ANIMAS GUIDES

Jeffrey Allen, M.A

Jeffrey supports people in making deeper connections with soul, spirit, community and purpose. A Vermont psychologist, he has led dream workshops, wilderness-based programs and rites of passage throughout the United States. He is a founding member of the Burlington Taiko Group and is practiced in the art of trance drumming. A co-founder of Men Alive, a Vermont men's community, he has an ongoing commitment to the healthy, embodied masculine. As an Animas guide, he delights in evoking the mystery. He brings a wild, playful spirit and a keen intuition to all programs he guides. He is a devoted father, husband, beekeeper, drummer and tracker of wild things.

Annie Bloom

Annie Bloom has been guiding with Animas Valley Institute for 17 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 28-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.

Gene Dilworth, M.A.

Gene is an educator and wilderness guide with more than twenty years experience leading groups in nature-based pathways to self-discovery, wholeness, and community. He is committed to facilitating meaningful encounters with the more-than-human world, and supporting individuals and groups to bring forth the unique gifts of their true nature. With an M.A. in Environment & Community, Gene has taught ecology and ecopsychology at Naropa University, and mentors graduate students in ecopsychology at Prescott College. He has been a college academic administrator and has served in a variety of roles in environmental and educational organizations. Gene is a long-time student of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, and has trained with Animas Valley Institute since 2004. He nurtures his own sense of wonder by exploring the Boulder foothills with his young daughter, and courts the muse through music and poetry.

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 Marie Haugen is a writer, wilderness explorer and guide to the intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche. Her work appears in many anthologies, including American Nature Writing and Going Alone: Women's Adventures in the Wild. Currently a PhD student in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, she is committed to the world-shifting potential of the generative human imagination.

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.

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.

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 has training 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 keeper of backyard chickens, Mary has a private counseling practice and lives with her teenage daughters in Boulder, Colorado.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.

Bill Plotkin, PhD, is a depth psychologist, wilderness rites guide, and ecotherapist. As the founder of Animas Valley Institute, he has, since 1981, guided thousands of people through nature-based initiatory passages, including a contemporary, Western adaptation of the pan-cultural vision quest. Previously, he has been a research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, whitewater river boatman, and mountain-bike racer. His doctorate in psychology is from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack peak, Bill experienced a “call to adventure” that lead him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (New World Library, 2003) and Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (New World Library, 2008).

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. Her most recent book, Courting the Wild: Love Affairs with the Land, (Hiraeth Press, 2008), is an anthology of stories about falling in love with the land and, as a consequence, opening to environmental stewardship as a way of being. 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 Scanlan is a clinical psychologist in private practice for 28 years in Nashville, Tennessee. He trained with AVI and with the School of Lost Borders as a vision quest guide and has been an AVI lead guide for nine 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 then honors to the unique power and truth of the stories that they bring back from those journeys. He brings heart presence and a playful spirit to his work.

Sheila Belanger, M.A.

Sheila is an inspiring astrologer, wilderness guide and neo-shamanic practitioner. She is a passionate advocate for our wild nature and our capacity to track and navigate the currents of soul. She has guided vision quests and nature-based soul programs since 1997. From her training in Transpersonal Psychology, Authentic Movement, and Deep Imagery, she is committed to nurturing the personal expression of embodied imagination and relationship to the Sacred. In her private practice, Sheila specializes in the astrology of midlife mischief and its attendant unique opportunities for soul growth. She lives on Whidbey Island, Washington and is an avid backpacker and sea kayak apprentice in the wild lands and waters of the West. Sheila brings her huge open heart, infectious humor and compassionate respect for each person’s individual Mystery to all her guiding work.

Jade Sherer

Jade Sherer is a wilderness guide, teacher, cemetery sexton, body-worker and artist. She has led vision quests and other wilderness journeys in California, Oregon, Hawaii, Mexico 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 more than 32 years, Jade is fascinated with the way nature serves as a mirror, especially for the wild feminine. Her work is rooted in deep love and respect for Earth and Her creatures, and in the innate understanding that sacred reciprocity with all Beings is an essential step towards our collective and individual re-evolution. As a way of echoing Earth, she is apprenticing herself to death now in uncommon ways, including the creation and growing of a Conservation Burial Ground in Washington state.

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.

Doug Van Houten

Doug Van Houten has an eye for the heartbreakingly beautiful and a wild heart that sings in the dark night of his own soul. He is beekeeper, artist, brave explorer of the "darker than darkness", student/facilitator of the Great Work, and Animas trained vision fast guide. In his own backyard of the rolling Kentucky hills, Doug organizes retreats/conferences/workshops/drumming circles, and festivals in celebration of Earth spirit. Lit by the luminescence of his own dreams, wanderings and visions, his firsthand enraptured experience is a deep exploration of his own dark wounding. Doug has taken a vow to soul (‘that would kill him to break’) to live consciously with grace and to stay awake. Here, he dances with shadow, hones his artistry, and answers the call to support the soulful opening of others.

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.