Anima Terra

Come to the forest, sister!
Reach out; take our hands.
You’ve been called in whispers
Into deep, sacred lands.

Your wild soul beckons you
Come now while the light wanes.
Leave all that which binds you.
And enter Mystery’s terrain . . .

This yearlong is for women who feel the undeniable call from Earth and Soul to dive more deeply than ever before, to cross a one-way threshold and fall back into the “source of everything,” to dissolve and open to the Muse, to Mystery, to the mythopoetic underworld, to finally gain access to their own ecological niche in Earth’s dream and how to embody it in the world.

We are calling in sisters who already engaged in worthwhile lives and work, have achieved one or more successful, functional roles in society and have cultivated a sense of responsibility to themselves and the world, YET they hear an undeniable call to something more — to something beyond the edges of the known — something wild, rich, and even a little scary. Through murmurings and imaginings, they have been urged to uncover why they are really here and to hear what their Soul is beckoning them to embody.

This transformational journey is one of descent and return. The descent is into the underworld of Earth and Psyche to let go of attachments to the roles and identities of a life that has become confining, so you can encounter the pure voice and true expression of your wild feminine Soul.  By courageously releasing the cultural and personal mindsets that have bound you, you will cross many thresholds, confront your shadows, your fears, and your wounds as well as your light, and explore the edges of your grief and your longing.  In relationship with the clear reflections of nature, you can allow yourself to be radically reshaped by the elemental forces of wind and water, moon and sun, rocks and trees, owl and coyote, and return to your communities in wholeness, with your mythical Soul now guiding your life.

Earth willing, during this yearlong journey, you will have a genuine soul encounter that shatters illusions and makes it impossible to stay small or to inhabit any world except the one to which you truly belong.   The risk is you won’t be the same woman you used to be; the reward is you will potentially be irreversibly changed into the one you were born to be.  By gaining profound inspiration and fresh vision for your life, you will return to your community with precious seeds and gifts that only you can offer the world. 

A uniquely feminine journey of soul initiation, held at four different wild places that unfolds over five sessions – 4 five-day sessions and one 8-day wilderness fast session. Beginning in October 2023 and ending in November 2024.

There is not a program like this anywhere. It is a creation that grows out of our intensive guide training with the Animas Valley Institute, but also from our many years’ love of and experience with women’s work. While you can do lots of women’s programs and you can go on a journey of soul initiation, no one out there is marrying them in the way that has emerged through our own mythos and guidance.

Dear Soul Sisters,

• Do you feel a longing-ache to seek your unique, yet-to-be-revealed gift for your people and for the greater Earth Community?

• Are you ready to tear away the masks of the tame and domestic self and feel your pure wildness come through?

• Have you done much work around your own healing and feel you have cultivated some real resources and inner strength?

• Do you feel like your center of gravity has shifted away from concerns about career and social belonging and toward the depths and the unknown?

• Do you feel like the life you’ve been living (even if you are “successful”) is too small and that there is something more raw and real that is drawing you in — something both terrifying and breathtakingly exciting?

• Are you undeniably pulled to spend time delving into the realms of dreams, longings and wild nature?

• Do you feel you must dissolve your old identities and release attachments to anything holding you back from accessing the greater service and work Mystery would like you to offer the world?

• Are you ready to be challenged and encouraged by seasoned guides to look fearlessly in your own mirror with both love and ferocity?

If so, we have designed this yearlong immersion for you.

By committing to this extended journey in a circle of sisterhood, you will be invited to cross more deeply into Mystery’s terrain than you ever have before.  As the voices of the over-culture fade, and you leave behind the distractions of your daily life, you will finally come home to true belonging on Earth supported by seasoned guides and the wild ones in nature.  By creating the space for your Soul to come through, you will finally partner with your ego to more fully live your sacred purpose into the world.  

Outline of the Year

Once you are accepted into the program, preparation begins in the months and weeks leading up to our first meeting, through in-depth readings, exercises, and nature wanders that will anchor you in your wholeness and give you strong resources for the journey you are setting out on.

