Wild Mind Deep Imagery Training – May 2025, Bulgaria
May 27 - 31, 2025
With Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
This training program is open to you if you have a solid foundation of experience in soul work and in accessing your own deep imagery. Ideally, you will already have participated in a Deep Imagination Intensive. An application is required.
This training is designed for people who work — or plan to work — as facilitators of deep imagery. If, in contrast, you are primarily seeking guidance in developing your personal relationship with deep imagery, please enroll in our A Portal to the Imaginal.
During the Deep Imagination Training, we will apprentice ourselves to the mystery and wild otherness of images that arise from the unconscious. Depth psychologists say that the substance of soul is image, and that deep imagery (imagery that comes to us unbidden from the unconscious, from our core human nature) is one of the most direct and potent means for accessing soul. On imagery journeys, we meet inner guides who possess the wisdom and capacities to assist us on the descent to soul.
Employing a variety of modalities — including interactive dialogue with our imagery, expressive arts and movement, and wandering on the land with our imaginal guides and in our imagery — we will attune to our sensorial-feeling-intuitive-embodied selves and the imaginal world.
This is a highly experiential training. We’ll utilize lecture, discussion, demonstration, and lots of supervised practice guiding individual and small-group deep imagery journeys (including opportunities to debrief and receive feedback on your work). You will guide and be guided in deep imagery processes, recognizing that experiences with your own deep imaginations and imaginal inner guides prepare you to more artfully guide others to access theirs. You’ll meet and/or deepen relationships with your imaginal inner guides who represent your primary resources for your unique way of facilitating deep imagery work, as well as underworld work, more generally.
We’ll explore several themes and principles, including:
- Guidelines for facilitating individual and group deep-imagery work
- Cultivating your soulcentric guiding attitude, including respect for the autonomous otherness of imaginal guides and entities
- Deep imagery as distinct from “guided imagery”
- Discovering your unique style of guiding
- Deep imagery as a tool for designing self-generated ceremonies and individual soul tasks
- Employing the windows of imagination and feeling
- Deep imagery as a method of soulcentric dreamwork, sacred wound work, and supporting the three phases of the underworld journey (descent, liminality, return)
- Expressive arts: embodiment and movement practices to evoke and deepen your relationship with the deeply imaginal.
Guide
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