Animá Correspondence Courses

We live in an age where were we have largely lost touch with our feelings and needs, our knowing bodies and the natural world we remain rooted in and dependent on… unwell, under-effective and dissatisfied.  Animá teachings encourage and make possible our reconnection to our distanced dreams, awakening us to a very intimate way of engaging the world, to our individual most-meaningful purpose and likely neglected calling.

Student Opportunities

Anyone can study and benefit from Animá teachings through available Personal Counsel, free Animá articles found under the Teachings & Practice and Animá Tradition of Herbalism menus as well as on this Animá Blog and the Medicine Woman’s Roots Blog, and of course in the Animá Books & Recordings.  However, for those who want to learn all that they can, and actualize what they learn, we suggest committing to an 8 Week Correspondence Course or Mentorship – Studentships open to all ages and genders, regardless of one’s existing existing experience, practices or beliefs.  The online courses of your choice will make it possible for you to study and practice at home where you live… with personalized guidance and support.

I have been researching natural medicine for a long time, Kiva, and have never found anyone who teaches about our real medicines with such awareness and insight as you do.  Please don’t ever stop!
-Lisa Robbins, BScHN, RHN

Animá Studentship courses provide not only the clarity and insight – but also the practical information, tools and skills needed for more enlivened, proactive and personally fulfilling lives.  And in the case of the Herbal Tradition courses, the ways and means to also become the most effective and responsive healers and herbalists possible.  Whether Lifeways or Herbal, the intent of these courses is increased wholeness and maximized awareness, response-ability, real world manifestation and utilization.  As a result, the course assignments are considered even more important than the questions and readings, requiring that every new insight be acted on and every new skill and tool applied.

Animá 8 Week Correspondence Courses

Correspondence Courses are topic specific, focused on specific areas of interest such as Deepening Awareness, Sense of Place, Constitutional Diagnostics, Medicine Making etc.  We recommend you register for one at a time, preferably beginning with the self-exploratory Introductory course in each field, then over time taking as many courses as you think you can learn from and use.

Like all Animá opportunities, these are offered on a donations basis, with a $150 to $350 sliding scale donation suggested for each course, either sent at the time of registering or in pledged payments as able.

Each course is intended to take from 8 to 12 weeks to complete, counting a minimum amount of work on the course assignments.  Once your course work is ready to be handed in, there will be one or two exchanges with your teacher clarifying, affirming, and making suggestions particular to your personal quandaries, needs, abilities and direction.

Curricula

Each 8 Week Course will include:
• Assigned Readings by your Animá teachers
• Self-Exploratory Questions – for you to consider and then respond to
• Useful Techniques & Practices – for you to try, and then to describe the results of
• Assignments – for testing and manifesting what’s learned, for the student to describe         and then report back on… requiring our implementation of lessons and insights, and the         finding of ways in your daily life to apply what is learned to further your quest, practice,         path or purpose
• Plus one or more in-depth teacher/student exchanges, clarifying, affirming, adding to,         and furthering… with sometimes additional personalized assignments

Students progress at their own rate of speed. Once satisfactorily completing your first chosen Course, you are then encouraged to choose and another.

Students wishing for a more demanding and possibly rewarding mutual commitment, can put their name on the waiting list for one of the year or more long Mentorships… or even apply for a potentially long-term Apprenticeship after familiarizing themselves with all that Animá is about.

Currently Available Courses
(more will be added regularly, including herbal courses with Kiva Rose)

• Orientation, Principles & Pitfalls: The Journey Begins
(For all Fields including Herbal.  Recommended for all first-time students.)
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
Vital to understanding and practicing Animá, is an honest exploration and measure of one’s self, understanding who and where we are, establishing intentions, choosing ways of being, picking a direction and committing to a purpose.  In this course you will begin to explore deeper not only yourself but the principles by which you wish to live and work, the definitions and principles of Animá practice, and be made aware of some of the conceptual obstacles and behavioral pitfalls on your chosen path.  Whether your field and focus is Herbal, Shamanic, Lifeways or other, this course can be the springboard to becoming the most effective learner and practitioner.

• Reaping the Blessings of Ultra-Presence: Grounding & Noticing
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
A truly foundational course, this study and implementation of ultra-presence can make all your other efforts, studies, choices, activities, relationships, healing and shamanic practices more fully realized, consciously engaged, meaningful and timely, instructive and moving, nourishing and satisfying.  To get the most from other Animá courses, especially ones like “Awakeness & Embodiment,” “Awareness” and “Diagnostics” for herbalists, you may want to give your time to this focused exercising of deep presence.  Assignments move the student from conceptualizing to actualizing, becoming ever more in-body, in the now where all things happen, reaping the gifts (the “presents”) of the vital immediate moment.

