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As I walk this path in The Medicine Woman Tradition, I am grateful for the courage I found in myself to finally step with two feet and whole heart into this journey. I am in awe at the support, the love, and the sincere guidance Kiva, Loba, Wolf, Rhiannon and the Canyon have repeatedly given me. This past year has been one of great unfurling and and discovery, challenges and pain, and pure enthusiasm and confidence in which to continue this walk of life.
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.
"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.
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.
Anyone can take any mix of the courses that they like, and all courses contain the core Animá perspectives and principles, but for the sake of organization we will be listing each of the available courses under one of the following 7 Fields. • Path of Heart Path of Heart Courses Completed or in Development include: Developing Self-Knowledge & Self-Confidence; Transforming Fear; Valuing Feelings & Trusting Instincts; Employing Empathy, Nurturing the Self, The Power & Response-ability to Discern & Making Choices; Exploring & Fashioning Healthy Roles that Fit; Finding & Fulfilling Purpose... • Shaman’s Path Shaman’s Path Courses Completed or in Development include: Heightening Awareness; Ultra-Presence; Maximizing Intuition & the Senses; Vision Questing; Animal Totems & Plant Helpers; Learning to Use the Animá Gifting Bones Runic System; Using the Animá Medicine Wheel... • Herbal Essentials Herbal Essentials Courses Completed or in Development include: From the Ground Up: A Foundational Course in Traditional Western Herbalism; Blossom & Dream Herbal Course for Girls ages 8-16; Animá Principles of Healing; Wildflower Remedies Children's Herbal Course for Ages 5-10; Grandmother's Stewpot: Food as Medicine and Healing Through Nutrition; Introduction to Botany for Herbalists • Herbal Advanced Herbal Advanced Courses Completed or in Development include: Engaging the Anima: Utilizing Vitalism in Clinical Practice; Walking the Medicine Wheel: A Course in Hands-On Herbal Energetics; Wild Allies: A Weedy Materia Medica; A Grassroots Approach to The Practice and Work of the Village Herbalist • Nature Connection Nature Connection Courses Completed or in Development include: Deepening Sense of Place; Getting Intimate with Your Bioregion & Plant & Animal Life; Understanding Wildness & Diversity; Primal Diet & Gathering Wild Foods; Animal Tracking as an Awareness Exercise; Preserving & Restoring Wild Species & Natural Habitat... • Life Skills Life Skills Courses Completed or in Development include: Presence & Grounding; Making Every Moment Decisive; Healthy Sexuality; the Healing & Nourishing Power of Food; Making Home More Magical & Meaningful; Empowerment Parenting & Animá Insights for Home Education; Discovering Your Most Meaningful Mission or Heeding a Calling... • Expression Expression Courses Completed or in Development include: Writing Essentials for Budding Authors; Nature Writing Intensive; Art Instruction & Inspiration; The Principles of Rhythm & Giving Voice to the Drum; Protest & Activism... Course Length & Student/Teacher Exchanges: 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
• 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 long Mentorships... or even apply for a potentially long-term Apprenticeship after familiarizing themselves with all that Animá is about.
The Courses CURRENTLY AVAILABLE are: – 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 Presence: Grounding & Noticing –
- 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, click on, download, fill out completely stipulating your first Course choice, and return the Correspondence Course Application . Your Donation can be sent via or mailed to: Gretchen Loba Geggis PO Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830 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. -------------------------------
Due to the extensive amount of student and teacher exchanges and support, there is a strictly limited number of Mentorships available each year and applicants will often have to be put on a waiting list. Mentorship Curricula Mentorships involved 12 or more lessons, each meant to take a month or longer to complete, and each as extensive as its counterpart being offered as an 8 Week Correspondence Course. Each month or longer lesson includes: • An introduction to the lesson topic/field • Questions reviewing the previous lesson coursework • Assigned reading • Self exploratory questions for you to answer • Practices and techniques for you to implement and then describe the results of • Assignments for manifesting and feeding back about: implementation of lessons and insights, finding ways in your daily life to apply what you learn and further your quest, path and purpose • Two or more in depth exchanges including teacher clarifications, comments and suggestions, and further personalized assignments At this time you can choose between: • An Animá Medicine Woman Mentorship... with Kiva Rose • An Animá Lifeways Mentorship... with Jesse Wolf Hardin and • An Animá Shaman Path Mentorship... with Jesse Wolf Hardin Each will be described for you below. --------------------------------------------------------
For Women Only Taught By Kiva Rose "Kiva, it is true that we learn from the plants and experience but without the encouragement from you and your teachings I am not sure I would be the herbalist I am today. Your class and counsel has been transforming for me and I continue to reap the benefits of your teachings daily. Words cannot express how grateful I am to have you both as a dear friend and mentor. - from The Medicine Woman's Path by Kiva Rose The Animá Medicine Woman Mentorship serves as an intimate and often personal exploration of self, herbs and healing. Students will be given an in-depth overview of the philosophy and spirit of the path while also being provided the skills to practice and personally manifest the Medicine Woman. Tools to embody purpose, honor, clarity, discernment, authenticity, wholeness and a fierce commitment to serve the whole through healing, mediation and example. Learn to walk the Animá Medicine Wheel as a way of moving with integrity, purpose and consciousness, assisted by ancient knowings and new insights. Lessons are taught through story, instruction, question and assignment, allowing for individual ways of learning by each student and multifaceted representation of each subject. Set apart by its intense focus on the Medicine Woman Tradition, the student can expect to be challenged by the introspection, honesty and exploration required by the course. This is a foundational but advanced training for the aspiring Medicine Woman, a practice and way of life that demands ever expanding awareness, insistent focus, unwavering dedication and an innate need to serve the whole.
