• Align your work with the healing powers of Nature and the innate wisdom of the body
• Learn cutting-edge therapeutic approaches for city or wilderness work
• Join a community of like-minded colleagues in a transformational journey
• Directly experience the life-changing power of ecotherapy & rites of passage work

Blending the ancient ceremony of the wilderness quest with contemporary advances in ecopsychology and mindfulness-based therapy, this one-of-a-kind training is an opportunity to learn the skills, forms, and essential framework of wilderness rites of passage work.  With a curriculum informed by the ceremony of the wilderness quest, ecopsychology, Hakomi®, Somatic Experiencing®, expressive arts therapy, and other body-oriented practices, you’ll engage in and study an array of practices applicable to urban or wilderness settings.  Over the course of our time together, we’ll form a peer community that will nurture and support your personal growth and professional progress as a wilderness rites of passage guide.

The program has three phases:

Phase I: We’ll spend 4 days together developing the core skills and practices essential to the work. These include The Way of Council®, the stages of rites of passage, designing Nature-based personal ceremony or ritual, the role of fasting in wilderness ROP, and facilitation of the stages of ROP- Severance, Threshold, and Incorporation. We’ll also study Nature-based models of human nature, the history and evolution of contemporary wilderness rites of passage, and an array of supporting skills and aptitudes needed to do the work well.

Phase II: The Wilderness Solo. Eight days to dive deeply into experiencing the work as you do your own wilderness with your cohort. This phase begins with orienting and refining of intentions for the solo, physical safety considerations as a part of a full day of preparation. On Day 2 you will begin your fast (optional) and find your solo sites. Then, you’ll cross a threshold from the life you’ve been leading and step away for 3 days and nights of solitude. This is a time where you can go to a place “only you can take yourself”, perhaps becoming both more a part of the wild Nature all around you and more truly inhabiting your own true Nature in the process. After 3 days and nights of your solo fast, you’ll recross the threshold back into the incorporation stage of the journey and the “one life that waits for you”. We’ll take the next two and a half days to help one another make meaning of the journey and prepare to bring it back home to “live it forward”.

Phase III: Putting Your Skills to Use. Coming about 5 weeks after the Wilderness Solo phase, the exact plans for this weekend will be partly dependent upon some of the outcomes of the first two phases for this unique cohort. In the intensive experiential immersion of the first two phases, students will have been very much in the mode of learning through their own direct experience as participants of this work. In contrast, in this third phase, the emphasis will be on engaging as guides-in-training and taking turns in the guiding role with one another as your voluntary ‘student/participants’. This will also be a wonderful opportunity to be deeply witnessed by your peers and the instructional team for the unique gifts and style you bring to this work. Dave will be calling in by video call for this weekend.