Palika Wilding

The application deadline for this program has passed, and the program is FULL. Please feel free to fill out the application and our guides will reach out if a cancellation occurs.  SWEET DARKNESS: The Initiatory Gifts of the Shadow, Projections, Subpersonalities, and the Sacred Wound is Animas Valley Institute’s most intense six-day immersion. Accordingly, we require that people have participated in previous Animas programs before applying to Sweet Darkness.  During Sweet Darkness, we will do some Core Wound work but first we will gather our four facets of wholeness — internal resources that support us in traveling effectively into uncharted territory. Then we will experientially enter the realm of…

Women, do you hear a great love call singing within your bones? A call from the earth, the cosmos and the ancestors, asking you to fully inhabit your true place within the earth community and protect the web of life? We invite you to join us in Washington for a contemporary Western enactment of the ancient, pan-cultural vision fast ceremony and wilderness rite. This is a unique ceremonial gathering designed specifically and intentionally for women-identified humans seeking greater connection, depth, and clarity about life purpose and meaning. This Quest is intended to serve as a portal through which women might…

This program is offered to parents and educators only. Anchored in traditional four-directions wisdom, contemporary depth and archetypal psychologies, and twenty-five years of nature-based soul guiding, the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (SDW) is a new ecopsychology of human development and cultural transformation. It’s a blueprint showing how richly we can grow and mature when soul and nature are embraced as our wisest and most trustworthy guides. It includes an integrated set of developmental guidelines that can help every human mature into an adulthood of visionary leadership — precisely what we need in this century if we are to create a just,…

Based on Bill Plotkin’s book, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, this 5-day intensive is an experiential exploration of our human psyches as unique expressions of the universal forces and patterns of nature. We will work with what we call the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, which is, among other things, a comprehensive inventory of what can be right about a person, a “shadow” version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), mainstream psychology’s list of what can go wrong with people. Our wild minds possess astonishing resources, untapped potentials and depths that we might not even know exist until we…

The application deadline for this immersion is May 27, 2025. Please submit your application prior to that date. Our guides will review all submitted applications at that time and will reach out shortly afterward. Soulcentric Dreamwork: The Secret Alchemy of the Nightworld The soul yearns to dream itself into the world. Every dream emerges from the mystery of the soul and is an opportunity for our conscious self, our ego, to be further initiated into the secret stream of our deeper life. On this 5-day immersion, you’ll learn what it’s like to enter dreams as mysteries; to boldly and vulnerably…