Date & Time Details: September 20-24, 2023 - Start Time 1pm End Time 1pm

Location: Wild Geese Collective, Wabanaki Territory, Swanville, Maine

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 are responsible for bringing their own lunches, and snacks. Breakfasts and dinners will be provided by our gourmet caterer.

Prices
  • $1,475.00 to $1,750.00 – Sliding Scale Price: you are free to select any price within this range
  • $1,750.00 – High End Program Price: choosing the high end amount or more allows us to compensate our guides at a higher rate

Queer Soulcraft Intensive, September 2023

September 20 - 24, 2023

With Doug Van Houten and Sara McFarland

THE QUEER SOULCRAFT INTENSIVE PROVIDES A CONTAINER for the rainbow of diversity that is LGBTQIA+ for one to perhaps drop in deeper, to dance with your unique and wild animal selves, all your sacred emotions, your inspirations and visions, your gifts of seeing and imagining, dreaming and creating. 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 well as the essence of your true service to society (the cross-cultural wisdom traditions say these are one and the same). Soulcraft practices spring from nature-based cultures, modern depth psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage—to comprise a truly contemporary Western path to soul discovery and soul initiation. For a full discussion, see Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche.

The Soulcraft Intensive is highly experiential and—well—intense. We alternate between practices utilized in group, practices explored in solitude in nature, and sharing and deepening those experiences in small groups (5 to 9 people each). There is a Soulcraft guide for each small group, providing you with a fully individualized experience. What you discover through one practice is carried into and amplified by what you learn in the next. By the end of the intensive, you will understand yourself and your place in the world from a more soul-oriented perspective, be clearer about the gifts you were born to bring to the world, and have new skills to enrich your life and to defend the health of the more-than-human world.

Soulcraft practices include:

  • 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!

 

 

WILD GEESE COLLECTIVE

WABANAKI TERRITORY, SWANVILLE, MAINE

A small rural town located in the mid coast area, Swanville is 40 minutes from Bangor International Airport and 10 minutes from the coastal city of Belfast, which is also accessible by interstate bus. Our camp is set in a mixed forest, with wetlands and hidden springs. Wildlife and bird sightings are abundant from resident porcupines who wander around in the evenings, to passing deer, bobcat, and many more seen and unseen wild ones. There is ample space for wandering on and off trail and plenty of space for tent or hammock camping.

 

Guides

Doug Van Houten
Doug (he/him) draws on the wisdom of the natural world, depth-psychology, eco-psychology, dreams, somatic knowing, poetry, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering practices that includes: The Way of Council, vision fasting, shadow work, symbolic artwork, trance dancing and conversations with the more than human world. Doug’s true calling in life is to support others as they uncover their own unique gifts and in so doing, transform their lives in service to what Thomas Berry called ”The Great Work” of our times. Doug is also an ardent beekeeper, a visual artist, a wily wanderer, a dream tracker, an emergent ceremonialist, a heart-centered activist, and…
Learn more about Doug Van Houten
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,…
Learn more about Sara McFarland