Sweet Darkness – March, 2025

The guides are still accepting and reviewing applications for this immersion. Please feel free to apply!

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 our greatest vulnerabilities and core sensitivities. Through experiential practices, we will explore how our Core Wound may be re-mythologized into a Sacred Wound. (Sweet Darkness is not recommended if you are in a time of life in which your wound story is particularly painful to visit or if you are seeking greater comfort. This is not a psychotherapy or trauma-healing program — nor a substitute for one.)

At Animas, when we speak of the Shadow, we mean the hidden realm of our psyches, with both its “golden” and “sinister” aspects. The Shadow is NOT what we know about ourselves and don’t like or know that others find uncomfortable but, rather, what is true about us but know nothing about and would sincerely deny if accused of it or praised for it. During Sweet Darkness, we explore those sticky, difficult, and immensely rewarding dynamics that come up so often in life, like overpowering emotional charges triggered by other people and by our encounters in the other-than-human world.

We will ask, for example: What do you do when you catch yourself projecting on others — maybe while you’re guiding, teaching, socializing … or trying to love? We’re going to work with these things, in part, by jumping into the cauldron with our own projections on each other.

How can we live a conscious existence these days without knowing we’re all regularly conjuring up all kinds of monsters from the deep? It’s a common experience to go off in search of soul, with the desire to contribute to the Great Turning as visionary agents of cultural regeneration, and then soon enough discover that we have inadvertently opened the long black bag we drag behind us (the Shadow), and all these demons (and deities) are climbing out. We understand, however, that so much of our wholeness is hidden in that bag. In fact, some of our greatest powers lie within, disguised and mislabeled as dangerous. In Sweet Darkness, we’ll work with strategies for spotting, unmasking, and assimilating these dusky mysterious shapes.​

We each also have a whole host of inner protectors (a.k.a. subpersonalities) doing their best to keep us safe and to sustain the persona we’ve worked so hard to create. Sweet Darkness will put them on alert. While together, we’ll explore ways to assess if these protective strategies are truly still needed or whether we have the inner resources to explore both wound and shadow. This endeavor will likely require us to break some old promises and to change the nature of our alliance with our inner protectors. This can feel (and be) challenging and risky.

In short, we’re going to enter the initiatory realm of Sweet Darkness. This can be both enlivening and demanding. A great deal of liberation and deepening can occur as we re-story some of our wounds and liabilities into capacities and powers. On the other hand, if you are in a place in your life where you cannot welcome challenge, we recommend that you not apply to Sweet Darkness. 

REMINDER: Sweet Darkness is offered as a 6-day program rather than our typical 5-day offering.