Receive our quarterly newsletter and program updates.

Programs

The School of Lost Borders in committed to creating opportunities for people from all walks of life to express their invdividual natures within old and modern ceremonial practices.

Solitude and silence in wild nature, the commitment to community, honoring personal intent, and the acknowledgment and responsibility to bring forth one's gifts, are the foundation of our ceremonies and teachings. Every course at the School is a right of passage, a border crossing from the past to the future, from the old to the new, from the outward to the inward, from the self to the Self. The emphasis is on the challenge of life transitions, the borders we all must cross.

Rites of Passage trainings for vision fast guides and other human beings.  Trainings explore the elements of The Four Shields of Human Nature, Mirroring, and Storytelling in immersion programs through one week, two week of month-long trainings.

The modern day vision fast is a border crossing practice. When one steps across the threshold and into the unknown wilderness, boundaries begin to dissolve and our vision begins to expand. Everything is pregnant with meaning, and nature speaks to us in the voices of rock, tree, and wind. Following the ancient pathway of this rite of passage, we step into our true nature and remember our home among the wild. We become who we were born to be.

As our modern culture has grown ever more sophisticated, we have also become ever more divorced from our natural surroundings and from ancient wisdom about living and dying. We have pushed Death away from Life, the dying away from the living - all in order to impose the illusion of control on the uncertainty of change. We have lost touch with the natural world and with our place in it as mortal animals. We have forgotten "how to die."

We seek to answer a call heard in the voices of people who sit in our circles. Many people express a longing to bring their deep and ceremonial relationship with wild nature into their work lives, homes, relationships and communities. Living the Practices is designed to synthesize the traditions of the School of Lost Borders with spiritual, artistic/creative, personal and professional disciplines and practices.

Upcoming Programs

diamond

Let Go into the Mystery: The East Shield of Living and Dying

Throughout time and cultures, people have crossed borders of their ordinary lives seeking contact with the Mystery. An experience of Oneness, it is beyond any fixed identity. Called by many names, known in a myriad of ways, yet it is ungraspable. In the wide-open view of this Mystery, living and dying are fundamentally interdependent. So too is our recognition of being wholly and completely interconnected with it all.

The Great Ballcourt Initiation – Fall Fast

Death is the ultimate agent of transformation—be it a physical death or “the little deaths” encountered throughout life. Indigenous cultures developed rituals to aid and…

CO June Queer Quest

The natural world reminds us that being Queer* is both beautiful and something to be celebrated! Showing up as who we are, and with our…

CO Mirroring the Four Shields of Human Nature: The Art of Story Telling and Listening

Who is this miracle speaking to me? And who is this miracle listening? What amazingness are we creating? Out of gray matter a star spark…

CO Two Week Training

In these times of change and uncertainty, it is crucial that we show up for our community in ways that truly serve. The world is…

CA Women’s Vision Fast

Perhaps you are one of the many women called to this ceremony. Maybe it is time to move deeper into the questions: What is asked of me? How do you source myself? How do I recognize the ancient myths guiding my life? What is drawing me toward the threshold? A descent, incubation, or an emergence? Is this a time of letting go or a time to reclaim? What do I offer in service to the greater?

The Elder’s Journey: The Four Shields of Elderhood for Women

Throughout the ages, elder women have enjoyed sitting in circle to weave the rich tapestries of their stories, stories that continued to warm and inspire people across time and culture.

What about us, now, in our time? As women in all stages of growing into our greater years, there is a growing passion and a commitment to tell our own stories

Finding Purpose and Meaning through the Practice of Living and Dying

Life is the primal impulse towards a never ending search for vitality and also the struggle to survive. Without death the life force could not exist. It has been said we come into the world with death beside us. And in the end our physical death is the ultimate rite of passage. This begs the questions: What is my relationship with my own mortality? How does the certainty of my own death inform my life? What are contemporary practices to support living and dying in these complex times of cultural and environmental crisis and “the great separation” from self and nature?

AZ Mirroring the Four Shields of Human Nature: The Art of Storytelling and Listening

This Program is an invitation to all humans who are willing to share stories and experience the gift of mirroring stories of empowerment and wholeness. This program is also specifically appropriate for direct care professionals such as: wilderness guides, counselors, coaches, and teachers to name a few.

CA Fall Vision Fast

The twelve day immersion ceremony involves four days of preparation, four days and nights of fasting alone, and four days of incorporation in Death Valley.  (Payahüünadü), at Baker Creek Campground, and the solo threshold phase of the ceremony will take place in Death Valley National Park (Tüpippüh Valley).

 

"We do not go into the desert to escape people, but to learn how to find them: we don't leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good."

THOMAS MERTON

"We do not go into the desert to escape people, but to learn how to find them: we don't leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good."

THOMAS MERTON

"We do not go into the desert to escape people, but to learn how to find them: we don't leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good."

THOMAS MERTON

"We do not go into the desert to escape people, but to learn how to find them: we don't leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good."

THOMAS MERTON