The facilitators at Animá Center believe that all personal, social and ecological imbalance are the result of deep seated insecurity, caused by our learned separation from both our authentic natural selves and the restorative natural world. Whether we're working with groups or individuals the emphasis is on reengagement with our aware creature bodies, the reawakening of instinct and intuition, and the deepening of our personal relationship with the larger universe and this living planet-whole. Participants are offered the skills to get beyond debilitating illusion and denial, and to develop heightened sensitivity, mindfulness and response, while taking time to open up to the direct embrace and instruction of nature. For information on the location and setting, turn to the Animá Center page, and to read about the available cabins please turn to Lodging.

There are no charges per se for our work, though we are totally dependent on your gifts, services and support. Please also take the time to download some of the event flyers on our Spread The Word page– to post in appropriate places, and help spread the word!

Events may include Rewilding & Thriving, the Shaman Path Intensive, The Medicine Woman Gathering, Wild Foods Weekend, Guest Herbalist Weekend… and depending on interest, two or more Stream Restoration Workshops and a Nature Writer’s Workshop. Please download, completely fill out and then return the appropriate Registration application, located beneath each of the event descriptions.

Donate Here

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(for both women and men)

With Jesse Wolf Hardin & Kiva Rose

The increasingly difficult global economic times are neither a fluke nor a surprise, being the predictable result of an unsustainable mindset and unsustainable social paradigm. The benefits of this long term downturn are a permanent readjustment of the status quo, the exposure of untenable credit systems, vanishing oil reserves, untenable ecological practices and debilitating governmental intrusion in our personal lives.

Topics explored will depend on the needs and desires of the participants, but will likely include:

• Redefining “wild” as being embodied, willful, true to our nature, and empowered to act

• Getting in touch with and meeting essential needs

• Reinhabiting our bodies, awakening our senses

• Reawakening intuition, learning to trust our instincts

• Living off the clock, and the intensity of presence

• Self authority and going beyond the victim mindset

• Homesteading and back to the land skills as a means of self empowerment

• Wild Foods and Plant Medicines as part of a quest for greater self sufficiency

• Hearth & Lifestyle, nurturing and healing

• Exploring ability and purpose, considering alternative or more meaningful means for making money

• Barter, and creating an alternative economy

• Daring to live our wildest dreams

Together, these understandings and skills can sustain us through any hard years... and even in the best of times, provide us with what we need to truly thrive.

Click Here For Your Rewiliding & Thriving Registration Form

And please see Jesse's seminal essay: "The Rewilding”

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(for both women and men)

Never in my life have I been so whole-ly received as a person by a group, a community. I look forward to the real and lasting relationships that will emerge as a result of this Shaman's Path Weekend. As if the experience couldn't go any further, it does. Just being in a wild, sustainable, inspirited place creates yet another relationship that cannot be overlooked. Each day, I woke to song of nature calling me back home in myself. The way this wild place opened itself to me and showed me its spirit was profound. It speaks in a way that cannot be denied or overlooked. I would wake to song birds every morning with the urge to hop out of bed and immerse myself as deeply as i could in hopes of not missing any single moment that might be presented to me.
-Stacey, NM, Medicine Woman Student

A 3 day intensive held not in a classroom but an ancient Place Of Power. Taught by Jesse Wolf Hardin with Kiva Rose, the focus is on realizing a deep and experiential understanding of empowered self, and on redefining the role of the contemporary shaman in terms of envisioning possibilities, bridging the worlds, and healing personal and societal imbalance.

Specific topics will depend on the needs and desires of the participants, but may include:

• Developing conscious hyperpresence, hyperawareness, hypersentience, precognition and intuition, tapping primal instinct

• Sensing, connecting with, drawing energy and discerning lessons from the various manifestations of the earthen Animá.

