Step into a 5‑week online journey that treats your psyche as a living landscape, not a problem to be fixed. Rooted in Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, this experiential course invites you to explore your inner ecology as part of the wider Earth community.
What if we saw our human psyches as unique expressions of the universal forces and patterns of nature?
Our wild minds possess astonishing resources, untapped potentials, and depths that we might not even know exist until we discover how to access them, cultivate their powers, and eventually integrate them into our everyday lives.
Through guided nature-based practices, creative expression, movement, deep imagery, group dialogue, and solo wanders on the land, you will:
Cultivate the four key facets of your Self: wisdom, creativity, vision, and emotional aliveness. This constitutes what we call the dimensions of your innate wholeness.
Befriend your protective and wounded parts and discover the gifts they carry.
Reimagine and re-orient your work, relationships, and activism as creative acts that serve the more‑than‑human world.
This online offering not only invites an opportunity to experience and embody the parts of the Wild Mind map of the human psyche in an accessible and simple way, but it also supports you in bringing the learnings home into your daily life. This helps you practice awareness of your resources, protective strategies, and wounded ones as they show up in your relationships.
Learning Outcomes
You will discover:
how to recognize and consciously cultivate the four facets of the Self — your innate human wholeness
how to identify the protective strategies or subpersonalities that supported you in childhood and adolescence to adapt to the challenges of family and social life, but ultimately became barriers to the full and authentic expression of your wholeness
practices and guidelines for cultivating Self-healing relationships between the Self and your subpersonalities, enabling you to gratefully welcome them home and discover and integrate their gifts.
how each facet of the Self provides essential resources for the underworld journey (the descent to soul), its radical transformation of personal identity, and for living as a visionary artisan of cultural evolution.
We’ll explore the landscape of the psyche through a variety of practices, including creative expression, self-designed ceremony, solo exercises while wandering on the land, group work, movement, voice dialogue, journaling, and deep imagery work. Our goal is to fully embody our multifaceted wild minds, commit ourselves to the largest, soul-infused story we’re capable of living, and serve the greater Earth community.
Who is this for?
This offering is for those who are curious about a first step into nature-based soulwork as well as those further along the Journey of Soul who are needing support with more advanced wholing and healing practices.
This is an opportunity to cultivate your Wild Mind facets of wholeness in each of the 4 directions of the map and for a supportive container to compassionately bring protective parts back home to your "inner village”.
If you are not able to dedicate time (2-4 hours) for wanders and journaling between each online session, this may not be the time for you to participate. This work relies on you having solo time with the more-than-human world. You don't need to be in totally wild places. Access to a place where you feel safe and where the rhythms of nature are at least as noticeable as the human rhythms (some city parks can work) will be extremely supportive.
Practical info
Program dates
April 8
April 9
April 16
April 23
April 30
Time
Each session lasts 3 hours, except the session on April 30, which lasts 4 hours.
MST: 9 AM - 12 PM (check your local timezone)
BST: 4 PM - 7 PM (check your local timezone)
CEST: 5 PM - 8 PM (check your local timezone)
Tickets
Pay It Forward (Help someone with limited means to participate): £425
General Admission (Covers the costs of the course): £385
Supported rate (For those with a low income): £325
Some limited scholarship places are available for people on benefits. Please contact us if you feel you qualify
About the Facilitators
Laura Blakeman is a desert-dweller who draws from her unique trans-disciplinary background in the performing arts, and her lifelong study of human flourishing, to invite worldview shift for individuals and collectives across the corporate and cultural sectors. She spent the early part of her life working as a somatic educator, producing dance events, live art immersions, and land-based programs that centered marginalized ways of knowing, doing, and being. Her academic work has bridged integral, developmental, and eco-depth psychology, complexity and systems theory, and transformative learning. Her doctoral thesis explored beauty as a catalyst for change. She teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute and is a co-founder and creative partner at the Wolf Willow Institute.
Gene Dilworth is dedicated to the project of rewilding the human spirit as an essential dimension of being fully alive in these times. By nurturing meaningful relationship with the more-than-human world and facilitating deep inquiry into the mystery of one’s true nature, he supports individuals to discover, re-member and live from the center of their soul-rooted sense of belonging to the world. With degrees in ecology and ecopsychology, Gene has been guiding groups and individuals in transformative nature-based experiences since 1986. He has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in environmental studies and ecopsychology, has been a university academic administrator and has served in a number of administrative and leadership roles in educational and environmental organizations. Gene lives on wild land near Lyons, Colorado, where he nurtures his own sense of wildness and wonder by exploring the Rocky Mountain foothills and courts his muse through music and poetry.