May 22-27th

Wild: (adj.) 1. Willed; free.

2. Embodying and expressing original nature.

The first Anima group event ever held in the Canyon was the Wild Women’s Gathering, launched by Loba in the Summer of 2000. In conception it was intended to afford women an opportunity to exercise their wild sides in a beautiful and empowering place, and for some, to begin a lifetime process of personal rewilding. While the experience continued to be life changing and life affirming for everyone participating, it gradually morphed into the celebration of womaness and self growth that this year we are calling Woman Spirit Gathering (in mid June, see below).

The Wild Women’s Gathering will be in May from now on, with renewed focus on the primitive experience – intensive rewilding of the self in relation with the land and each other. Jesse Wolf Hardin, who coined the word “Rewilding,” will be invited to come down to teach on a related topic at some point during the event. Kiva and Loba will be teaching some basic skills such as wild medicines, wild foods gathering and fire-pit cooking, as well as leading discussions on what it means to trust our senses, instincts and needs – and to heed our instincts and live our dreams – regardless of the constraints of societal norms and morays, fears and habits, rigid schedules and personal or parental expectations. There will be ample time for practicing awareness, taking wilderness hikes, and savoring liberating mud baths next to the river. Expect to get dirty, have fun and get in touch with your wilder, awakened, and most original self!

Download A Wild Women’s Gathering Flyer

Download Registration Here

“Come to the canyon and find the self that has been hidden under layers of belief, of ego, of history. Go through the fire, step out on the other side and feel the sand under your feet, the brush of bee-plant on your bare skin, and jump with abandon into the crisp life-giving waters. Emerge whole, new, and never ever the same again! The canyon will take all you can give it, strip you to bare bones, and fill you up with a love that overflows... something that needs to be experienced by anyone wanting to embody their true self, wanting to truly live!”

-Terri Segal, Elkton, MD

June 12-17

(women only)

Each Summer sisters of all ages are invited to a 6 day gathering in New Mexico's enchanted Gila mountains. Come join us as we explore the depths of selfhood and sisterhood in a truly sacred place of power. You can be a part of a small group of powerful women celebrating our connection to our own wild and beautiful beings, to each other, and to the inspirited earth... enjoying riverside dancing, lovely swims, incredible food and deep connections.

An outgrowth of our first-ever Sanctuary event – the original WWG – Woman Spirit Gathering is a unique opportunity to delve into, express and share with others the experience of woman-spirit in a wholly natural and fully wondrous place... with you contributing to that special magic only women together can create. Expect a cozy gathering in cabins and tents, with sharing and teaching circles where we learn new ways of nurturing ourselves as well as others. For women who give most of their attention all year long to taking care of a family, a business or both – always putting everyone else first – this can be the perfect balance and medicine. Come prepared to indulge in scrumptious meals we’ll enjoy preparing together, and for a luxury of personal time spent walking through the woods and in front of a crackling fire with intriguing new friends. We’re looking forward to it already!

Download Registration Here

“I loved the women that were there and being able to feel so deeply connected to almost everyone! You really created a space for people to open and share themselves deeply and transparently. The connections and discussions really nourished me.”
-Sarah Mace, Seattle WA

“I had a wonderful, incredible time! I can't really explain my experience, but I know that my Spirit was thriving in the canyon. Boy, does my spirit love to be recognized!”
-Meg Harpool, Maine

July 3rd - 6th

(for both women and men)

“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

A 3 day intensive focused on Earth Path Shamanism, held not in a classroom but an ancient inspirited Place Of Power (link to Archaeology section of Anima center page). Taught by Jesse Wolf Hardin with Kiva Rose, the focus will be 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, and tapping latent 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 animal and plant allies, and our human and spirit familiars.

• Reshaping perception, re-creating primal ritual tuned to these modern times.

• Soul retrieval as the reincorporating of the scattered or denied parts of our whole selves. Reintegrating mind, body, heart, spirit and earth.

