For Women Only

2 to 6 Week Long Blocks
April through October

Apply Now

Animá Student Internships are special women’s residencies at the Animá Sanctuary in the isolated Saliz mountains of S.W. New Mexico, offering a focused resident learning opportunity, solitude and self exploration... as well as hands-on experience with living a rural life, including helping to replant and restore a riparian ecosystem, and doing what it requires to make a retreat and teaching center function. We’re very excited to have replaced the amorphous general internships, with an intense, hands-on learning experience for the most intent students of the Animá Path of Heart, Shaman Path and Medicine Woman Tradition. For healers in training, this is an opportunity for personal instruction and practice, in a stunning Southwestern canyon blessed with a wide variety of native medicinal plants. For every woman, it is a place that provokes engagement, provides challenge and supports growth.

Student Internships are scheduled for blocks of time of 2 to 6 weeks in length. Anyone hoping to stay longer, should reapply before the end of their current block. The Student Internship season lasts from Spring through Fall, although exceptions are occasionally made for a Winter stay.

No dates have been set for these blocks, so that we can schedule according to when various students are available to come. We sometimes work with a single resident Student, but prefer to hold off on scheduling specific dates until there are 3 or more students applying for approximately the same period of time.

Student Internships are available regardless of age or ability to donate, to any woman willing to commit to:

• Being open and sensitive to the spirit and needs of the land

• Working on herself, facing her fears, developing her powers

• Doing her best to understand and actualize what’s being taught

• A self-made pledge to utilize every insight, lesson and tool for the good of self and others

We highly recommend (but don’t require) that Student Interns either have already completed or be simultaneously enrolled in Animá Medicine Woman, Shaman Path or Path of Heart Correspondence Courses.

Student Intern days generally consist of:

4 hours or more per day of focused study, both alone and with your teachers, including:

• Assigned readings

• Answering course questions

• Fulfilling personalized assignments

• Hands-on practice

4 hours or more per day working on projects for the Center such as:

• planting willows and other native trees and plants

• wood gathering and chopping

• home and kitchen work

• caring for the guest cabins

• preparing and preserving wild foods

• possible computer work

• helping with visiting guests and students

Plus 6 or more hours per day of unstructured time including:

• meal preparation and mindful eating

• tending cabin or camp

• nature walks and sensual immersion

• contemplation, or quiet and receptive mind

Depending on which course you apply for – and in the case of the Medicine Woman courses, which level course block you apply for – you can expect to receive personal instruction covering areas such as:

• Expanding awareness and deepening presence

• Sense of place, and learning from the natural world

• Understanding healing as wholeness

• A unique system of Traditional Western herbal energetics and constitutional treatment

• How to know what herbs and other treatments to utilize

• Diagnosing illness and recommended treatments using the Animá Medicine Wheel

• How to identify, ethically wildcraft, conserve, prepare and administer plant medicines

• How to get to know the core nature of your plant allies

• How to successfully work with a small, intimate group of herbal allies

• Determining what diet best serves your personal health/wholeness

• The importance of tending, nourishing, savoring and celebrating

• The work of helping heal not only self and others, but our society and our planet

• Discovering your most meaningful purpose, and fulfilling your dreams

We will send you detailed Logistics & Practicalities along with directions prior to your arrival. In general, Student Interns tent-camp in the Sanctuary under the pines, but have access to an indoor kitchen most times, and may also have use of a cabin when it’s not needed for either events or guests. Students bring food with them when they come, and usually cook and eat together... though your teachers/hosts may share in or even help prepare some of the meals.

Please note that there is neither a telephone nor cell service here, and we cannot offer internet access as the only satellite line goes to our always busy office machine. Interns are welcome to use our Post Office box (PO Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830) for getting mail, and their families can be given our email address, but only for emergencies or otherwise urgent messages.

If you are as yet unsure about whether a Student Internship is for you, you might consider that those who work out best here tend to be:

• Grateful for the opportunity to spend time in such a special place

• Either at ease in nature, or else absolutely committed to overcoming their discomfort and developing an intimate connection with the natural world

• Content when alone, seeing the value and benefits of purposeful, mindful solitude

• Willing and able to work with other students and event participants

• appreciative of having a teacher’s assistance and support, rather than acting out of a sense of competition or entitlement

• honoring of the decades of work that has gone into this place and teaching

• conscious of a spiritual or nonordinary reality, able to sense and honor a place of power

• open to some strenuous physical work, and desirous of increasing their strength

• on a search for self knowledge, and committed to change and growth

• desirous of new skills, and excited to develop their existing abilities

• willing to be challenged, and their comfort levels tested

• drawn to learning about plant medicines and natural healing

• impelled by or in search of their most meaningful purpose

We expect that you will be open to what this place has to offer you, and that you won’t let your existing ideas or habits get in the way of experiencing yourself and this place in new ways. We have to warn you (smiling, but serious!), that the energies of this canyon have a reputation for bringing up those unresolved issues we’ve longest suppressed, as well as to cause us to look honestly at both our true selves and our as-yet unfulfilled dreams. For those seeking a life changing or enhancing experience, the Sanctuary can feel like the safest imaginable place for that kind of work, while encouraging comparable degrees of bliss and play. For those looking for a place of escape, however, this really isn’t it.

What we offer is all that we are and know, and this most magical place of power, clarity and love! Our years of study and practice, and opening up to our hearts and the will of the living earth, have blessed us with much to give. Spirit, the earth and Anima speak to all of us whenever we stop long enough to listen, and we at Animá Center have the privilege of encouraging that conversation again and again.... in a place where both your heart and the living land seem to speak the clearest.

Thank you for your interest, and what we hope will be your commitment, focus, heartful effort, determination, completion... and ultimate fulfillment.

For your Student Resident Internship Application

Download Here

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