• Recognizing and learning from our kindred spirits, including our animal totems

• Reshaping perception

• Plant medicines and teachers

• Moving energy, and the Animá principals of healing

• The Animá Medicine Wheel

• Reincorporating the scattered or denied parts of our whole selves. Reintegrating mind, body, heart, spirit and earth.

Together participants walk through the portal of the feeling heart, to enter into deeper connection with the daily miraculous… taking responsibility as potentially powerful, artful co-creators of our world and our reality. Those wishing, have the option of spending a night or more out on a mini-quest, or otherwise customize your weekend experience to best meet their needs.

Thank you all so much for all your hard work during the Shaman intensive weekend! The intensity of it all is still resonating with me, and I feel it will always be with me. It has changed me forever! Wolf's drumming was unbelievable and so very powerful! I know he affected every cell in every body in that circle around the fire, next to those magical cliffs.
-Suzen, NM

Registration Form

You can help spread the word by printing and posting a Shaman Path Flyer

And please see Jesse's essay: "The Shaman: Awakening the Powers Within”

“The change of direction can be accomplished only through what Carl Jung has referred to as ‘an obedience to awareness’.”
-Joan Halifax The Wounded Healer

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(women only)

You are invited for an exquisite week long gathering each Summer at the Animá Sanctuary, focused on awakening the intuitive Medicine Woman resting latent within all those who feel called to a life of awareness and the role of healer. The presentations, discussions and workshops provide inspiration and tools for that life of awareness and choice, informing and empowering the vital work of the contemporary Medicine Woman.

Does existence or career as you know it now, seem to lack something crucial to your spirit, and does there seem to be some purpose encouraged by spirit or destiny that you have not yet wholly undertaken? Do you feel a special affinity with plants, and does the natural world strangely seem to be trying to communicate with you? When you were little, or lately in dreams, pictured yourself not dressed as you are in your normal existence, but in the cloth or fur vestments of a curendara, as someone to whom the rest of the tribe comes for needed wisdom as well as essential healing? Or have you imagined your hands busy not with rote and meaningless tasks, but reverently gathering wild herbs from the precious places they grow, or planting a medicine garden, or grinding ingredients with an old mortar and pestle? Are you sensitive to people’s energy, and are you drawn to contribute to their wholeness and balance? If so, then the Animá Medicine Woman Tradition (link) and this special gathering are for you. Activities include:

• In-depth plant walks with Kiva, identifying, describing the uses of, and gathering some of the important wild medicinal herbs found in the American West and this diverse river canyon. ,

• Instruction and hands-on practice in medicine making, with Kiva.

* An inspiring talk one evening by tradition cofounder Jesse Wolf Hardin

• Instruction in essential Medicine Woman Teachings such as: Healing as wholeness; the problem with heroic healing models; developing our intuition and tapping our instinctive abilities; connecting with one’s personal plant allies; obedience to awareness; re-envisioning and re-creating our lives; the story of the Wounded Healer and the importance of our individual wounds; sensing and seeking to address the imbalance and distress in the larger world; and fulfilling our most meaningful purpose.

We hope you will take this unique opportunity to explore the primal power of ceremony and story, while learning new ways of working with the healing plants and effecting the world – in the tradition of the Animá Medicine Woman. A retreat for both beginners and accomplished teachers, in the remote Saliz Mountains of the Gila Wilderness.

Register Now

You can help spread the word by printing and posting a Medicine Woman Gathering Flyer

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(for women, men and families)

Driving to the whole foods grocery store, many folks drive right be a wealth of free wild foods growing along the acequias and in the empty lots, leaving behind a surprisingly diverse garden growing unbidden in their own backyards. The Southwest mountains, deserts and river canyons in particular, host a cornucopia of wonderful wild flavors and additive-free nutrition.