Together we will learn to walk through the portal of the feeling heart, to enter into deeper connection with the magical and 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 your abilities and needs. See Wolf's essay: "The Shaman: Awakening the Powers Within”

Download Registration Here

It was like living in a fairy tale at the Sanctuary. The magic was real, rooted in love, fueled by earthen energy. I've had enough magical experiences to know the memory of them dissipates like a fragrance and soon I'll be questioning even my most profound experiences there. But there are some moments that transform who we are for the rest of our days. Their energy nests in us and reminds us when we need it most. The canyon has nested in me and I thank the land for this gift.... It was an incredible, intense, challenging, energy-shfiting experience. - Lynnda Pollio. NY, NY. '07 Shaman's Path Intensive Participant

Being and living is beginning to take on new meaning. I got a lot from you all... It's time in my life to move forward. It's going to take time and practice. But you all are brave enough to live full out, and I feel honored to have the opportunity to be and live more myself. Your examples and support are providing me with the necessary power and self-acceptance I need to go forward. Thanks so much and forever. You all are teachers.
-Lee Hurwit, Boulder, CO. '07 Shaman's Path Intensive Participant

August 1st-6th

(women only)

You are invited for an exquisite week long gathering at the Anima 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 Gaia 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 Anima Medicine Woman Tradition (link) and this special gathering are for you. Activities will include:

• In-depth plant walks with Kiva and Loba, identirying, describing the uses of, and gathering some of the importnat 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 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 Anima Medicine Woman. A retreat for both beginners and accomplished teachers, in the remote Saliz Mountains of the Gila Wilderness.

Download Registration Here

THank YOU for your beautiful amazing selves, for bringing such a group of women together over Plant Medicine! It was truly a rejuvinating experience to be among only women in such a way. Brambles and Blossoms have taken over my mind and when i'm drowsy i find myself in a patch of Roses, small like an Elf, Journeying somewhere with the medicine. i've been inspired to invite several plant friends to my forest garden and cultivate relationships with them, WIld Rose, Honeysuckle, and ELderberry will be the first. We had a fabulous time with you, and you feel so near... Yes, the Canyon calls me, and it is a comfort to know she has such beautiful Warrior-Priestesses to guard her and help her heal. - Sarah, Vanderwagen, NM

Aug 29th-Sept1st

Gathering & Preparing the Wild Foods Of The American Southwest

(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.

Download Registration Here

"...ever since I got back from NM, my head has been swimming in songs! I can barely capture the notes of one song before another comes in... I haven't solved all of my problems, but I do feel more empowered. I also realize that I can move through the creative process more gracefully as long as I allow myself some alone time with Gaia."

-Kim Bold, Dallas, TX, Wild Foods '07

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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. In 2007 we were pleased to work with Robin Rose Bennett and a number of her students.

Oct

Relationship, whether with ourself, friends or lovers, or even with the living earth we draw sustenance from... can benefit from increased authenticity, intimacy, sensory and emotional engagement, conscious reciprocity, gratitude, ritualized expression, exploration and celebration.

This is all the more important when we are talking about relationship with a primary lover or spouse, when the intense amount of time and energy we give each other can be anything from trite or abusive to ecstatic and spiritually satisfying. We have had a number of requests for a workshop designed for couples, so that women could bring their partners or husbands to share learning more of the art of radically honest and mutually fulfilling relationships. This powerful weekend will involve:

* Inspiring presentations

• Participants sharing the challenges as well as satisfactions around their relationships

• Our personalized responses, clarifications and suggestions for each person

• Assignments and practices for each couple to try while here, and utilize once away

• Wonderful romantic meals, and the opportunity to clarify and possibly deepen and beautify existing relationships

Topics will likely include:

• The ecology of relationship, with examples from the natural world

• Loving the self wholly, as the basis for loving others in the most healthy ways

• The difference between codependency and interdependency

• Maintaining individual identity, surrendering to unity

• Avoiding unhealthy attachment, and building healthy attachments

• Knowing the difference between giving in a relationship, and giving in

• Knowing the difference between glad accommodation and spirit-deadening compromise

• Developing personal requirements for relationship, knowing what to ask for and how to ask for it

• Techniques for increased intimacy

• Sharing interests, activities and goals

• Sexuality, fidelity, jealousy, the importance of keeping agreements

• Reawakening romance

Feb.

