Posts by Andrea Palframan
CO Summer Vision Fast
The call of the earth is getting louder! The ecological stress we see in wildfires, flooding, and global pandemics can leave you feeling helpless, frightened and stuck. Technology and the fast pace of work and home can rob our lives of meaning and purpose. These times are calling all of us back to a place…
Read MoreCA Month-Long Training
The month-long intensive is designed for those who seek to explore and develop their vocation as wilderness guides within the tradition of the School of Lost Borders. Participants are given the opportunity and mentorship to fully immerse themselves in the ceremonial and practical aspects of modern day wilderness rites of passage that have evolved throughout…
Read MoreQueer Men in the Life Lodge: Forgiveness, Apology & Reconciliation
Imagine you, as a queer man, living in a community that has its own “Death Lodge,” a place where a dying person can rest and receive the visitors who come to say goodbye. This is the natural place of “making it good” with your people so you can cleanly move on, and they can let…
Read MoreNM Women’s Vision Fast
A woman’s journey is both vigorous and introspective as she covers ground outwardly, so she ventures deep within herself. Stirred by nature’s calling to be creative and complete, and beckoned by an irresistible urge to cross personal boundaries, she travels the path of her unique destiny. Her passions and gifts are her map. Psyche is…
Read MoreBecoming Human: The Four Shields Model of Nature-Based Therapeutics
The Four Shields model offers us guidance in the form of a map to help us find our way back to our origins on this living planet. This earth-based wheel of human nature was handed down to Steven and Meredith in the early days of Lost Borders and has become essential in helping us regain…
Read MoreDark Nature: Matrix of Initiatory Growth
Of all the shields of human nature, the dark or fall shield can be at once the most compelling and the most frightening. It calls on us continually to risk everything, to let go of what has come before, to step over the edge, to go where life is lived inwardly in the mansions of…
Read MoreCA Spring Vision Fast
Life transitions like entering adulthood, midlife, or elderhood are always “DNA invitations” to go out on the land. The need to become anew is planted deeply into our ancestral bones because it was (and is!) crucial for the survival of the community that we let go of what no longer serves and enter the calling…
Read MoreCA Women’s Vision Fast
One of a woman’s greatest longings is to be seen and known in her most wild and authentic self – a self that is intimately intertwined with the creative forces and cycles of nature. Like the waxing and waning of the moon, the feminine is reflected by the continual movement of light into dark, and…
Read MoreOpen Desert, Open Mind: A Wilderness Program for Contemplatives
Eureka Valley is a vast open space that stretches on for miles. Here the scale of desolate earth and expansive sky is something to behold. “Clear, open, awake, without color or form, containing all things, yet not limited by them,” writes Jack Kornfield.
Read MoreCA Two Week Training (Full with waitlist)
This training gives the student an immersion in the vision fast ceremony, including the skills involved in leading the vision fast and an understanding of…
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