RE-EARTHING: Coming Home to the Wild Soul

Come back to Earth! Leave behind the confines of the culture of consumerism and find your own wild and authentic self, your place of belonging in community and your purest connection to Gaia.

ReEarthing is a place where you are welcomed in your raw vulnerability, a place where all emotions are embraced, where self-love is amplified, and perspective and play are celebrated, where you will cross thresholds into the forest and into the depths of your own soul, where inspiration is re-ignited and revered.

Re-Ignite, Re-Source, Re-Earth, Re-Inspire!!!

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?

Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly

there’s nothing left outside us to see?

What, if not transformation

is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,

I want it too.. Believe me,

no more of your springtimes are needed

to win me over—even one flower

is more than enough. Before I was named

I belonged to you.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

How will you live in these unprecedented days on Earth?

Will you continue to live fragmented in your own psyche– keeping it together on the surface while inside your soul and emotions are repressed and in turmoil? Will you continue to feel like you don’t fully belong in the culture OR in nature? Will you continue to feel helpless and overwhelmed by what is happening in the world without a clear direction of how to plug in and make a difference?

Now is the time to finally resource in your wild and beautiful wholeness, to truly come back into deep relationship with Earth and become inspired to find your sacred niche in the Great Turning.

If we truly want to change the momentum of the outworn and destructive Business as Usual paradigm and become agents of cultural regeneration, then it begins with coming home to our innate facets of human wholeness, re-membering ourselves into a deep love affair with Earth.  By self-healing our wounded parts, finding our place of belonging within the greater Earth community, and beginning to mature ourselves into true adults and elders, we can actively participate in the evolution of our culture.

RE-EARTHING will meet in person for five weekends October through April. Each session will include teachings, deep imagery journeys, council, small group practices, and experiential invitations out on the land and in the forest. We will be offering you many invitations to deepen the work between sessions. 

This program is inspired by Tracey's and Kimbers’ own life-long journeys of healing and re-wholing into passionate love for Earth and Mystery and our human place within it, as well as their intensive guide training with Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute, the teachings of Joanna Macy, and the poets, writers, thinkers and dreamers that collectively inspire a vision of the evolution of humanity. 

Over the course of the journey, your nervous system will settle into a deep sense of belonging in yourself and within a supportive and safe community, you will gain access to energy, creativity and passion that may have been locked away since childhood, you will feel more space, self love and joy in your body, mind and spirit, and you will feel the deep possibility of being an active part of maturing our culture into integrity, beauty, wisdom and regeneration. 

Practices Include:

• Soulcrafting™ – a cross-cultural set of practices developed by Bill Plotkin and guides of the Animas Valley Institute

  • dreamwork

  • self-designed ceremonies

  • conversations across the species boundaries

  •  embodiment exercises (ecstatic dancing, authentic movement and coming into our animal bodies)

  • threshold crossings,

  • deep imagery exercises

  • creation of art and collage

  • soulful poetry and music and drumming 

  • extended periods of time on the land, praising, lamenting, listening

  • cultivating relationships with the other-than-human ones

• Wild Mind practices (Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche) to learn how to access the Four Facets of Wholeness and work with our sub-personalities or “protective parts” to learn to do self-healing.

  • journaling

  • deep imagery to facets of wholeness and protective ones

  • dialogue work

  • four-directions circles

  • re-nesting for inner support and unconditional love

  • courting one’s inner beloved on the land

  • invoking and getting to know the Muse

  • shadow work

• The Way of Council

  •  Circle process for speaking from the heart, listening from the heart, getting to the heart of the matter and being spontaneous

  • Guides mirror, reflect and offer invitations periodically to deepen participants’ journey

• The Spiral of the Work that Reconnects from Joanna Macy. 

  • Starting with Gratitude

  • Honoring our Pain for the World

  • Seeing with New Eyes

  • Work with Ancestors and Future Ones in Deep Time

  • Going Forth

This program is open to all genders and orientations, cultures and colors. And we are especially calling in men!

2024 - 25 Dates to be announced.

Food:

Bring your own lunches and Sunday breakfast.  We will be sharing a potluck meal on Saturday night. Coffee and tea will be provided all weekend long. There is an outdoor stove and sink for your use (in warm months) as well as a refrigerator. Please bring easy to put together or heat foods (premade might be best) as we will not have time for extensive prep and cooking.

Lodging for Weekend Gatherings:

Spirit Hollow has tent cabins that have cot-style bunks. These are only available in the warm months, so for most of our gatherings, you can bring your tent and camp on the land, OR you can stay slumber-party style in the yurt if Covid is chill (bringing your own bedding and padding; this is a shared space, so if you need more privacy, we suggest you book a room nearby or stay in your own tent).  Our outdoor showers are ONLY available in the warm months.

