Date & Time Details: February 1-5, 2023 - Start Time 9am End Time 5pm

Location: Taft Gardens, Ojai, California

What to Bring: : This is an all-camping program. Participants are responsible for bringing their own personal camping equipment, and for personal transportation to and from the program.

Meals : Participants also responsible for bringing their own dinners, and snacks. Breakfasts and lunches will be provided by our gourmet caterer.

COVID-19: To protect the health of you, your fellow participants, and our guides, please review our COVID-19 POLICIES AND PROTOCOLS. We also ask participants to be especially vigilant in the weeks leading up to the program to avoid exposure to the virus.

Prices
  • $1,300.00 to $1,600.00 – Sliding Scale Price: you are free to select any price within this range
  • $1,600.00 – High End Program Price: choosing the high end amount or more allows us to compensate our guides at a higher rate

Nature and the Human Soul: An Experiential Exploration of the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel – February, 2023

February 1 - 5, 2023

With Brian Stafford, MD, MPH and Palika Rewilding

Anchored in traditional four-directions wisdom, contemporary depth and archetypal psychologies, and twenty-five years of nature-based soul guiding, the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (SDW) is a new ecopsychology of human development and cultural transformation. It’s a blueprint showing how richly we can grow and mature when soul and nature are embraced as our wisest and most trustworthy guides. It includes an integrated set of developmental guidelines that can help every human mature into an adulthood of visionary leadership — precisely what we need in this century if we are to create a just, compassionate, and sustainable world.

A life-span model of development from infancy through authentic elderhood, the SDW presents eight distinct stages of life and shows how these stages are almost always independent of chronological age, biological development, cognitive ability, or social role. Rather, the movement from one stage to the next comes about through progress with psychological and spiritual tasks that are specific to each stage. The SDW presents an achievable vision of a contemporary way of life that holds soul-discovery and genuine contribution to the more-than-human community as its most central features and goals.

(If you are a previous Animas participant familiar with the 4-directions-based map of the Self and the sub-personalities — used on many of our programs — please note that the SDW is something quite different and complementary.)

During this intensive, we employ talks (with handouts), conversation and story telling, and experiential exercises on the land as we explore the SDW and its applications to education, parenting, rites of passage, psychotherapy, personal growth, and cultural change. You’ll discover how to use the SDW to clarify your own next steps of soul-infused development and learn a set of principles and practices by which you can align yourself with the lifelong journey of growing whole.

This is an all-camping program for those who desire to camp. Participants will be meeting at Taft Gardens each morning for the Program and camping each night at Lake Casitas Campground (a 5 minute drive from the Gardens). Price includes campground fees, however participants can arrange their own nightly lodging if desired.  

 

TAFT GARDENS, OJAI, CALIFORNIA

taftWith maintained paths and seating areas, the 15 acres of curated gardens inspires visitors to learn about the majesty of nature and it’s complexities. Hand painted botanical tiles mark the path of the Docent Guided tour through the South African and Australian Gardens. Sculptures adorn the garden with curated art pieces inspiring each visitor to explore the connection between themselves and their environment.

 

 

Guides

Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Brian Stafford is a guide to the wilderness of nature, wildness, and soul. Called out of academic medicine to serve as a guide to the depths and to serve as an agent of cultural awakening and transformation, he guides with humor, playfulness, fierceness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be. A native of Colorado and the former holder of an endowed chair and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, he is currently a guide, Board Member, and Training Director of the Wild Mind Training Program at Animas. He…
Learn more about Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Palika Rewilding
Palika Rewilding has been courting and centering  the mysteries of the moon and the wild miraculous blue green pearl as long as she can remember. As a threshold midwife she listens and tends the edges and holy cracks with fierce love for pearls and shadowed gems within the psyche and hearts of the individual and collective, longing to recover our enchantment with Mystery, and our reciprocity and response ability with the Animate Earth. Passionately committed to the somatic and imaginal, deep structure, the descent into the Underworld, and the way of  beauty; she tends questions that matter, praise, grief and…
Learn more about Palika Rewilding