• Awakeness & Embodiment: Maximizing The Senses
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
Of the up to 80 or so years that we mortal humans are allotted, we already spend 6 to 10 hours per day asleep getting the rest we need, we can subtract for the years of early childhood when weren’t yet aware of our environments and the potentially reduced awareness of extreme old age.  All the more reason then, to spend every possible moment wholly awake, bodily and in every other way alert and engaged, taking in the information we need to make choices and act, soaking in the sights and sounds, tastes and textures of the world.  In this course we seek to reawaken not only the physical senses but also our primal instincts and latent intuition, necessary precursors to expanding awareness or consciousness.  Healers learn how to better  read their own bodies and feelings as well as the energy and conditions of others, those studying the Shamanic arts maximize cognizance of their selves and environs before untethering in a search for alternate worlds, and every student reaps the information and rewards that attend the awakened state.

• The Rewarding Art of Expanding & Deepening Awareness
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
The more aware we become, the more effective we can be as parents and healers, activists and artists, and as simply people seeking a richer and more deliberate life.  When fully present and awakened, it becomes possible to expand awareness of the patterns of relationship, cause and effect around us, and deepen awareness of relevance and ramifications, reason and purpose.  For this reason, students may find the completion of the “Reaping the Blessing of Presence” and “Awakeness & Embodiment” courses to be crucial preparation for this exciting journey.  Assignments include usable tools for apportioning attention while inspiring recognition of ongoing patterns and our place in them.  Here you will find necessary as well as enlightening aids for your committed journey of ever greater awareness… awareness of the world we are an inseparable part of, the world we choose to consciously co-create.

• The Animá Medicine Wheel: Charting Our Paths, Challenges & Advantages
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
Medicine Wheels have been employed in one way or another for thousands of years, perhaps as far back as the Paleolithic.  While obviously marking the four cardinal directions, in many cultures these directions had also symbolized various energies or qualities, with the center representing the fifth direction or element.  There are both similarities and significant differences between the Animá Medicine Wheel and Wheel attributions taught by other traditions, making the Animá wheel a unique tool for assessing ourselves and others.  Realizing the nature of our original starting direction helps us understand and make better use of our proclivities and tendencies, native gifts and challenges, shows us what ways of being and seeing that we have next to move into… and points to what is our personal final fifth direction, the most difficult of all to integrate in our journey to wholeness.  Assignments help students discover the true nature of their beings on the wheel, while providing a means for understanding and thus helping family, friends, students and health clients – a practical, nature inspired and experience-tested system for all practitioners and seekers of a full and effective life.

• Sense of Place & the Search for Home
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
The land is not simply the ground we live on, it feeds us, informs us, and helps shape our very characters.  An in-depth familiarity and physical/emotional/spiritual intimacy with place grounds, strengthens, instructs and empowers.  The effort to know and experience the local (including urban) wildlife and plant life – to determine what is native or introduced, what their roles and effects are, what contributes to health and balance and what impinges or destroys – inevitably results in our increased ability to notice, in greater awareness, sense of connection as well as self reliance, groundedness and emotional security.  Assignments assist students with this increased knowing and intimacy.  This course teaches ways to determine what bioregion we would be truly most “at home” in, as well as how to better connect with, learn from, value and celebrate whatever area and landscape we currently live in.

• Rewilding: Reclaiming Freedom & Self-Reliance
with Jesse Wolf Hardin
The word “wild” has all too often been equated with savagery, chaos or lack of self discipline.  Even in the case of folks who use the word in a positive manner, it is usually meant to describe a wilderness landscape free of people rather than a set of intrinsic wild qualities that are by right and by nature humans’ as well.  Hardin was the first to coin the term “rewilding,” meant to describe a process not just of habitat restoration but a conscious and deliberate re-embodiment of our wild – free willed – selves, our natural awakened, responsive and response-able beings.  The course provides assistance with the radical and sometimes disruptive process of rediscovering our needs and dreams, coming to trust our feelings and believe in our abilities again, to act out of choice not obligation, to do what we believe is right rather than simply obeying rules or conforming to norms.  Assignments embolden and facilitate the rewilding of our bodies and minds, and help facilitate your intentional rewilding of our culture as well as the vital living land.

To apply for any of the above courses, please download an Application for the website’s:

Animá Correspondence Courses Page

New Curricula is being written and expanded as you read this, so please keep checking back here often for the latest additions… and be patient waiting for your favorite subjects to be available.

Thank you for your interest!

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