Wilderness Is Medicine

Wilderness is Medicine – founded in 2013 by Brian Stafford, MD, MPH — offers a rich assortment of journeys into the wilderness of the natural world in order to cultivate "nature-based" resilience and encounter the wilderness of the inner world. His wild colleagues represent guides from nearly all of the healthcare disciplines.
The healthcare profession continues to make innumerable and spectacular strides. However, the wholeness, health, depth, vitality, and visionary capacity of our healers is more than compromised by the extreme conditions of our current situation. It tends to leave a clinician, a researcher, an educator, or an administrator fragmented, questioning the meaning of their calling, and, occasionally, burning out.
It is not just our healthcare environments that face these issues. Something is out of balance and has been for quite some time, and our culture’s fragmentation has finally invaded healthcare and many of its practitioners are suffering. For most of our human history the elders knew that civilization and wilderness lived in a balance. From time immemorial healers left their village and entered the wilderness to find their medicine. That journey into the wilderness of the natural world and our own deeper “wilder”ness – our native gifts and our deepest truths – has been forgotten. Rather we have been in”doctor”inated by our educational systems, surrounded by technology, and swallowed by the “busy”ness and business of practice. Those who have entered the wilderness have found their true place. It is time to return to the Wilderness. In wilderness we find our wholeness and our medicine. For our own selves. For our people. For the world.
Wilderness is Medicine guides individuals into “wilderness consciousness” with the help of Soulcraft™ skills to evoke the world-shifting experience of medicine or soul encounter — the revelation of our unique identity. This identity, this “medicine” birthed by Mystery, is an identity that can be intentionally encountered by wandering into the wilderness of nature. This “medicine,” this “wilder” way of being is expressed through symbol and metaphor, image and dream, archetype and myth. It is an identity embodied in a wild mysterious story that whispers to us in moments of expanded awareness and exquisite aliveness. The shape and rhythm of this story reveals the hidden treasure , our medicine, that each of us carries for the world — a world longing for the transformative contributions of visionary leaders and artisans of cultural renaissance.
Wilderness Is Medicine offers multi-day, experiential explorations into wild landscapes, into “wilderness consciousness,” and into the wilds of soul with the goal of discovering our medicine, the meaning and destiny at the heart of each life.
What to Expect from a Wilderness is Medicine Experience:
– Recover or perhaps discover the forgotten voices of your wild psyche
– Cultivate resilience of your inner ways of knowing
- Heal your fragmentation and wound with the medicine of the wilderness
– Experience your wild connection to the natural world
– Discover the wilderness consciousness that you were born into
– Encounter your Medicine that is a birth-rite not an educational achievement
We are guides to the initiatory journey of the hero and healer— the descent into the mysteries of the inner and outer wilderness where the husk of outgrown cultural and ego-identity is shed; and from which a new self emerges as a vessel for one’s distinctive genius and world-transforming gifts.
Our immersions are designed to effect a deep-structural shift that matures the ego and elicits each person’s most creative medicine, a response that is desperately needed in our critical time.
Our collective journey as healers requires a radical shift in the human relationship with the community of all life — a cultural transformation so profound that future humans might regard it as an evolution of consciousness. As healers we are being asked to move toward the wilderness of our medicine, our singular genius that the world is longing for.
Our work is informed by the Eco-Depth Psychology of Bill Plotkin, Ph.D. and the Animas Valley Institute.
Soulcraft is a Trademark of Bill Plotkin.