Session One – Preparation

We are passionate ones holding the flame of ideal and healthy culture where humans live in deep relationship with the land and oneThus, the whole first gathering is to come home to these ways–to enchantment with nature, to the ways of council, to sacred speech, to our beautiful facets of wholeness, to healing childhood wounds, understanding our survival strategies and the inner protectors that have kept us from living in our wholeness and authenticity, to working with dreams as messages from the subconscious, and deep imagery journeys to access soul guides. Together we land in the context, language and tools and begin our journey down soul canyon.

Session Two – Severance

This work of healing, wholing, tracking and journeying out into the wild continues on your own between session one and two, and during session two, we begin the descent into the underworld where Soul/Mystery is hunting you, and you are hunting it. You enter the stage of the Wanderer, psychospiritually “leaving the village” in order to shed attachments to the old ways you have inhabited the world through relationships and social roles, shedding outworn former identities, and allowing disintegration of previous ways of living and being.  You will exist for this time (from the end of session one until session three) outside of old limitations, social roles and cultural norms. You will be invited to lean into the not-knowing, listening to and following the call from the depths, and be supported to allow yourself to feel all the grief and gratitude for what you are leaving behind. By falling apart, you are falling toward the underworld.  By listening, feeling, seeking, answering the invitations, letting go, you are creating space for Soul.

Session Three – Soul Encounter

Our third gathering is the deepest dive of the year.   You will enact a wilderness fast ceremony alone out on the land for four days and three nights — just you and Earth in that timeless space where the voice of Soul and mystery is as palpable and present as the trees, stars and streams. Through this death-rebirth experience and revelation, you will open to receive new vision and clarity for your life and understand more of your personal mythos- who you are as a mythic being in deep reciprocity with the Earth Community.   Our hope is for a genuine Soul Encounter which reveals to you your ecological niche– the unique role Earth has dreamed just for you.

Session Four – Shape Shifting 

What shifts and changes is your Soul asking of you?   How are you being rearranged by Earth, your own consciousness and Mystery?  What metamorphosis is underway? How is your Ego being reshaped into a form capable of carrying the vision you received on your fast?  How can we continue to make ourselves vulnerable to the shape-shifting interventions of Soul?

As our teacher, Bill Plotkin, says, “The Ego gets transformed directly by making itself vulnerable to the vision, by inviting the holy thing, the revelation, to do its alchemical work on it. How this happens and how the Ego cooperates with and amplifies the process are what we are exploring– a transformation that enables you to enact your vision, to ‘carry what is hidden as a gift to others.’ “

Session Five – Emergence and Embodiment

How is your more mature ego now of service to the missive of your Soul- that unique expression of mythos that is your way of showing up in the world? What strengths, what skills, what tools are needed now to do your Soul’s work?  How will you begin to embody and deliver your gifts?

This is the time of fulfillment and celebration–a rite of passage into a more mature and mythopoetic identity–knowing your self, knowing your place, your power, your voice and beginning to deliver that to the Earth Community.

Anima Terra Philosophy

“The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it.  It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it.  You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place.  Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge.  The offering of that gift—your true self—is the most you can do to love and serve the world.  And it is all the world needs.” ~Bill Plotkin

In an intact, soul-centered culture, a child grows through the stages of healthy ego formation, into the stage of wonder and belonging in nature and culture, to then create a strong social identity with a secure place in community.  From here, supported and guided by their elders, they enter a fourth stage of development to release attachments to that early adolescent identity by exploring the mysteries of nature and Soul.  Alone on the land, the initiate enacts a wilderness fast or Walkabout in the forest, the mountains or the desert, to understand their own direct relationship with Self and Earth and align fully with their own Soul.  Once this stage is completed, the wanderer is initiated into soul-rooted adulthood committed to inspired service in the world.

In this modern age, in our unhealthy culture, most humans never embark on what we call the Journey of Soul Initiation.  Instead they remain in an egocentric adolescent limbo, either conforming into society’s “approved” roles, while their Soul quietly atrophies inside, or rebelling with increasing cynicism and frustration.  Many end up turning to excessive entertainment and substance use to satisfy the need for magic and heroic adventure which normally would be in the realm of the Soul journey.

