Our Amazing Co-Guides
I'Lauren Chambliss
Lauren is a lifelong, published writer, soul explorer, and compassionate guide who finds deep joy in helping others bring their stories to life. With over a decade of experience as a writing professor at Cornell University and a former guide with the Animas Valley Institute and Dreaming into Life, Lauren weaves the art of storytelling with a profound connection to nature and personal transformation.
Now retired from formal teaching, she devotes her time to creating rich, accessible resources that empower people to shape their lived experiences—whether rooted in family history, soulful reflection, or personal journey—into meaningful, publishable work. Blending her deep publishing background with reverence for the earth’s wisdom, Lauren supports others in telling the stories that heal, connect, and inspire.
For more of Lauren’s background, find her on Linked In .
Peter Scanlaneter Scanlan ter Scanlan
Peter 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 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 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.