UPCOMING OFFERINGS
Wilderness within INTENSIVE: Michigan
June 13--June 15, 2023
Wilderness Within Intensive
Big Rapids, Michigan
June 13-June 15, 2024
This program is designed to facilitate a deeper conversation between your soul and the natural world. We’ll be working with numerous practices, ceremonies, solo wanders, dreams, active imagination, stories, and group conversation. Accommodations range from tent camping to modern private rooms (extra expense). Anyone is welcome, with or without camping experience. There are few opportunities in the modern world for listening to the Soul and to the Mystery, for expressions of longing, prayer, grief and transformation. This weekend is designed to toward these possibilities. Please apply below.
The cost is $500. *If you financial limitations, let me know in the application
Location: Private and Public Land, Big Rapids, MI
Program begins the morning of the 13th, at 10am, and ends after dinner on the 15th.
soulcraft intensive: Animas valley institute
July 10--July 14, 2024
Soulcraft Intensive: Animas Valley Institute
Uncompahgre National Forest, Colorado
July 10-July 14, 2024
This is an Animas Valley Institute Program I’ll be co-guiding with Rebecca Wildbear, near Telluride Colorado. Animas handles all applications. Space is limited. Click on the link.
Wilderness within: Colorado
July 31--August 3, 2024
Wilderness Within: Colorado
Angel of Shavano Campground, Salida Colorado
July 31-August 3, 2024
This program is designed to facilitate a deeper conversation between your soul and the natural world. We’ll be working with numerous practices, ceremonies, solo wanders, dreams, active imagination, stories, and group conversation. Anyone is welcome, with or without camping experience. There are few opportunities in the modern world for listening to the Soul, and to the Mystery, for expressions of longing, prayer, grief and transformation. This program will be co-lead with Emma Duke, a friend and nature-based guide from Southwest Colorado (www.emma-duke.com). We’d love for you to join us. Please apply below.
The cost is $600-800, sliding scale. *If you financial limitations, let us know in the application
Location: Angel of Shavano Campground, State Forest Land
Program begins the evening of July 31st, and ends after dinner on the August 3rd.
Understanding your dreams: An online course
January 7-28, 2024
Understanding Your Dreams (Past Program)
January 7-28, 2024, Online
Dreams have been an incredibly important part of my own spiritual life for the last 10 years, as well as my guide training. I’ve come to see how dreams stand between what we know and what we do not know. This 4 week program is designed to facilitate a deeper understanding of dreams, and how they can influence our growth and development. Whether you remember your dreams, or forget them in morning, this course will awaken a conversation with your own hidden dream world. Join me Sundays in January. Please apply below.
Cost: $300. If you have financial limitations, let me know in the application.
Time: Sundays at 3pm Eastern on Zoom
I’m so excited to release my new audio book about the seven stages of transformation revealed in the life of Jesus. This long format audio book has 6.5 hours of content and questions about what the Christ symbol might still have to offer the world. Whether you are religious or not, the Grain of Wheat, is the central image of transformation that Jesus reveals and invites us to undergo. I hope you hear a few hints and guesses for your own wild spiritual journey. Enjoy!
New Pilgrimage: israel 2024
Feb 29-March 9, 2024
New Pilgrimage: Spring 2024 (Postponed for terribly obvious reasons)
Feb 29-March 9, 2024
People have been taking pilgrimages to Israel for hundreds of years. It’s an ancient discipline where the adventure of walking and learning and conversation are teachers. I’ve been leading these immersive experiences for twenty years, creating far more than a tour. We will explore ancient Biblical texts and stories, archeological sites, and the modern complex reality of Israel and Palestine. We try to hold a humble posture as we explore the history, religion, politics, and culture of one of most fascinating places on the planet. Expect long days in the field, good food, rich conversation, and a chance to deepen your own spiritual life. Space is limited, so please contact me right away for all the details.
Exploring the sacred masculine
October 27-30, 2022
Exploring the Sacred Masculine (Past Program)
October 27-30, 2022, Michigan
This program is designed to facilitate a deeper conversation between the sacred masculine and our wounds, hangups, misunderstandings, shame, reluctance, passivity, and power games of the modern male experience. There are very few opportunities to have this sort of sacred and missing conversation. Join me and a few other men for an intense, life-giving, and challenging few days in the woods, not too far from Grand Rapids Michigan. Please apply below.
