Date & Time Details: May 7-11, 2025 - Start Time 10am End Time 3pm

Location: RoFo Ranch, Southwestern Colorado

Contact: [email protected]

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 breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. For dinners, the group will be divided into meal teams to plan, purchase and prepare group dinners using safe protocols.

Sliding Scale Price: $1,400.00 to $1,750.00

Shadow Training – May, 2025

May 7 - 11, 2025

With Bill Plotkin, Ph.D. and Sage Magdalene

The Shadow is the hidden side of our psyches, with both its “positive” and “negative” aspects. The Shadow is not what we know about ourselves and don’t like (and perhaps keep hidden) but, rather, what is true about us but know absolutely nothing about … and would deny if “accused.”

During this training, we’ll develop our skills, as nature-based soul guides, in being with and working with:

• The Shadow: strategies for spotting, unmasking, and assimilating the dark shapes of Shadow

• Projections and transferences

• Loyal soldiers: the subpersonalities that have been keeping us “safe” since early childhood by keeping us small

• Sacred wounds — our core vulnerabilities — that have kept us stuck in the Old Story, but that also provide the priceless opportunity, when we are ready, to remythologize our lives.

• Overpowering emotional charges triggered by other people and by encounters in the natural world

Working in dyads, triads, and full group, we will practice underworld guiding by working with Shadow elements that emerge between us in the training group, in our dreams, in our lives more generally, and while wandering on the land and interacting with the Others. We’ll hone our skills by serving as guides for each other, and through discussion, feedback, and suggestions.

The training will also include instruction and practice in the guidance of the Heart Warrior Council, a format for acknowledging projections and transferences existing within the group and for uncovering the soul-revealing experiences waiting there.

This training is designed primarily for trainees in the Animas SAIP program, but is also open (by application) to guides working in the settings of wilderness, rites of passage, soul initiation, psychotherapy, coaching, etc.

 

ROFO RANCH, SOUTHWESTERN COLORADO


RoFo Ranch is located on 40 acres of land under the shadow of the Sleeping Ute Mountain, several miles down McElmo Canyon near Cortez, Colorado.

 

 

 

 

 

Guides

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.
Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As founder of western Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute in 1981, he has guided thousands of women and men through nature-based initiatory passages, including a contemporary, Western adaptation of the pan-cultural vision fast. Previously, he has been a research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide. In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack peak, Bill experienced a call to adventure, leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. Bill is the author…
Learn more about Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.
Sage Magdalene
Sage has a gift for hearing and reflecting the deep stories of many beings. She invites people to thresholds and opens gates between worlds. She has been an educator, artist, dancer, and gate keeper in many ecosystems. Her greatest joy is to hear and converse with the wild others: moon, spider, frog, human, river and stars. She brings a light touch and embodied wisdom to the serious work of transformation.
Learn more about Sage Magdalene