Into the Wilderness of Dreaming

July 24-28, 2024
In-person on South Whidbey Island, WA

Three-tier fee: $425 • $595 • $795
(includes camping fees and all meals)

with Sheila Bélanger and Anne Hayden

The Wilderness of Dreaming invites you to explore your night and day-world dreams through embodied Soulcraft™ and Process Work practices.

Soul speaks to us in the images sent in dreams, making mysterious, valiant efforts to initiate us into the one life that is truly, authentically ours. Exploring the imagery of the dreamtime through embodiment practices is a potent way into the native landscape of the soul. This highly experiential program supports you in letting the dreams work deeply on your ordinary day-world ego, bringing your conscious self closer to being in service to your soul and to the world in these tumultuous times.

Our dream approach is not focused on interpretation or analysis of dreams, nor in applying the messages from dreams to our day-world situations.  Instead, we enter the wilderness of the dream itself, explore its unique ecosystem, surrender ourselves to its atmosphere and characters and be open to be deeply changed by our expeditions.

You can know yourself, if you bring up
those cloudy canvases from your dreams,
today, this day, when you walk
awake, open-eyed.

~Antonio Machado

We invite you to explore the cloudy canvases of dreams as if they were unfamiliar but beloved wildernesses. We enter with curiosity and reverence for the intact ecosystem of the dream landscape, ready to be surprised and enlivened by what we find. Just as we wouldn’t go to a foreign country and impose our own customs and beliefs on the people there, so we enter the dream country with the same humility. We arrive, as dream-workers, dream tenders, and dreamers, exploring from the day-world, and want to know the place and people we are visiting, as they are, without our projections and assumptions.

In The Wilderness of Dreaming program, you can expect

•   surprising and intimate connections with nature (inner and outer) 
•   conscious participation in a council of fellow explorers
•   movement and somatic explorations
•   creative engagement through sound and other expressive arts
•   soul poetry 
•   deep imagery journeys

For us, the golden rule in touching any dream
is keeping it alive.
Dreamwork is conservation . . . 
Conservation implies holding on to what is
and even assuming that what is, is right.

~ James Hillman
from The Dream and the Underworld

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PROGRAM DETAILS

FEES: For this camping program, we offer a 3-tier fee structure:  $425 • $595 • $795.   We acknowledge the challenges of economic inequity in our culture and purposely set a wide fee structure. We invite participants who have the financial means to pay on the upper end of the 3 tiers, in support of others who need to pay on the lower end. Reparation rates available for BIPOC.  Please contact us.

REGISTRATION: To register, please fill out this form and send a non-refundable deposit of $250.

• Send a check, payable to Anne Hayden, mail to:
  NW Soul Quest  •  PO Box 181  •  Clinton, WA 98236
• Pay via PayPal using our email address as the payee: nwsoulquest@gmail.com. Please add 3% fee for Pay Pal transactions.
• Pay via Zelle by using our email address as the payee:  nwsoulquest@gmail.com  (Direct bank transfer, no fees.)

LOCATION: This program takes place at a private home/retreat space on South Whidbey Island, with camping spaces available in the cedar forest nearby.  You will need a tent and sleeping bag and minimal camping equipment.  Contact us if you are not able to camp.

FOOD:  Locally sourced, fresh, mostly vegetarian meals provided.  We can accommodate vegetarian, gluten free and dairy free diets. You may need to supplement for other specific food needs.  Please specify any dietary restrictions or needs when you register.

SCHEDULE: Program begins on Wednesday at 7:00 pm.  Check-in available starting at 4:00 pm. A light dinner provided at 5:30.  Program ends at 1 pm on Sunday. Due to the erratic nature of the ferries to our island, please allow for extra travel time.  We recommend that you do not make commitments on Sunday after the program.

CURRENT COVID AND HEALTH PROTOCOLS: We ask that participants be willing to follow the guidelines we determine when the program takes place. Our venue offers the possibility to hold all meetings outside if necessary.  Participants will camp in their own tents. Please come healthy.

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Contact us for more information or to register:

(360) 320-5343    •    nwsoulquest@gmail.com

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We honor the people––past, present and future––of the Snohomish, Lower Skagit, Swinomish,
and other Coast Salish Tribes,
upon whose traditional lands and waters we live and work.