The Dark Alchemy of Embodied Prayer: Dancing with Grief & Gift-Bearing - January 27-31, 2026
Artwork by Doug Van Houten.
A residential, face to face, fully catered intensive held at Chakola wildlife refuge and conservation area in Kangaroo Valley, Southern NSW.
Program Pricing (Soulcraft ANZ Inc is a not for profit, volunteer organisation) - 10% GST is added upon checkout:
Early Bird - $1,695 - paid in full at registration.
Full Price - $1,895 - with a $500 minimum deposit to hold your place - remainder paid 4 weeks before program start.
Concession Price - $1,595 - current concession card 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 some concessional places. If you are challenged financially, please contact us to discuss.
WE LIVE IN A PIVOTAL MOMENT ON EARTH, a time of immense challenge and profound uncertainty, in which this precious world, with its endangered creatures and imperiled ecosystems, hangs by a precariously thin thread. This is a time of both a great unraveling and a great turning, a time when humanity has entered a collective dark night — perhaps a necessary one. And yet, this moment is not only about collapse. It is a summons - a mythic invitation to return to the body as a sacred vessel of memory, movement, and metamorphosis. A call to embrace our full participation in what Thomas Berry has called, “the Dream of the Earth”.
The body of the world, alive with sorrow, trembles beneath us: countless species vanish, waters rise like ancestral memory, forests burn like funeral pyres. This trembling is not separate from us — we are part of Earth’s body dreaming itself awake. Grief pulses through our veins, nests in our bones, and aches in the hollows of our bellies. We carry collapsing ecosystems on our shoulders, the silence of lost birdsong tucked beneath our ribs. To be alive now — truly alive — is to feel the slow, holy exhale of a dying world, and to let it move us. At such an hour, we are called to walk directly into the fire, to be transfigured and transformed as we behold the breath-taking beauty of the world while fully feeling its pain, yielding to what visions emerge as prayers in the dark.
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see…” — Roethke
Radical transformation - personal and cultural - calls for a descent into soul. This initiatory journey drops us into the inescapable grief and despair and lays bare a sobering truth: we are being asked to hospice the dying myths of modern Western culture while we bring forth our hidden and unique gifts. This darkness we face is not empty; it is holy. Not a void to flee, but a temple to enter. Not a problem to solve, but a portal to pass through. Earth does not ask for cleverness or control, but for our courageous presence - to meet the real possibility of collapse and compounding extinction (including the possibility of our own), with bare feet on the ground, bowed heads, and the trembling honesty that arises when sacred tears release old stories of separation. May we surrender to the truth we make everyday with our bodies — truths born from soul’s depths and Earth’s living dream.
On a descent journey such as this, we will encounter: our grief, demons, fears, wounds, and disavowed parts of ourselves, as well as angels, awe, wonder, and the ancient enchantment of soul. Through dreams, mysterious symbols, and numinous encounters, we might uncover our unique mythopoetic identity — the deeper story we were born to live or, as poet David Whyte writes, “the truth at the center of the image [we] were born with.” In a time of planetary polycrisis, reconnecting with this mythic core - this soul-rooted identity - becomes essential for living with embodied purpose, and offering our deepest gifts to a world in need.
This 5-day intensive is a sacred invitation into embodied prayer — where movement becomes offering, dance becomes devotion, and grief becomes gateway. Through somatic practice, dreamwork, art, imagination, and communion with sacred Others - falcon, eucalyptus, stone, marsupial - we make space to feel deeply, move authentically, and listen with full intelligence of flesh and bone. We offer grief as prayer, praise as balm, and allow the body to speak what the mind cannot. True alchemy begins in the trembling, breathing body - in salt-traced cheeks and the rhythm of mourning and praise. As we shake, we shed. As we dance, we remember. This is not collapse, but consecration - a return to what is essential, a path toward the soul gifts buried beneath our sorrow.
With grief as compass, soul as guide, and Earth as beloved, we summon truth-in-waiting. Are you willing to let your body become an altar? To break open in the arms of a sacred sorrow? Inside that fracture lives something ancient, radiant, regenerative - ready to remind you of your true name, and the holy mystery at the center of your life. Come. Let your sorrow dance you. Let it alchemise beauty from dark truth. Let it carry you - and your gifts - home.
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.
Your Guides:
Doug Van Houten: Doug draws on the wisdom of the natural world, depth-psychology, eco-psychology, dreams, somatic knowing, poetry, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering practices that include: The Way of Council, vision fasting, shadow work, symbolic artwork, trance dancing and conversations with the more than human world. Doug’s true calling in life is to support others as they uncover their own unique gifts and in so doing, transform their lives in service to what Thomas Berry called ‘The Great Work’ of our times. Doug is also an ardent beekeeper, a visual artist, a wily wanderer, a dream tracker, an emergent ceremonialist, a heart-centered activist, and a yogi and a dancer interested in new forms of somatic practice.
Jules Howatt: From her earliest memory, Jules has been spellbound by wild places, following the call of wind, water, and stone into the ever-unfolding mysteries of the living earth, the untamed depths of the psyche, and the shadowed realms of the Underworld. Storm-shaped and drawn toward horizons without fences, she has braided her life from the edge of the land’s fierce beauty, the deep currents of soul, and the dark shimmer of what cannot be seen, yet is always felt. She walks beside others as they turn toward their own wild truth, into landscapes both inner and outer where longing and Mystery conspire to weave a deeper story. An ACMG/IFMGA Mountain Guide, wilderness guide, and photographer, Jules makes her home in the Monashee Mountains of Canada, on the traditional territory of the Sinixt people. Here, she listens to the songs of the peaks and rivers, her two adventurous adult children keep her deeply moved and wildly entertained, and she is held in awe by the land’s enchantment.
Food and Accommodation:
The program is fully catered, providing hearty vegetarian food by the amazing 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:
There is dormitory accommodation in shared bunk rooms or camping if preferred.
