My Fabulous Co-Guides!
Jim Marsden
“When we’re facing challenges that appear oppressive to our spirit, or thwart our will to achieve, we come to a threshold that, if crossed, can usher us into a new way of seeing ourselves and the world around us. We gain a new stance that we couldn’t think our way into. Leaning into these crossings is to lean into our emerging leadership and humanity.”
Jim is intensely interested in the human experience, he guides individuals and organizations through transitions while stepping more fully into their lives. He’s keen to help entrepreneurs and start-up organizations discover their own authentic expression of leadership and the meaningful contributions that come from it. Jim has extensive cross-cultural experience and has worked in settings around the globe. As a speaker and workshop facilitator, he is engaging on topics of leadership, innovation, design thinking and transformative change.
Joyce Harvey-Morgan
Joyce has numerous academic degrees, extensive training in a range of areas (counseling, trauma, leadership, group process, nature-based soulwork) and much professional experience. While all this informs and grounds her work with death and dying, the core of her work comes from her lifelong love affair with the natural world, her intuitive connection with nature-based soulwork and a directive from her soul. She is a wanderer, explorer and creator in both the literal and metaphorical worlds. Her passion is leading workshops like this, helping others to dive deeply to explore the full circle of life, in the heart of the wilderness, using all of our gifts—including dreams, emotions and the creative arts. Joyce leads the Boise, ID Death Café movement and teaches classes/gives presentations on conscious dying. And she is a wild and crazy mask maker!
Peter Scanlan
Peter Scanlan has journeyed through a succession of priesthoods from the Roman Catholic variety (3years) to Clinical Psychologist (38 years) to Vision Fast and Soulcraft guide for the Animas Valley Institute (16 years), to guiding nature-based ancestral programs, interspersed with now longer periods of napping, dreaming, writing, and grand parenting (7 years and counting). Over the course of that journey, he spent 29 years in academic settings as a professional student, finally arriving at grandmother’s classroom for the environmentally challenged where he discovered the rich path of unknowing. The aging process has turned his attention to the challenges of discovering what it means to be an elder in this culture.
Carol Kortsch
Carol Kortsch was born in Africa, educated in Canada, and then worked internationally building community in different forms. After 25 years in psychotherapy and group practice at Stonehaven Commons in Radnor, PA., she now offers nature-based retreats from Boulder, Colorado as a Courage & Renewal group facilitator. She is blending the Earth-based practices of Animas Valley Institute in a visionary program called ElderSoul. As a life adventurer and Earth listener, she recognizes our essential and critical human need to stop, slow down, and listen to our lives and all our relations speak.
What we offer in these circles is a dream of unique personal and communal ‘belonging’ to this physical land and human-time on Earth. Learning to live whole-heartedly as individuals within a culture that mostly hides behind its own shadow. We aspire to support each other in fully emerging as soulful beings-in-process, at every age and life-stage. To learn from and through ‘the Elder within’ – that fiery birthright capacity to be elders-in-training to serve as channels of life energy on behalf of the greater village we live in.
Stephanie MacKay
Stephanie MacKay is the Co-founder and Director of Fianna Wilderness School. She specializes in ancestral knowledge,
earth-based skills, ceremony and myth. She has a degree in literature, and her work is informed by over 15 years of
practice and study through Animas Valley Institute, Haven Institute, Wilderness Awareness School, and 12 years of study
with Martín Prechtel.
She is a fiercely compassionate facilitator, mentor and guide
in search of perspectives and practices to deepen the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Stephanie is
dedicated to uncovering the vestiges of intact cultural origins within the body of old European mythologies. Her work is centered around feeding the possibility of a way of life that embraces our cultural origins as its foundation.