The cost is about $600, depending on accommodations (I’ll explain once you apply, the details have yet to be finalized). If you financial limitations, let me know in the application
Location: Private and Public Land, Big Rapids, MI
Iron John: Exploring the sACRED MASCULINE
Sept 2021-May 2022
Iron John: Exploring the Sacred Masculine (Past Program)
Monthly Gatherings Sept 2021-May 2022
Sunday Afternoon 3-5:00pm EST
The book Iron John by Robert Bly is one of the most influential books of my life. This year, I am offering a deep study of the book, and the myth, for men called to understand and explore their own Sacred Masculine. This nine month course will include guided book discussions, my own teaching, group conversation, an email council between sessions, practices for deepening the work, and one one-on-one session during the year. Your own copy of Iron John required. This group is confidential and private and will meet over Zoom. Sessions will also be recorded for those with scheduling conflicts. Please apply below.
The cost is $600. *If you financial limitations, let me know in the application
Dates: Sept 19, Oct 31, Nov 14, Dec 19, Jan 16, Feb 20, Mar 27, April 17, May 15
Stay up to date on upcoming programs, podcasts, writings, and teachings.
Perhaps there’s a call on our lives that we know very little about. What if we turned our attention to this mysterious beckoning, as if our lives depended on it? What if we oriented our life toward the Mysterious and Sacred?
“My work is about turning toward the Mystery, as if our life depends upon it, and by doing so we begin to wake up, grow up, and show up in the world in the deepest and fullest way we’re able.
It’s a paradox, that the deeper we descend inward, we touch the eternal and transcendent. And when gifted with a taste of the transcendent, something of our inner core is revealed. Encounters of Soul and Spirit, the inner and outer, help us transcend our initial stories, ways of being, roles, and masks. They are not for the spiritually elite, but available in the hidden counters of our ordinary human life.
I believe everyone is invited by the Mystery into a deeper relationship with Soul and Spirit, with Nature and the World, with their own complex inner world and with their neighbors. It’s ever-present and always calling. This calls for spirituality, or a stance, that is at home in the underworld, as much the upperworld, the darkness and the light, with the transcendent and the ordinary. It’s both a descent to soul and an ascent to Spirit in classic mythic terms. The capacity to hold these paradoxically tensions is the kind of spiritual and psychological stance we must hold now in the 21st Century if we are going to grow up.
Maybe religion is giving you trouble, but you still feel the tug of spiritual longing, and are looking for some next steps. Maybe a privatized spirituality that feels a little like consumerism is giving you trouble, and you long to be connected to something deeper and older. Or maybe you have questions that will not go away, and you have the sense they’ll never be answered in ways you presently understand.
My programs, guiding, teachings, and writing are meant to help you deepen your relationship with the Mystery of your own life, and perhaps overhear your own deeper Vocation, your voice, your soul-centered way of being in the world, which is your greatest act of service to the world.
Programs
Companion- Guiding
One-on-one sessions for personal depth work.
Wild Soul programs
Small groups that dive deeply into sacred listening, myths, dreams, and maps of meaning.
Wilderness Within Retreats
Retreats in an outdoor setting where group practices support a dive into the mystery of soul.
PILGRIMAGE TO ISRAEL
I lead all kinds of groups, with all kinds of people—religious, non-religious, Jewish and Christian, schools and churches, families and organizations, all are welcome, all have something to learn from the land and culture that have shaped our understanding of God, the Bible, and being human.
I help people orient their life to be in deeper relationship with Mystery, the shape of their own soul, and to a meaningful sense of their unique voice in the world.
The old stories and teachings insist that to discover this voice, this vocation, requires a descent into the depths of our own soul, beneath our everyday persona. Modern life resists this descent and prefers a shallow, self-serving story, which starves the soul. We are suffering from an arrested spiritual development.
The path I’m interested in preserving, is about growing up, ultimately into the village elder, a generative presence committed to serving others, embodying the path of wisdom, and sacrificing for the health of the community and the earth. We are all capable of living into this potential and we need more people who are committed to this path and are bringing forth their unique gifts to the world.
This path used to be called Initiation, where one is initiated into the mysteries of life and called to bring forth their own possibilities. We need a revised and contemporary initiation process which breaks down the shallow modern illusions and our personal ego’s grip on our life. In this sense, my own role is to be a Companion-Guide in the ancient process of Soul Initiation.
My work is designed to cooperate with the eternal tug of Soul and Mystery toward descent, initiation, and new birth. This is a process of deep transformation and I invite you to join in it with me.
Join the Conversation
For those interested in deepening their own unique conversation with soul, I will be sending a monthly update on programs, events, podcasts, teachings, and more.