Into The Bone: Body & Soul – June, 2025

This is an application-based program. Applicants must have completed at least one previous Animas Program (Online Programs okay!) to apply. 

Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body…” – Linda Hogan

Coming to know our soul shape is a natural, instinctive, and fundamentally fleshy affair. There is no thought, image, dream, or word — no experience, that happens independently of the body. Whether we are conscious of their missives or not, our bodies, in all their diversity of shapes, and colors, and capacities are the ground from which all our life experience unfolds. Listening to the body is one way we can come to know our particular way of being alive.

Shaped by our journey on Earth, our bodies are an amalgamation of many life processes, forms, and currents that are not static, but constantly in fluid exchange with the world around and within. They cannot be separated from the soul, nor can they be separated from our evolutionary and ancestral histories. Our blood, bones, and breath can reveal threads of our mythopoetic identity.

Over millennia we’ve slowly emerged from the primordial past to situate ourselves as a highly individuated species with an affinity for consciousness. Yet, so many of the challenges we face are a direct result of our dissociation from the ecological ground that birthed us. The mechanistic worldview of modernity has left us dangerously isolated, cut-off from our body and soul, our ground of action, and the earth itself. And yet many of us instinctively feel the pull toward a more embodied wholeness.

In our 5 days together at Spirit Hollow, we’re going to invite you to move and to feel. Feel the world that we live in with its wild diversity of life. Feel the sensations that move through you as you breathe and listen, wander, and dance. Dive into the bone – into the muscles, tissues, fluids, and structures of your body and the body of Earth. Through Soulcraft practices, embodied dreamwork and deep imagery, authentic movement, body art, dance and drumming, somatic practice, and play, we will marry the conscious mind with the instinctual foundation from which everything arises. With ample time to wander in the fields, forest, and streams, we will surrender to the body’s intelligence to seek, and then to inhabit, the call of the soul.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away. — David Whyte 

“The body is the vehicle in which transformation takes place.” – James Hillman

This is an application-based program. Applicants must have completed at least one previous Animas Program (Online Programs okay!) to apply. 

This program is priced for camping facilities. Individual or Shared Cabins and Lodge rooms available for upgrades. Please contact [email protected] for more information. 

RIVER’S BEND RETREAT CENTER

The Navarro River runs through the Anderson Valley’s majestic redwoods, sunny meadows and vineyards and then curves at River’s Bend to create a still point for contemplation, ecological understanding and deep connection between land and people.