Journey into the Depths of the Soul – April 2023, Colombia

Your Soul, as we define it here, is the essence of your Being, your ultimate place, the set of relationships that form you. It is that particular vessel, unique and irreplaceable that hosts the qualities that most genuinely define and express who you are, as a unique ecological niche in the diverse concert of Life. It is the gift that you offer the world for a Life filled with meaning. To encounter your Soul supposes discovering that mystical image with which you were born with and that reveals the way to personal accomplishment, as well as the essence of your service to society. The practices that we use in the crafting of the soul arise from cultures that are still rooted in nature, depth psychology, poetic traditions, and nature rites of passage, to deliver a unique and authentic contemporary guide that allows to contact the voice of the Soul and work to initiate in its language. Bill Plotkin, creator of Animas Valley Institute, offers several books that deepen into the work of the Soul in nature (Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. The Journey of Soul Initiation ambos títulos edición de  New World Library).

Throughout these 5 days you will be under the guidance and orientation of Nate Bacon, nature guide and facilitator by excellence of the Descent to Soul, and the Efecto Mariposa team who will be there to deepen and facilitate your sensible and deep experience. You will be a special guest in the Chulajuan Natural Reserve, located and hour and a half from the city of Bogotá, with all of those that inhabit its forest, and who will participate in a magical way throughout your journey, bringing that which your soul needs from nature to make itself visible to your own eyes.

The intensive is directed to you that wonder with thirst through these words and to all those people that feel the urgency to listen to their inner voice, give a place to their deep imagination and open themselves to live a more whole, sensitive and meaningful life. To all those that maybe haven’t allowed themselves to experiment the interconnection between humans and other beings, and their place in the concert of Life; the romance with the living and sacred world that surrounds us; and the courtship of darkness which seeks for the treasures of transformation. To those who wonder about reconnecting with nature from their authentic being and dare to work their inner wounds; and making oneself available for mystery to open one‘s particular Life in a more whole and meaningful way.  

Some of the powerful tools that we will visit to court your Soul are:

• 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

At the end of this journey you can expect a clearer comprehension of who you are, and what is your place in this world from the perspective of your soul. You may have a wider clarity about those gifts -unique, irrepetible and particular- those with who you arrived to this life on Earth and have better tools to manifest them in the community that surrounds you, to the service of all of Life, including obviously that which escapes the human world and at the same time makes us more human.

Join us! This is a unique opportunity in these times that requiere of our decided participation to understand our place and concrete that better world of which we are capable of.

The program includes a camping place in the Natural Reserve, one of the most spectacular Andean highland mist forests in Colombia, the specialised guide, company and the facilitation of a team in the service of your process. It does not include food, transportation (groups are created to optimise the food shopping and cooking as well as carpooling). It does not include personal camping equipment.

 

About Colombia and El Chulajuán Natural Reserve

In this wondrous and mysterious place we will immerse ourselves in the entwined landscapes of our dreams and our waking lives as members of the wild, more-than-human world. We will tend simultaneously to our dream-lives and our experiences in the land and come to know them as inseparable dimensions of our human experience. Embedding ourselves in this numinous terrain will enable us to seek glimpses, or intimations, of our unique, individual places in the Earth community. Together we will cultivate our inherent capacities for perceiving the psycho-spiritual and ecological patterns that collaborate and conspire to draw us deeper and deeper into the territory of soul – our ultimate place within the community of life.

This intensive will take place at El Chulajuan, an astonishing private wildland and agricultural reserve an hour outside of Bogotá. In this place, the surrounding mountains trap the moisture from the hot Magdalena Valley and orchestrate entrancing dances between tree and cloud, mountain and sky, landscape and imagination. El Chulajuan is home to more than 360 animal species, including small mammals such as opossums, pacas, jackrabbits, coatis, and sloths. It is also a home for many species of uncommon high tropical birds including hummingbirds of all sizes and colors, huge turkeys, and bright green toucans. The plant, fungal, and insect life is also astounding and bewildering; in the space of 740 acres, El Chulajuan is home to more biodiversity than all of Great Britain combined. Here you will wander in relationship with fern trees, palms, beetles, butterflies, coatis, acacias, , and oaks, listening for subtle whispers or deafening cries announcing- if only you have the ears to hear- the nature of your unique and particular place in the community of life.

About Efecto Mariposa

In Efecto Mariposa we provide spaces and experiences for transformation so that participants can find answers to their own questions regarding the meaning of their own lives. We work with phenomenology, animism, and a holistic understanding of Life to see with new eyes the challenges of our times and to propitiate the emergence of paradigms that allow us to inhabit the Earth with consciousness and wholeness, flowing in harmony with life.