Connection. The basis of what spiritual and emotional life is all about. Join us as we explore our connection within and without, learning and leaning into our bodies and the earth. We will spend 5 days and 4 nights camped in the aspen on a lovely lake near Telluride, CO, nourishing our bodies and souls. Breakfasts and dinners will be provided by loving hands. Our days will be spent in a combination of learning tangible survival skills to help you know what to do in a wilderness emergency, while also taking time to breathe and dive inward to find your path.
Align with nature during this five-day immersion amid dense aspen forest, surrounded by the breath-taking San Miguel Mountains and the Lizard Head Wilderness. Witness how your body wants to move in a daily asana practice, listen to your dreams, and converse with the wild world. Learn skills to survive in nature, including clothing and shelter principles, navigation, edibility test for plants, and methods to find/procure water. Track the feelings and images arising inside you and recognize them as messages from the land, mystery, and our souls. Join us in journeying together as we find our way into the nourishing support of authentic sisterhood.
During this immersion, we’ll deepen our connection to nature, track our dreams, and discover and explore our creative gifts. We’ll engage in Earth ceremonies and intimate conversations with the land, noticing how the presence of moss and stream, birds and flowers, moon and tree affects us. We’ll access our deep imagination as we wander in nature. We will track the feelings, images, dreams, and words arising inside us and recognize them as messages from the land, mystery, and our souls.
We will dive into practices for healing our relationship with our heart, including mindful-ness based meditation, prayer, Wild Yoga, and sacred council ceremonies. We will court the image of our wild feminine souls through deep imagination, dreamwork, and mirroring stories.
Join us to nurture your body and heart while listening deeply. Enhance your relationships with yourself and the natural world. Open your sensory body, follow the mythic threads of your wildness, and receive glimmers about the part you are called to play in the symphony of life.
When women listen, individually and communally, to nature and our bodies, we grow rooted in creative partnership with their wisdom.
The soul is feminine, ebbing and flowing, as constant yet changeable as the moon and tides. We invite a different focus, emphasizing listening to nature and our bodies while allowing ourselves to feel, sense, imagine, and be led by a knowing that reaches beyond our strategic mind. To embrace the feminine, we must attend to our psyche’s quieter, less-known voices and honor the intelligence of dreams and the imaginal world.
We will journey together and find our way into the nourishing support of authentic sisterhood.
We are born of Gaia, and our bodies are made to receive dreams, visions, images, sensations, emotions, and signs from the planet we live on. Through coming home to the Earth’s holding, resting our body against hers, we link ourselves to her immense and mysterious intelligence. There's a precious joy as we experience ourselves as felt and known by a wise and sacred being. And as we attune with her, our dreams merge with her imagination.
This is an all-camping program, but no previous wilderness experience is required. We welcome a sense of adventure, curiosity, and enthusiasm.
Rebecca Wildbear, MS, LPC, E-RYT 500, is the author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration, & Advocacy for the Earth. She created Wild Yoga to connect people with the Earth and their souls by encouraging them to explore their dreams, listen to their bodies, and relate to rivers, trees, and animals as conscious beings. Through nature-centered, soul-inspired practices, she helps people deepen their imaginative listening and stretch their awareness, so they may be of creative service to the world. She has led Wild Yoga programs since 2007 and guides with Animas Valley Institute. Learn more at www.rebeccawildbear.com.
Natural landscapes and the beings inhabiting them have been a source of so much healing and growth in my life. My experience began with mom’s love, but was soon tainted by infant and childhood sexual abuse along with a few dashes of abandonment. Escaping outside to explore and distract myself became a primary coping mechanism. At 18 I joined the Air Force, where I learned a lot of hard skills and concepts, but also buried my emotions even deeper. Those emotions were excavated over 11 years while working as a wilderness therapy field guide, where I learned to be a child of the universe again; open to possibility and reveling in the blossoming of my clients and peers. Now I've come full circle. I feel loved and supported and get to teach the techniques I learned in the military tempered with joy and excitement; sharing what I've experienced of the natural world with others that wish to connect and learn as well. The wilderness doesn’t judge, and in our society, that’s a novel and startling place to be. No judgment?!? How awesome is that? It opens the door to a kind of freedom, challenge, and experience we can’t find in the manufactured human world. Through a connection with wilderness, we can heal parts of ourselves we may not even consciously know are in need of it. I did.
Now I’m the founder of O.W.L.S. Skills where one of my primary goals is to educate and empower women and other underrepresented demographics in the skills of surviving emergency situations in global wilderness environments. At O.W.L.S. (Outdoorsy Women Learning Survival), I work as the head instructor for in-person classes on a wide variety of survival topics, and also offer private training courses for all demographics ranging from a few minutes to a few weeks.
Occasionally I’ve also found myself on a reality show (History’s “ALONE: season 9” and National Geographic’s “Mygrations”), or in some kind of online educator role (MasterClass.com). Generally if I am offered a chance for some kind of adventure outside, I say “yes!”
I (Jessie) met and worked with Rebecca at Open Sky, a wilderness therapy program in SW Colorado many years ago. I always appreciated her calm and insight, and am very excited to bring our very different yet complementary modalities together in a unique and beautiful way. Our energy will combine elements of support, challenge, growth, centering, joy, humor, tears and so much more. We look forward to welcoming you to share for a short time in our collective journey.
A general day during the week may be something like this:
Class will start at 1 PM on July 24th, 2024. It will end at 1 PM on July 28th, 2024.
We prefer that you stay the duration of the course. You will get more out of it. However, if for any reason you are not comfortable or able to stay outside with us, you are welcome to book accommodations nearby.
This is a generic list, you’ll receive a detailed email with a tailored packing list, weather forecast, and other necessary information one month prior to the course. Please do not purchase much for this course. Just reach out and we can either loan you items or help guide you to alternatives.
This class is geared for adult women. If you want to bring a teenager, age 16 and up, they are welcome to attend with a parent or guardian.
Check out our FAQs.
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