Extensive coursework covers the philosophy, skills, spirituality and knowledge necessary to becoming intimate with herbs, the human body and the earth as a whole. Emphasis is placed on healing as wholeness, honorable exchange with the land, the Medicine Woman's place in society, problems as allies and the place of transformation in healing. The Animá Tradition of Herbalism is an energetics-based integrative approach to herbalism primarily rooted in direct experience but drawing from wisdom without borders, and instructs the student in an ancient understanding of healing within a modern context. Kiva teaches healing from the ground up, through a practical yet unique concept of common sense energetics, elements based constitutional theory and intuitive one on one relationship with the plants. The Mentorships cover plant actions, diagnostics, medicine making, organ systems, body as ecology and much more, all illustrated through Animá’s multifaceted Medicine Wheel. The course also includes an in-depth exploration of a broadly available and applicable Materia Medica. Medicine Woman Mentorships may include the following lessons: • Introduction to the Medicine Woman Tradition of Herbalism • Constitutions • Plants as Allies and Teachers • Bioregional Herbalism • Talking with Plants • Wounds as Gift, Illness as Ally • Healing as Wholeness • Medicine Woman’s Role • The Medicine Wheel • Common Sense Energetics and Actions • Body Ecology •Organ Systems • Life Cycles of the Woman’s Body • Diagnostics • Ethical Harvesting • Medicine Preparations and Recipes • Materia Medica “Knowing the plants, and the whole of the Earth, is not just sensation and knowledge, but also commitment. Commitment to keeping our heart open, our senses alive, and to a reciprocal relationship in which we use the wisdom of the plant in a meaningful way. To heal what is broken, to maintain the sacredness of self and land and to protect the interconnective web of life. Passing on this precious gift of awareness to our generation and the next, teaching the children to hear the plants again. And a commitment to consciously participate in life’s beauteous flowering.” - From The Flowering by Kiva Rose For more information go to the Animá Tradition of Herbalism Intro Page
To Apply for a Medicine Woman Mentorship and be put on the waiting list, Click on, download, completely fill out and then return the ---------------------------
For both Women and Men Taught By Jesse Wolf Hardin "What a relief to have found a depth of teaching to match my intensity, desire, passion. The lessons build each on the next, creating a deep shift in my perception of not only the world, but also of myself and my connection to the greater Anima. I move forward, step by intentional step, into a life that indeed is worth living!" “The call to power necessitates a separation from the mundane world: the neophyte turns away from the secular life, either voluntarily, ritually, or spontaneously through sickness, and turns inward towards the unknown, the mysterium. This change of direction can be accomplished only through what Carl Jung has referred to as “an obedience to awareness.” Only through the development of discipline will the shaman’s habitual ways of seeing and behaving dissolve, and the visionary realms open. Thus, the initial call to power takes the shaman to the realm of chaos, the limen, where power exists in a free and untransformed state.”
This discipline is a most difficult and demanding one. It allows for no comforting illusions, and impresses response-ability when many seekers broach shamanic topics as part of their creative escapism. This path insists you maximize your every known and subconscious ability and muster all your will, compels you to not only experience but impart – and not only to explore but to focus, discern, make choices, envision, commit and manifest! The Animá Shaman Path is the practice of wholly, magically, sentiently, sensuously, purposefully and deliberately living... the integration, awakening and maximizing of mind, body, heart, spirit and earth in service to the whole. It is noticing and fine tuning our effect on the direction of events, while acting as a bridge to other “worlds,” “realities,” aspects, dimensions and perceptions. It is a calling that few will ever hear, only a special few will respond to, accept, embrace and embody.
