Palika Rewilding

The Soulcraft Intensive is our popular five-day experiential plunge into the wild depths of Soulcraft; a synergistic set of nature-based practices designed to evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter. Your soul is your true self, those qualities that most deeply define and express who you are and the unique gift that you were born to bring to the world, a world so much in need of the socially transforming contributions of initiated, actively engaged adults. To encounter the soul is to discover the mystical image you were born with, which reveals the path to your greatest personal fulfillment as…

Sweet Darkness for Women: The Initiatory Gifts of the Sacred Wound and Shadow, is Animas Valley Institute’s most intensive short program. Because of this, we require that people have participated in other Animas programs before applying to Sweet Darkness. The immersion will take place over 6 days. There are many ways to experience and define being a woman. Because of this, we want to clarify that this offering is for people who have been socialized (at least the majority of their life) as female and who also self-identify as a woman. We make this choice conscientiously and ask for understanding…

Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche is an advanced version of the Soulcraft Intensive for people prepared for a radical immersion in the enigmatic dark waters of soul. This intensive is designed for those with previous Animas experience, people who have cultivated the personal resources we call the four facets of wholeness, people whose primary longing in life now is for a first or deeper experience of soul encounter. Soul encounter is the revelation of our unique mythopoetic identity, an identity expressed through symbol and metaphor, image and dream, archetype and myth, an identity embodied in a mysterious…

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…

…Hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with.… ~David Whyte Image is the mother tongue of the soul.  As humans, we carry images, symbols, mysteries within us that arise unbidden through the dreamtime, dance at the edges of consciousness, and arrive via encounters within human culture and nature. They are with us from the beginning. Images that are core to who we are carry energy, story, meaning, memory, emotion, and/or vision. They might, if we are willing to engage them, connect us to our hearts — to the places we most fear but…

Women, do you hear a great love call singing within your bones? A call from the earth, the cosmos and the ancestors, asking you to fully inhabit your true place within the earth community and protect the web of life? We invite you to join us in the beautiful Sonoran Desert in Arizona for a contemporary Western enactment of the ancient, pan-cultural vision fast ceremony and wilderness rite. This is a unique ceremonial gathering designed specifically and intentionally for women-identified humans seeking greater connection, depth, and clarity about life purpose and meaning. This Quest is intended to serve as a…

The application deadline for this Yearlong Immersion is August 1st, 2023. The guides will review and reach out after that date.  The Yearlong Soulcraft Immersion: Cultivating Soul-Infused Artistry and Leadership in a Time of Global Change is an advanced program for people already immersed in their soul-discovery process and who are either in a leadership position or are longing to support radical change in our world through cultivating their most vital, visionary essence. This program is focused on neither healing nor therapy, but rather on the journey of soul initiation and on the development of the skills and sensibilities required…