Join facilitators Loba, Kiva and Jesse Wolf Hardin for a weekend of deep presence and connection to nature.... learning to gather, preserve and prepare some of the many wild foods of the mountainous Southwest. Learn about deep ecology and sense of place while becoming intimate with the spirits, lessons and uses of plants such as stinging nettle, dock, sweet clover, lamb's quarters, watercress, wild olives, dandelion, yucca fruit, prickly pear, wild grapes and acorns. Learn how to dry, salt-cure, and grind on a metate as the herons croak and bald eagles soar overhead! and Loba will lead guided plant walks, processing and cooking. Loba can be counted on to turn what we find into the most amazing and tasty feasts, while sharing about presence and the gifting cycle.

Tenting space and cabins available. Children welcomed on a case by case basis.

Register Now

You can help spread the word by printing and posting a Wild Foods Flyer

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This spot will from time to time feature a special Guest Herbalist presenting at the Sanctuary, most often in the month of Sept. Always, it will depend on finding an herbalist we respect with a following, who can fit teaching a workshop here into their schedule.

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Includes a riverside cabin bed or tent space and wonderful dinners

“Our experience of nature is in many ways a silent one,” Jesse Wolf Hardin tells us, “or at least its songs are free of words as we know them, its sublime poetic moments recited in a language of ruffling feathers as much as avian melodies, in stillness as well as the wind, in our own anxious flesh and telling bones.” And yet some of us feel called, implored, impelled to translate nature’s poignant imploring, lessons and tales. For us, Jesse’s insights into the craft – and sharing our works and ideas with others – can inspire and empower “the artful translation of forest and feeling, matrix and meld, into words that roll rocks from the page, that sprout melodic rivers and dangle soil scented roots.” The emphasis will be on writing not “about” nature, but “from” that place where we know nature and our natural selves as one... our hearts, speaking from the heart of Gaia. The event will include:

• 4 hours per day of teaching, plus one-on-one assistance

• Morning guided and solo walks, practicing tools for awareness and observation

• Evening readings, or question and answer

• Completing a piece, inspired by your experience here

• Suggestions and advice from Jesse as you progress on your piece, if you like

• And reading or sharing your work with others, should you so choose

Hardin is the author of 5 published books and over 500 published articles, fiction and nonfiction, on subjects from spirituality to Old West history. Topics he may cover include:

• Passion and commitment, the writer’s heartful investment

• Writing as if every word matters, and regardless of whether you know anyone will ever read it

• Why nature needs translators, champions and celebrants now more than ever before

• The need to awaken, enliven, deepen and stir rather than to comfort, entertain or decorate

• Learning to describe nature in new ways, and making the spirit, lessons and benefits of nature somehow accessible to a largely urban and often insular or distracted population

• Evoking the natural within urban settings and plots, evoking the timeless in whatever time period you are working with

• Exploring our authentic human/creature nature

• Deepening and expressing “sense of place”

• Movement, cycles, timing and rhythm

• Developing an individual, discernible style

• The different roles of the essay, article, novel and poem

• The power of and inferences in metaphor, and the importance of not overusing them

• Seeing through the five senses, employing intuition and primal instinct

• The eros of nature

• Getting the natural science right, without losing the sentiment and magic

• Integrating the subjective human experience, making your nature writing personal even when not in first-person

• Common ground, creating bridges, drawing in and including the reader

• Avoiding polemics, while inferring a message or lesson

• The importance of “the twist,” the ironic or unexpected that contributes to balance

• The importance of what you leave out, and making use of mystery

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(For Men, Women, Families)

Learn the philosophies and techniques of rivershed restoration, while actively assisting in the repairing and rewilding of our river. Animá Sanctuary is a textbook example of riparian recovery, a 24 year project that has since become a U.S.F.W.S. affiliated wildlife refuge. An expert in stream morphology and riparian ecology will sometimes contribute his wealth of information, as we work to improve the meander of the channel, plant willow slips, and arrest erosion. Loba, Wolf & Kiva will tell tales about their years learning how to reinhabit this ancient canyon spiritually as well as physically, heeding the lessons and will of the land.... "healing ourselves, as we heal the earth.”