Some Learning Objectives: • The fundamentals of pan-cultural earth based cosmology and nature-informed shamanic practice. • Recognition and affirmation of our existing shamanic abilities, propensities and potentials, and their further expansion, refinement and development. And the development of personal criteria for its honorable application in these times of global struggle, tragedy, transformation, growth and enlightenment. • The means for re-creating primal/primary ritual, ceremony, practice, tradition and even tribe true to our usually mixed blood ancestry and these contemporary times. • The ready recognition of dangerous illusion and all too comfortable or popular notions, and the ability to discern (how to “cut through the crap,” including our own). • A deepening of our relationship with the natural enabled self, the instructive inspirited earth, the weaknesses we need to strengthen and the powers and abilities we’ve long left dormant or denied. • The means for ever-increasing awareness, intuition, confidence and courage, advanced perception, empathy, a heightening of the physical senses as well the so-called “6th Sense.” Further utilization of the tools of the contemporary shaman, in envisioning possibilities, bridging the magical and mundane worlds, and actively healing individual and societal fragmentation and imbalance. • An understanding of our calling, finding our most meaningful purpose, seeing clearly the path of greatest service and living our dream. “For over three decades I’ve studied tribal shamanic traditions, from around the world and going back in time to what we believe to be the first “magical” and “spiritual” practices, as well as having associated and worked with some of the most authentic and powerful Medicine Men & Women of our age. Invariably we recognized in each other a kindred soul, ultra aware and driven, both blissed-out and poignantly hurting, simultaneously totally free and wholly assigned. And always, we knew that we are magically connected, that we accessed a shared field of perception and possibility, interacted with the same Spirit and accessible energies, drew from the same sacred earthen Source... and together served the same ever-shifting, ever artful, multidimensional whole. While the thinking of some of these shamans was limited by the boundaries of their particular tribe or tradition, the majority considered their cultural trappings and metaphors as tools for the manipulation of consciousness and the passing down of the crucial and universal lessons. One only has to look at the number of shamanic traditions that exclude women, to see the benefits of a new neoshamanism... one grounded in the same inspirited earth, experience and blend of purposes as the earliest practitioners, yet reflecting and informed by new wisdom and understanding, effective in this modern matrix.” -J. Wolf Hardin Shaman Path Mentorships may include the following lessons: • Orientation & Acting From Our Inner Place of Powers • Constitutions • Animal Totems & Plant Allies • Grounding & Noticing • Heightening Awareness • Magic of the Drum • Healing Self & Others • The Vision Quest • The Medicine Wheel • Maximizing The Senses • Ultra Presence • Sexuality • Sense Of Place & Places Of Power • Omens & Signs • Precognition • Death As Teacher • • Mission, Purpose & Calling
To Apply for a Shaman Path Mentorship, Click on, download, completely fill out and then return the .
For both Women and Men Taught By Jesse Wolf Hardin and/or Kiva Rose The most widely applicable Mentorship, Animá Lifeways is the core path of self knowledge, compassion, passion, the senses, feeling and intuition, mission and love. This study is dedicated to exploring, understanding and empowering the self, overcoming insecurity, getting beyond comforting illusions, recognizing our true gifts and abilities, deepening relationships, awakening and nurturing bliss, tending and caring for ourselves, finding meaningful service and purpose... and no longer letting our fears hold us back! Included are many of the first steps towards becoming active sense-filled participants, ultra conscious and deeply sensing co-creators of our wondrous world and evolving reality, instead of being either victims or disempowered spectators. This is a path of essential self-growth and self-healing, of whole presence and the decisive moment, an introduction to connecting with authentic self, purpose, anima/spirit and the living natural world. It asks of us to not only experience but also to impart, not only to explore but to focus, discern, commit and manifest! To not only to embrace our hurt but also our welling joy, to heal and beautify. Lifeways Mentorships may include the following lessons: • Introduction & Orientation • Insecurity & Self Love • Transforming Fear • Sense Of Place & Finding Home • Presence, Focus & Grounding • Awakeness & Embodiment • Instinct & Intuition, Emotion & Empathy • Self-Healing • The Medicine Wheel • The Difference Between Vulnerability & Permeability • Nurturing Ourselves • Exploring Roles, Mission & Purpose • Making Every Moment Decisive • The Burden Basket • Sharing Story • The Healing & Magic Of Food • Intimacy & Heartful Sexuality
To Apply for an Animá Lifeways Mentorship and be put on the waiting list, Click on, download, completely fill out and then return the . |
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