(A Feb. 2008 event will depend on the amount of response in the short time available for announcing it. If you are interested in attending a nature writing event prior to Feb. 2009, please email us at mail@animacenter.org)

Nature Writing Workshop For Budding & Published Writers:

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

Recommendations:

“His word and voice is the haunting cry of a wild-voiced wilderness seer.... the ecstatic song of an Earth lover, a man intoxicated with the beauty and diversity of life. The high-spirited and soulful voices of.... the Earth herself, speak and sing through him– reminding us of our ancient heritage of sacred wildness.”

-Ralph Metzner author of Green Psychology and Well Of Remembrance

“Wolf’s loving, erotic sensibility allows him to play on ancient harmonies. He sings us into magician morning, calling us to re-enter primal states of being-in-the-world. If we are really quiet, Pan comes out of hiding and teaches us the will-of-the-land.”

-Bill Devall author Simple In Means, Rich In Ends

“Wolf’s work is an illuminating personal record.... and an invocation of the forthcoming epoch.”

-Peter Berg, Director, Planet Drum Foundation

“Except for some Aboriginal writers, there are few authors in North America who reflect such depth of being a native to its places — remarkable, given his background as a street kid with Nordic/Celtic ancestry. He came home to wildness and living close to the Earth. It shows all through his writings and performances. He gives others (such as myself) courage to speak from our own authentic selves. He is a highly productive artisan who is making a most important contribution to a new responsible culture.”

-Prof. Alan Drengson Editor, The Trumpeter Journal of Ecosophy

“In Wilderness & The American Mind I tried to write a history of our cultural relationship to wildness. In the course of this story I described the contributions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Now Jesse Wolf Hardin has added to our store of ideas. His books deserve a place on the shelf with the best American writing.”

-Roderick Nash author of Wilderness & The American Mind

“His vision is clear and inclusive and his message can take us into the world we are looking to restore and create.”

-Sedonia Cahill coauthor of The Ceremonial Circle

“Gaia Eros is a wild ride through the canyons of heart and mind of a modern earth warrior who has planted himself deeply in his place. Jesse Wolf Hardin writes from the place of true authenticity in an age of superficiality – from his experience and from his soul.”

-Jed Swift ecopsychologist, Naropa Institute

“Wolf doesn’t assume we all hear with the same ears. So he sings, dances, plays, and chants, as well as instructing through the normal means of narrative. Wolf’s message is that we must learn to celebrate diversity, as we protect it.”

-Ed Grumbine author of Ghost Bears

(Scheduled according to demand – please email us at mail@animacenter.org with your preferred dates)

(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, Van Clothier 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.”

May 2, 3, 4, 2008—San Francisco River Service Project – Tres Allianzas!

Tres Allianzas! is a yearly collaboration between the Sky Islands Alliance, Upper Gila Watershed Alliance, and NMWA. We work hard all day and play hard through the evening. Our previous riparian restoration projects have been in the Burro Mountains west of Silver City. This year we’re moving north.

THE PLACE: The San Francisco River starts in the Escudilla Wilderness above Alpine, AZ and flows mostly in New Mexico. South of Glenwood it makes a dramatic west turn to head back in to Arizona and join the Gila River. It carves some extraordinary canyons along the way including the one we will be working in. Come lend a hand to a very successful US Fish & Wildlife ‘Partners for Wildlife’ project near Reserve that was started in 1994 and has been going strong ever since.

THE PROJECT: Van Clothier of Stream Dynamics is doing the design and leading the restoration effort on the ground. The work will involve planting willows and cottonwoods on an eroding river bank based on an induced meandering design. This technique will naturally allow the river to self-heal using the power of floods to sculpt a stable bank under the modulating influence of the riparian vegetation. Our work will expand the native plant recovery to a new area.

Van will lead a guided tour of this award winning restoration project. The project involves water harvesting in the natural landscape and a variety of riparian restoration techniques on the river and its tributaries.

We will camp at an excellent spot in a very secluded canyon. Bring river shoes or waders, river clothes, and a warm jacket! Refreshments will be provided.

MEALS: Volunteers will provide all their own meals.

Maximum participants: 30

Contact: Michael Scialdone at 505-843-8696, scial@nmwild.org for more info.

Driving distance: 5 hours southwest of ABQ; 5 hours northwest of Las Cruces