician, river runner, professor of psychology, and mountain-bike racer. He is the founder and president of Animas Valley Institute, and, since 1980, has guided thousands of people through initiatory passages in nature. Currently an ecotherapist, depth psychologist, and wilderness guide, he leads a variety of experiential, nature-based, individuation programs. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche and the forthcoming (in January 2008) Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World. His doctorate in psychology is from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Jamie Reaser, Ph.D.

Jamie is a lover of the wild, intimate, and unnamable. She is a conservation ecologist, poet, writer, artist, and homesteader-in-progress with a private practice in “transformational counciling” (an approach integrating her expertise in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), ecopsychology, soul-guiding, and indigenous knowledge). Jamie has a passion for bringing people into their hearts, inspiring the heartbeat of community, and, ultimately, empowering people to live with a heart-felt dedication to Mother Earth. She resides on 85 transformative acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Ann Roberts, M.L.A.

Ann Roberts has served in a type of elder role most of her life in her extensive work with many organizations, ceremonial communities, and other groups, providing a variety of organizational and spiritual leadership. She has guided vision quests since 1986 in several locations throughout the American West. Ann is also a certified deep imagery guide in the Personal Totem Pole Process and has guided individuals and led imagery groups for fifteen years. Her wisdom and compassion has enabled her to care for the souls of many individuals and communities over the years.

Peter Scanlan, Ph.D.

Peter is a clinical psychologist in private practice for 27 years in Nashville, Tennessee. He trained with AVI and the School of Lost Borders as a vision quest guide and has been an AVI lead guide for seven years. He is working on a model for the challenge each of us faces in joining our masculine and feminine aspects within the four cardinal directions of our human nature. He is dedicated to guiding people to the edge of the deepest inner and outer mysteries and holding sacred space while they plunge into those depths. He brings heart presence and a playful spirit to his work.

Jade Sherer

Jade Sherer is a wilderness guide, teacher, artist, and bodyworker. She has led vision quests and other wilderness journeys in California, Oregon, Hawaii, and the American Southwest. She supports human transformation through respectful interaction and deep communion with nature, seeing soulful maturation as an essential step in making meaningful and lasting change in the world. Exploring the wild for 27 years, Jade is fascinated with the way nature serves as mirror, especially for the feminine mysteries. Her work is rooted in deep love and respect for the Earth and her creatures. She loves creating beautiful ceremonial containers in which people can open their hearts and dive into the mysteries of nature and soul.

Dianne Timberlake, M.A., M.F.T.

Dianne's respect for and dedication to heart-centered living is the core and foundation of her life journey. She is a licensed psychotherapist, teacher, and experienced guide in nature-based rites and personal growth programs. Dianne has a deep desire to facilitate wholeness in others, especially through the use of deep interactive imagery, which she delights in teaching and sharing. She is also an ongoing student of transpersonal healing arts.

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.

Sabina Wyss, CPCC

Sabina leads Vision Quests in the American Southwest and, accompanied by nomadic camel caravans, in the Sahara desert. She mentors graduates of AVI programs and trains vision quest guides. Sabina is a certified Life Coach (CPCC, MCC) and Holistic Health Practitioner (HMC) in private practice for 19 years, passionately assisting others in uncovering and courageously manifesting their life purpose and soul gifts. She is a founding partner of Sage Canyon, a Colorado center for nature-based soulwork. As faculty of CTI she trains new coaches. She leads a foundation in Niger, Africa to support the indigenous Tuareg. In her workshops in the U.S., Europe, and Africa, she loves to dive full-heartedly and with a dash of humor into the depths of soul.