quote:

Soulcentric Dreamwork

with Bill Plotkin, Sabina Wyss, and Geneen Marie Haugen

at Kelly Place Retreat Center & Archaeological Preserve
near Cortez, Colorado

October 26-30, 2006

You can know yourself, if you bring up
those cloudy canvases from your dreams,
today, this day, when you walk
awake, open-eyed. ...
--Antonio Machado


...To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others. ...
-- David Whyte


We invite you to join us on our popular and outrageously entertaining 5-day experiential seminar, Soulcentric Dreamwork, which will be held, once again, at Kelly Place, a most enchanted and dreamy retreat center in the redrock canyoncountry of southwest Colorado.

The soul -- our mysterious, unique essence -- longs to express itself in the world, and the world simultaneously longs for the soul-infused offerings of human beings. Soul sings, whispers, howls to us in the wild language of image, symbol, myth, poetry, and dreams, and is reflected to us in our relationships with the other-than-human members of the Earth community.

There is no better way to deepen the conversation with soul than by attending your dreams while immersed in nature.

Soulcentric Dreamwork is a central component of Soulcraft a contemporary set of nature-based, cross-cultural practices designed to facilitate the encounter with soul, our most innate expression and the source of our unique contribution to the world.

There are many methods of working with dreams. Soulcentric dreamwork holds the view that the soul wants to initiate us into our soul path by familiarizing the ego with the nightworld or underworld. Other forms of dreamwork might attempt to import some images from the nightworld of soul into the dayworld of personality to support the ego’s healing, therapy, self-understanding, or entertainment. But in soulcentric dreamwork, we commit ourselves to an extended stay in the soul's mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on us rather than the more common approach of doing our work on the dream.

We will apprentice ourselves to the mystery held within our dreams. With a variety of modalities including direct dialogue with the dream itself, expressive arts and movement, deep imagery, and wandering on the land with (and in) our dreams we will submit ourselves to the "underdream" that lies beneath our everyday conscious self. We will offer ourselves to what the nightworld has to reveal and will allow ourselves to be changed as a result. We will explore how our dreams want to shift us, what doors they want to open for us, what thresholds they want to usher us over.

We will deepen our dreamwork through additional soulcraft practices, including council work, drumming, trance dancing, poetry, shadow work, and individualized soul tasks in nature. We will spend much of our time outside in the redrock canyons that radiate out from Kelly Place, learning from greater nature as well as our human nature accessed through our dreams.

My co-guides on this intensive are Sabina Wyss and Geneen Marie Haugen, two people with enormous charm and facility in the intricately mysterious realm of dreams.

Please join us! Course details below.

Location: Kelly Place: an old adobe-style retreat center and archaeological preserve in magical McElmo Canyon, a world of redrock 10 miles west of Cortez, Colorado

Dates: October 26 30, 2006 (Thursday Monday)

Program Fee: $695 (eligible for a $100 early registration discount)

Meals & Lodging: $340 (Includes 4 nights shared lodging and all meals from dinner on the 26th through lunch on the 30th.)

If you would like to enroll but need financial assistance, ask us for our financial aid policy which includes partial scholarship and payment plans.

Guide Bios:
Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., founder and president of Animas Valley Institute, holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since 1980, he has guided thousands of people through initiatory passages in nature. An ecotherapist, depth psychologist, and wilderness guide, he combines his love of nature with his love of people into the crafting of a variety of unique soulcraft programs. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (2003) and the forthcoming A Natural History of the Soul: The Ecopsychology of Human Development.

Sabina Wyss 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 and Holistic Health Practitioner in private practice for 14 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. 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.

Geneen Marie Haugen is a wilderness explorer, writer, teacher, and guide for contemporary vision quests and other programs designed to facilitate a more engaged relationship between the deep imagination and the wild Earth. Her work appears in many anthologies, including American Nature Writing and Going Alone: Women's Adventures in the Wild. She has been exploring the intertwined mysteries of nature, imagination, beyond-human intelligence, and non-ordinary perception for over 20 years, and is committed to the world-shifting potential of the generative human imagination.


To register, call Animas Valley Institute
1-800-451-6327