Soul Journey Intensive - Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche - Feb 16-20, 2027
Collage by Doug Van Houten
A residential, face to face, fully catered intensive held at Chakola Wildlife Refuge - Kangaroo Valley Southern NSW. This program is inspired by the Soulcraft 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.
Maximum of 20 participants.
Programs fees incur 10% GST at checkout (for Australian residents):
Early Bird: $1,595 - paid up front
Full Price: $1,795 - with a $500 minimum deposit to hold your place - (paid in full by January 16, 2027).
Concession: $1,495 - a current concession card is required.
We encourage you to pay the full price if you have the means to do so. This will enable us to cover costs and offer concessional places to those in need. If you are challenged financially, please contact us to discuss.
The Soul Journey Intensive invites you into five days of direct, experiential exploration of nature, psyche, and the deeper dimensions of your life. Through time in wild nature, imaginal work, poetry, ceremony, dreamwork, and other Soulcraft practices, you will explore the mysterious territory where psyche and soul meet. At the heart of this work is the discovery that each of us carries a unique inner image - a way of being and a particular gift that is ours to bring into the world. As we come into relationship with that deeper image, new possibilities for how we live, create, and contribute can emerge. Soulcraft brings together ancient nature-based ways of knowing with modern depth psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage to offer a contemporary path of soul discovery and initiation. For a fuller exploration of this approach, see Bill Plotkin’s Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche.
The Soul Journey Intensive is highly experiential.
The program alternates between practices utilised in group, practices explored in solitude in nature, and sharing and deepening those experiences in smaller groups. There is a guide for each smaller group, providing you with a fully individualised experience. What you discover through one practice is carried into and amplified by what you learn in the next. By the end of the intensive, you will understand yourself and your place in the world from a more soul‑oriented perspective, be clearer about the gifts you were born to bring to the world, and have new skills to enrich your life and to defend the health of the more‑than‑human world. Soulcraft practices include:
Soulcentric Dreamwork
Deep Imagery Work with Animal Guides
Talking Across the Species Boundaries
The Way of Council
Soul Tasks in Nature
Self-Designed Ceremony
Shadow Work
Soul Poetry
Sacred Wound Work
Synchronicities: Working with Nature’s Signs and Omens
Befriending the Dark
Ecstatic Trance Drumming and Dancing
and many others!
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:
Chakola is a 32ha wildlife refuge and conservation area on the tribal lands of the Wodi-Wodi people in Kangaroo Valley NSW. The property adjoins the Kangaroo River which can be accessed for swimming. It is 2½ hours drive from Sydney or Canberra. Nowra, Berry and the Princes Highway are 25 minutes away over Cambewarra Mountain, while Bowral, Mittagong, Moss Vale and the Hume Highway are 45 minutes away via the beautiful Fitzroy Falls.
Food and Accommodation:
The program is fully catered, providing amazing vegetarian food by chef Ashley Mariani. We will pass on any dietary restrictions advised by you at registration. If you have not already let us know of any dietary restrictions that apply to you, please forward to us as soon as possible.
Lodgings and bedding requirements:
Most of the accomodation is in bunk rooms (2 people per room) with shared bathroom facilities. Several camping places are also available.
