Soul Dreaming Intensive – An Immersion in the Living Language of Dreams - February 25-March 1, 2027
Collage by Doug Van Houten.
This is an all-camping, self catered program 2.5 hours NE of Melbourne. The program is inspired by the Soulcentric Dreamwork Intensive of the Animas Valley Institute (AVI) of Colorado USA.
The program is produced and promoted by Soulcraft ANZ Incorporated, a Not for Profit, volunteer Association.
The program is led by Doug Van Houten who has completed AVI’s SAIP training program to become a Soul Initiation Guide. Doug will be assisted by a trainee guide.
Maxium of 20 participants. Programs fees incur 10% GST at checkout (for Australian residents):
$795 Full Price
$650 Early Bird - paid up front
$495 Concession (valid concession card required)
Note: Participants are responsible for bringing their own personal camping equipment, and for personal transportation to and from the program. Participants also responsible for bringing their own breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. For dinners, the group will be divided into meal teams to plan, purchase and prepare group dinners using safe protocols.
The soul yearns to dream itself into the world. Every dream emerges from the mystery of the soul and is an opportunity for our conscious self, our ego, to be further initiated into the secret stream of our deeper life.
On this 5-day immersion, you’ll learn what it’s like to enter dreams as mysteries; to boldly and vulnerably interact with its denizens and dreamscapes; to be moved by the deep intelligence of its living images; to open to non-ordinary ways of perceiving; and to experience the underdream of your everyday waking life.
Soul speaks through images, including those that comprise dreams. While most modern forms of dreamwork focus on interpretation and analysis, soulcentric dreamwork invites us to do something radically different — to fully surrender to the experience the dream wants us to have, however strange it may be. A soulcentric approach holds every dream as an embodied invitation to our unfolding soul story.
In this intensive, we’ll wander slowly in the disturbing splendor of the nightworld’s rich symbols, images, and emotions. We’ll courageously commit to an extended stay in the soul’s mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on the ego. Instead of trying to figure out the meaning of the dream, we’ll submit ourselves to its atmospheres, landscapes, and characters.
Earth is always dreaming and inviting us to dive into our own dreamstream. The inner wilds of dreams and the outer wilderness of the world are two of the most potent guides to soul. Unlike any other Western form of dreamwork, we’ll enter both wildernesses at the same time, amplifying the initiatory effects of both. We’ll apprentice ourselves to the mystery held within our dreams while approaching the animate world as if it is listening and wanting to participate. We’ll re-enter our dreams while deepening our conversation with the other-than-human world.
Through a variety of modalities — including direct dialogue with the dream itself, expressive arts and movement, deep imagery, and wandering on the land with (and in) our dreams — we’ll explore how our dreams want to shift us, what doors they want to open, what underworld thresholds they want to usher us over.
Join us and deepen into your dreams and your unfolding soul story!
There is an opening downward within each moment, an unconscious reverberation, like the thin thread of the dream that we awaken with in our hands each morning leading back and down into the images of the dark. – James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Your Guide:
Doug Van Houten has spent much of his life listening for the deeper story - the one whispered by forests and dreams, carried in the bones, written in the stars, and waiting beneath the noise of ordinary life. At the heart of his work is a longing for a way of being in which we remember that we are both Earth-born and star-born: intimate with the living world and inseparable from the unfolding story of the cosmos. His path has been shaped by teachers and companions including Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute, Joanna Macy, Matthew Fox, David Whyte, Mary Oliver, and Brian Swimme.
Doug creates wild, ceremonial, and soul-centered spaces where people can slow down, listen beneath the surface, and encounter what is asking to emerge. He draws on dreams, imagination, embodied knowing, poetry, art, grief, and the wisdom of the natural world to accompany others into the deeper terrain of their lives.
For Doug, transformation is a remembering - a descent into the wellspring of soul where grief and beauty, wound and gift, longing and possibility meet. From there comes the invitation to return to the world carrying our particular gifts in service to what Thomas Berry called the ‘Great Work’ of our time.
Alongside his work as guide and mentor, Doug walks this path as a visual artist, wanderer, dream tracker, occasional beekeeper, heart-centered activist, and cosmic dancer - each a different way of listening, participating, and staying awake to the mystery.
Venue:
This is an all-camping, self catered program - 2.5 hours NE of Melbourne.
Food and Accommodation:
Participants are responsible for bringing their own personal camping equipment, and for personal transportation to and from the program. Participants also responsible for bringing their own breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. For dinners, the group will be divided into meal teams to plan, purchase and prepare group dinners using safe protocols.
