Date & Time Details: February 14-18, 2023 - Start Time 8:30am End Time 5pm

Location: Taft Gardens, Ojai, California

What to Bring: This is an all-camping program. Participants are responsible for bringing their own personal camping equipment, and for personal transportation to and from the program.

Meals : Participants are responsible for bringing their own lunches, and snacks. For breakfasts and dinners, the group will be divided into meal teams to plan, purchase and prepare group meals using safe protocols.

COVID-19: To protect the health of you, your fellow participants, and our guides, please review our COVID-19 POLICIES AND PROTOCOLS. We also ask participants to be especially vigilant in the weeks leading up to the program to avoid exposure to the virus.

Prices
  • $1,050.00 to $1,350.00 – Sliding Scale Price: you are free to select any price within this range
  • $1,350.00 – High End Program Price: choosing the high end amount or more allows us to compensate our guides at a higher rate

The Way of Council and the Art of Mirroring – February, 2023

February 14 - 18, 2023

With Brian Stafford, MD, MPH and Palika Wilding

THE ART OF MIRRORING: There is an art to hearing a story as well as telling one. Mirroring is a collection of skills employed in receiving, embracing, and honoring each others’ stories. In mirroring, we neither project nor interpret but rather celebrate the magic of the story and the gifts of the One Who Bears the Tale. We help the storyteller glean-harvest-reap the jewels, the dark ones as well as those that sparkle.

The Way of Council and the Art of Mirroring are invaluable practices on the descent to soul. Although much of the descent is solitary, gathering with others in council can make all the difference in finding our way. In the mirror of another, our eyes are opened to aspects of both our gifts and our challenges that we might not have seen otherwise. We are encouraged and inspired to drop into realms that are scary, edgy, darkly alluring, mysterious, and ecstatic — dangerous, yes, but keenly aligned with our deepest longings. During council and through mirroring, we serve as consorts for each other’s mysteries. We are supported to track threads of our soul story that, during the intensive or later, can be amplified as we wander on the land or surrender ourselves to movement or dance, or expressed through poetry or other arts. Council and mirroring can crack us open to irrefutable truths about our core nature and our connection to the Others, the larger field in which our councils occur. During council, we track synchronies with the other-than-human world that surrounds us (animal appearances, for example, or weather shifts, or the quality of the light). And we unearth common archetypal themes that appear within our own human circle. All this helps us better perceive the threads of our individual soul stories and our unique ways of belonging to the world.

Through the Art of Mirroring, we learn to listen as if our lives depend on it (they do). We hone our ability to detect the magnificence and mythic qualities in our own and others’ stories. We listen for unique soul threads that might appear in a repeated theme, a tone, aspects of sacred woundings, dreams, unique imagery, archetypal dimensions of the journey, or tracks of shadow material.

A circle of fellow pilgrims, witnessing and mirroring us, helps us understand where we are on the journey to soul and supports us to take our next steps — from our initial preparation for the descent, to the leaving of “home” and the courageous abandonment of our old story, to our hazardous and ecstatic encounters with numinous mysteries, to the gathering up of mysterious treasures, and, finally, the return to our communities with a vision to perform in service to the larger web of life.

We invite participants to arrive at the Lake Casitas campground the evening before we commence (February 13th) to get settled.

 

TAFT GARDENS, OJAI, CALIFORNIA

taftWith maintained paths and seating areas, the 15 acres of curated gardens inspires visitors to learn about the majesty of nature and it’s complexities. Hand painted botanical tiles mark the path of the Docent Guided tour through the South African and Australian Gardens. Sculptures adorn the garden with curated art pieces inspiring each visitor to explore the connection between themselves and their environment.

 

Guides

Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Brian Stafford is a guide to the wilderness of nature, wildness, and soul. Called out of academic medicine to serve as a guide to the depths and to serve as an agent of cultural awakening and transformation, he guides with humor, playfulness, fierceness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be. A native of Colorado and the former holder of an endowed chair and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, he is currently a guide, Board Member, and Training Director of the Wild Mind Training Program at Animas. He…
Learn more about Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Palika Wilding
Palika Wilding has been courting and centering the mysteries of the Underworld, the Moon and the miraculous blue green pearl for as long as she can remember. As threshold midwife she listens and tends the edges and holy cracks where a psyche the size of Earth, entangles with the human body and psyche, towards a discovery of the pearls and shadowed gems within that lead to one’s unique enchanted love affair, reciprocity, and response ability with the animate Earth & Mystery. An astute tracker of beauty, and the forgotten, forsaken, forbidden and feared, she sensitively and artfully serves to bring…
Learn more about Palika Wilding