Anima Terra  facilitates this journey to initiate women into true adulthood with Soul clearly guiding their work and life. It was crafted to help facilitate the radical shift that our species urgently needs to make to build a mature, beautiful, healthy, soul-centric and life-enhancing culture that is in tune with Gaia and the entire Earth community. It is part of our offering to this wild and precious world.

Commitment

As loving, devoted, and highly skilled guides, we will support you in all stages of this journey.  We will hold you in a sacred container and push you toward the unknown, naming places you might be hiding from or hijacking yourself, as well as mirroring your strengths and powers.  Expect nothing less than transformation.

We are committed to your evolution; likewise, we expect a full commitment from you in return.  This journey will ask a lot of you–psychospiritually, maybe physically.  It’s NOT for those who are currently in a healing crisis or actively in trauma response.

It IS for you if you have come far on your journey, done significant healing work, and are emotionally and psychologically strong.  It requires you to be willing to take risks and confront fears, to lean IN to edges and be willing to enter new, rich territory in yourself and in the natural world.  It requires your ability to sever attachments with a fierce devotion to creating and protecting the space required for your Soul to come through. It requires you to spend extended time alone out on the land, doing the work we offer you to do. You will be uncomfortable, you will be challenged, you will have to find deep courage, and you will find your strength and your gifts.

If your body is not ringing with a full yes, then we can recommend other programs to prepare you. If you are feeling an undeniable magnetism to the words we speak here, then we welcome you to apply. 

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. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.
— Rilke, From the Ninth Duino Elegy

LOGISTICS

DATES

October 19 - 23, 2023 at Spirit Hollow in Shaftsbury, Vermont

February 15 - 19, 2024 location TBA

June 23 - 30, 2024 at Spirit Hollow

September 5 - 9, 2024 in Unity, NH at Jonah’s place

November 14 - 18, 2024 location TBA

Lodging and Food

For Sessions 1 and 3: Spirit Hollow has tent cabins (shared with one or two others) with bunk beds, or you can stay in your own tent for more privacy

Session 2 TBA

Session 4 is camping

Session 5 is slumber-party style (and you can camp in a tent if you wish)

You are responsible for your own food for breakfasts, lunches and snacks. Meal Teams will be organized for suppers, and each team will plan, shop and cook one supper during each sessions. All venues have cooking facilities and hot showers.

Enrollment is limited to ten fully committed women, so apply early.  Application required.  

This application is to help both your guides and you determine if this program is a good fit for you at this time in your life. 

TUTITION

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required upon acceptance to the program.

Spirit Hollow is providing you with a year-long journey of soul initiation. The journey consists of 5 in-person gatherings including a wilderness vigil, monthly zoom circles, 3 private mentoring calls, and a private Facebook group. The circle opens October 2023 and closes November 2024.

We have found that women really benefit from the private mentoring calls and so we have created an optional offering of an additional 8 mentoring sessions for $600 that can be wrapped into your payment plan. Of course, you can add private sessions in later, but we wanted to offer them upfront to encourage women to do it as it deepens the transformational work between gatherings.

The full cost for the core program is $3900.

Core program plus 8 additional mentoring sessions is $4500.

Deposit is $500 when committing to the circle.  This deposit is applied toward your full tuition.  

There are options to pay in full, pay monthly or pay in five payments.  Please email Tracey if you are super drawn to this program but can’t afford the full amount. Some scholarship funds may be available.

Guides: Jonah Ruh Roberts and Tracey Forest

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.

KeyTurner is particularly called to help women and young adults to move from the outworn worlds, across thresholds into yet-too-be-revealed worlds that are coming. She is a deep listener of Earth's dreaming, of the "in-betweens," in communion with the sacred land that is Spirit Hollow and a devotee of the underworld, the soul stream, the mythological realms in service to that which is the holiest of holies, the deepest Source beneath all identities, all spiritualities and all beings.

Co-founding Director of Spirit Hollow, Tracey is a shamanic healer and teacher, yoga teacher and singer of soul-stirring songs. With 30 years of experience guiding others, she is currently in final phases of the multi-year Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program (SAIP) with Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute learning the nuances of Soul Initiation Guiding and cultivating more tools to assist in the Wholing and Healing of this broken, beautiful world.

Questions?  Email Tracey or Jonah