We do have four outhouses for your use.

There are plenty of inns and Airbnbs for staying in the area.  A few suggested places are here:

We recommend all of the following hotels/motels/inns, all within 20 minutes of Spirit Hollow:

• Harwood Hill Motel, Route 7A, 802-442-6278

• Governor’s Rock Motel, Route 7A, Shaftsbury, 802-442-4734

• Serenity Motel, Route 7A, Shaftsbury, 802-442-6490 (closed in winter months)

• Henry House Inn, Route 7A, N. Bennington, (802) 442-7045

• Eddington House, A Village Inn in North Bennington, 802-442-1511

• Camping on the Battenkill, Arlington, VT, (800) 830-666

TUITION is on a Sliding scale 

$995 - 1500

Tuition includes a one-on-one mentoring sessions with either Kimbers or Tracey.

A non-refundable deposit of $400 is required to hold your spot.

DEPOSIT 

Please consider that the midpoint of this scale is our intended price. If money flows abundantly for you, please consider giving more, and if finances are tight then we have purposely made the low end of the scale accessible.  While you can pay anywhere on that scale, you must commit to the fee you agree on. You’ll be asked to sign a tuition contract at our first session. We prefer you pay the whole fee up front, but payment plans are available and can be arranged by emailing Tracey. Your deposit counts TOWARD your total tuition.

Please fill out this application FIRST.  Once accepted, you can make your deposit or payment in full.

ADD-ONs

Optional one-on-one mentoring with Tracey or Kimbers (in addition to the session you get as part of the tuition)

REQUIRED READING

‘Wild Mind’ by Bill Plotkin. Please purchase and begin reading this book before our first gathering.

Guides

Tracey Forest and Kimbers Wattendorft

Tracey (KeyTurner) is passionate about helping others step through the doorway into the mystical and the mythical, the sacred and the sublime, the earthy and the erotic, the dark depths and high heights. She is a fearless and compassionate facilitator who has “been to the mountain” and descended into the abyss to lament for the earth, to celebrate the beauty and pain and who knows the rich gifts that lie in the dark to be mined. She stands in the portal, holding a lantern, singing ancient songs, dangling a key, inviting you to step through into the vast landscape of your Soul.  

As a soul midwife she is committed to helping people cross from the old world to the yet-to-be-revealed one, with owl wings outstretched across Deep Time, across millennia, born with a broken-open heart, tapped into the magma in the Earth’s core, singing while split in half, making the lament beautiful while the rattle snake rattles.

Co-founding Director of Spirit Hollow, Tracey is a shamanic healer and teacher, yoga teacher and singer of soul-stirring songs.  A graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies’ Three-Year Program in Advanced Shamanism, she has been training shamanic healers for over 20 years through the Seeing with the Heart Apprenticeship Program  and running transformational immersions and camps for that time as well.  With 25 years of experience guiding others, she has been studying with Bill Plotkin for the last six years.  She is a Certified Level 1 Wild Mind Nature-Based Underworld Guide with the Animas Valley Institute.  Currently, she is in the second half of the Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program (SAIP) with Plotkin learning the nuances of Soul Initiation Guide and cultivating more tools to assist in the Wholing and Healing of this broken, beautiful world.

Kimbers Wattendorf (Northstar) has spent her life seeking the mystical cloaked in the mundane, the spiritual concealed within the secular. As a child she had aspirations of joining the priesthood of her Roman Catholic upbringing, but despite her penchant for transubstantiating Ritz crackers and absolving her stuffed animals of their sins, certain accidents of birth in the form of improper plumbing barred that course of action. Thus she embarked on a roundabout journey back to Source that took her from the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows to Zen monasteries, rock shows to gem shows, dive bars to crystalline mountain summits. As T.S. Elliot enjoined, she “never ceased from exploration, and at the end of all her exploring was to arrive where she started and know the place for the first time.”

All her wandering eventually led to Spirit Hollow, where she finally found Here, on the Land, the divinity she had been so desperately seeking Elsewhere, down endless labyrinthine American highways of night. Through the Seeing with the Heart Apprenticeship, under the tutelage of the incredible beings, human and more than human, who steward this sacred place, Northstar finally found her calling and her medicine. Now, as a yogi, a shamanic healer, a daughter of Gaia and a priestess of the Goddess, Northstar is deeply committed to assisting our young ones who are also adrift in the darkness of our times to find their own direction Home.
Her life’s mission is to be a navigator of soul, and she is dedicated to holding space and shining light that lost boys and lost girls of all ages might chart their course back to loving, regenerative relationship with Nature, with Community, with Mystery, and with Self.