Wild Mind Intensive: A Mythopoetic Journey for Black & Brown Leaders - September, 2026

This 5-day intensive is an experiential exploration of the human psyche as a unique expression of the universal forces and patterns of nature — designed specifically for Black & Brown participants, and held in a container that explicitly honors the complexity of that experience. It is rooted in the work of the Animas Valley Institute and Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, experimentally adapted for this gathering in collaboration with Tuesday and Gibrán Rivera.

We will work with what Animas calls the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche: a comprehensive inventory of whatcan be right about a person, a “shadow” version of the DSM, mainstream psychology’s catalog of what can go wrong. This reframing matters especially for those of us whose inner lives have been pathologized, diminished, or unseen.

Our wild minds possess astonishing resources — untapped potentials and depths we may not know exist until wediscover how to access them. In this intensive, we’ll work with the four facets of the Self, the dimensions of our innate human wholeness, and the subpersonalities that formed during childhood in response to family and social life — including the survival strategies and adaptations that shape the experience of Black & Brown people. Rather than eliminate or suppress these subpersonalities, we’ll cultivate the Self’s capacity to enter into relationship with them, heal them, and uncover the gifts they carry.

This gathering holds both the universal human journey and the specific wound of racialization — not as competing concerns, but as dimensions of the same depth work. The shadow work here includes internalized oppression. The soul work here is also the work of reclaiming what structural violence has obscured.

You will discover:

• How to recognize and consciously cultivate the four facets of the Self — your innate human wholeness
• How to identify the subpersonalities that helped you adapt in childhood and adolescence, and how they may now limit your full, authentic humanity
• Practices for cultivating relationships between the Self and your subpersonalities — enabling healing, uncovering gifts, and fostering Self-actualization
• How each facet of the Self provides essential resources for the underworld journey — the descent to soul, the radical transformation of identity, and the life of a visionary artisan of cultural evolution
• How to hold your sovereignty in mixed-race spaces and in the face of collective wounds — with dignity rather than as fixed identity

We’ll explore the landscape of the psyche through: creative expression, self-designed ceremony, solowandering on the land, group work, movement, voice dialogue, arrhythmic music, journaling, and deep imagery work.

This is not therapy. This is not racial justice activism. This is soulcraft — the work of becoming who you are meant to become, in service to the world that needs you. It is depth psychology meets nature-based soul initiation, in a containerthat takes Black & Brown experience seriously without being reduced to it.

GROS VENTRE CAMPGROUND, GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK

Gros Ventre Campground is 11.5 miles south and east of Moose, Wyoming.  The campground lies along the Gros Ventre River with a mix of sites in sagebrush, beneath cottonwoods and adjacent to but a short distance from the river.