This Wild Mind Intensive program is offered by the Animas Valley Institute to Deep Green Resistance organizers, allies, and supporters. It will be held near Portland, Oregon in the United States.

“Wild Mind” Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries

Those who confront oppression and destruction often struggle with profound stress and disconnection. This intensive aims to help you access deeper wellsprings of strength through connection to wild mind. Imagine what it would be like if nature and dreams were your primary guides.

Healthy, mature cultures emerge from the depths of our psyches and from the Earth’s imagination acting through us — through encounters on the land, dreams, and our visionary self.

In his book Dreams, the author Derrick Jensen wrote: “That we come to the earth to live is untrue: We come but to sleep, to dream…dreams are living, willful beings.”

The cultures of nature-based and indigenous peoples are rooted in their mythology and their relationship with Earth.

Modern culture not only lacks these qualities, but actively mocks them. Yet, the revolutionary potential of our dreams, visions, and encounters in the other-than-human world await us nonetheless, for those who can break through these barriers. Through Bill Plotkin‘s Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, a holistic model rooted in the four-directions, we can access our innate human potentials that we may not even have known existed, cultivate their powers, and integrate them into our everyday lives. We can also contact our fragmented and wounded sub-personalities which formed to protect us in childhood, but may now have become barriers to our authentic humanity.

Later in Dreams, Derrick Jensen asks “how would you live this life, if you fully internalized and realized the implications of participating in a vibrant, living, meaningful universe?”

In this 5-day intensive, you can begin to reclaim and embody your original human wholeness and experientially explore your human psyche as a unique expression of the universal forces of nature. You will engage in nature-based practices to cultivate your fourfold wholeness, create more beneficial relationships with your sub-personalities, and commit yourself to the largest story you’re capable of living in service to the greater Earth community.

“All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.”

–John Trudell

Discover new ways to resource yourself and inspire your defense of the more-than-human world.

Enhance your resilience and adaptability for the challenges of these times. Converse with the natural world. Listen to your dreams. Track what arises in your body, heart, and deep imagination. Engage in the practices of council, creative expression, self-designed ceremony, wandering on the land, movement, and soul poetry. Become clearer about the particular gifts and purpose you were born to offer the world.

“I’m not suggesting we call on those on other sides in lieu of fighting back. Quite the opposite: I’m suggesting we try to learn to listen better so that we may gain whatever assistance they may be able to give us.” – Derrick Jensen, Dreams

The land and our dreams support both evolution and revolution. By cultivating our wholeness and accessing our visionary capacities, we become co-creative partners with Earth.

“Why is the world being destroyed? In large part, the answer lies with consent…From birth, we are trained to obey authority…If resistance is a muscle, then our situation — a world wracked by global warming, species extinction, imperial war, resource extraction, and systematic violence against women, people of color, and the poor — calls for us to start training.”

– Max Wilbert, Practicing Lawbreaking (Deep Green Resistance Guest Speaker for this program)

Rescheduled from the original June 2020 dates. You can see the program here:

https://animas.org/event-registration/?ee=364

This is an all camping program. Participants are responsible for bringing their own lunches/snacks and will be forming meal teams to provide/prepare breakfast and dinner. Scholarship monies have already been applied to program cost. CoViD-19 precautions will be observed.