Why the Soulful Living? SUMMIT

Creating the Future through Eco-Soulcentric Adulthood 

‘Why the Soulful Living?’ Summit is a transformative online gathering designed to inspire personal, collective and cultural evolution. This unique event brings together visionary leaders, guides and mentors who live and lead from their Soul’s wisdom. They are beacons of true adulthood - modeling maturity, courage and a profound connection to the web of life. 

Together, we explore the possibility of deep-rooted transformation: fostering a world of reciprocity, where soul-initiated adults offer their gifts to nourish humanity and the Earth. This summit transcends environmental, social and political boundaries, calling us to a new paradigm of "adulting" and living life from our Soul identity - maturing for the future and becoming stewards of a sustainable, eco-soulcentric world. 

Through powerful stories, insights and guidance, we will learn and be inspired how to embody the change needed to create a flourishing, interconnected world. 

The Online Summit will take place on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of April 2025

SUMMIT SCHEDULE (times are in CET - Central European Time)

DAY 1 - 3rd of April 

15.00 - 15.30 - Welcome by your hosts 

15.30 - 16.46 - Wendy Robertson Fyfe - ‘Being Ushered By Celestial Landsong In Soulful Living’

17.00 - 18.15 - Bill Plotkin - ‘Soulful Living during the Great Unravelling: A Conversation with Bill Plotkin’

18.30 - 19.45 -  Wild Ally (Claire Milne) - ‘VESSEL: Weaving ancestral webs of grief, Love and (be)longing between the worlds’

20.00 - 21.15 - Hologram Heart (Sara McFarland) - ‘Holy Death Doula- embracing the Life-Death-Life cycle in our psyches and our world’

21.15 - 21.45 - Closing ceremony by your hosts

DAY 2  - 4th of April 

15.00 - 15.30 - Welcome by your hosts 

15.30 - 16.46 - Jon Marro - ‘The Opening: A Mythic Invitation into the Edge of Everything’

17.00 - 18.15 - KeyTurner (Tracey Forest) - ‘ The Cave of the Ancient Grandmothers’

18.30 - 19.45 - Deer Ryder - ‘Stories for the Altar of Soul’

20.00 - 21.15 - Sage Magdalene - Spider Woman at the Gate - ‘Gathering in Granny Spider's Garden’

21.15 - 21.45 - Closing ceremony by your hosts

DAY 3 - 5th of April 

15.00 - 15.30 - Welcome by your hosts 

15.30 - 16.46 - Salmon King (Brian Stafford) - ‘Pathways to Ecological Awakening: Finding Our Way Back Home and Into the Future’

17.00 - 18.15 - ahlay (Alexandra Blakely) - ‘ Resonant Kinship: Community Singing as a Living Technology’

18.30 - 19.45 - Rebecca Wildbear - ‘Dreaming with Nature & Community’

20.00 - 21.15 - Rene Aish - ‘Turangawaewae – A place to stand’

21.15 - 21.45 - Closing ceremony by your hosts

REGISTRATION form (there are no costs): https://forms.gle/ocoP4hfbKfiqJF9V9

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF GUESTS & THEIR OFFERINGS

DAY 1   - 3rd of April

3rd of April, 15.30 - 16.46 - Wendy Robertson Fyfe 

Wendy have devoted a lifetime to re-awakening soulful indigenous and ancestral memory through deep listening and remembering all life as an embodied, animate, mysterious ‘we’. They founded Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus in 2018 that is sung worldwide on 1 April yearly, and Abbey Of Soul in 2024 as ways of ushering holy ceremony and revelation in daily life where uncast or/and longing. 

Being Ushered By Celestial Landsong In Soulful Living

Description of the Offering:
Wendy will be reciting their new poem Celestial Landsong which sings into the times we are living as Earthborn beauty-making people. With one ear to song and one ear to poetry longing to enter the world, this poem ushers a prophetic way to resonate with the world fully entering collaborative soulful living. Wendy shows how poetry is a consciousness shifting practice enabling a way for humans to surrender to Mystery’s reshaping. 

3rd of April, 17.00 - 18.15 - Bill Plotkin

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As founder of western Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute in 1981, he has guided thousands of seekers through nature-based initiatory passages, including a contemporary, Western adaptation of the pan-cultural vision fast. Previously, he has been a research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide.

Why the Soulful Living? conversations with Bill Plotkin

Description of the offering:

Sandra Horea, an apprentice in Animas Valley institute’s Apprenticeship Program will be in dialogue with Bill Plotkin. We will explore insights about human development, and soul encounter, in particular. We’ll also discuss the future: What kind of world will we be leaving for our youth? Together, Sandra and Bill will explore the vision of an eco-soulcentric society inhabited by soul-initiated humans. During the final part of the session, participants will have the opportunity to ask Bill their deepest questions about human and Earth evolution and the visionary dreams many of us are having about possible human evolution.

3rd of April, 18.30 - 19.45 -  Wild Ally (Claire Milne)

Claire is one of Starter Culture's co-founders and an experienced facilitator and guide. Claire is an intrepid traveller amidst the treasure trove of her own inner/relational world - and guides programs supporting others to harvest the rich pickings on offer when we re-member how to surrender to an embodied power so much greater than the individual human self.

VESSEL: Weaving ancestral webs of grief, Love and (be)longing between the worlds

Description of the Offering: 

Come one, come all. Gather-in to weave together the golden threads of connection these increasingly testing times are longing for through us. In this offering we will explore what it is to weave ourselves as the web-vessels needed for grief, Love and (be)longing to pour forth through us as the amber nectar pearls only we can offer to the world.

3rd of April, 20.00 - 21.15 - Hologram Heart (Sara McFarland) 

Sara, Hologram Heart, is a Ritual Performance Artist tending to the shifting of consciousness through Beauty and song. Sara is a Soul Guide, tending the healing, transforming and initiatory journeys of humans. Sara is a Death Doula for the Great Dying, tending the birth canal of death- in and as these times- for a collective initation: the dying that brings a renewal of Earth-centric culture through the future ones.

Holy Death Doula- embracing the Life-Death-Life cycle in our psyches and our world

Description of the Offering: 

In this offering we will let ourselves be cracked open by the following question: How do we turn towards Death as lover, as friend, as guide in our own shapeshifting and in these transforming times? I welcome you at the threshold of the dreaming, to step beyond ordinary consciousness into the threshold place that is the birth canal of Death, guarded and guided by the Holy Dark, the wise and well ancestors and your own soul.

DAY 2 - 4th of April 

4th of April, 15.30 - 16.46 - Jon Marro 

Jon Marro is an award-winning Artist, Author and Filmmaker. In some ever-widening circles, he is also known as Vision Sower, one who plants seeds of imagination into the minds and hearts, eyes and ears of the collective conscious. Jon is the founder of Worlds Within Enterprises, a Creative Agency and Production Studio that brings big, bold, prophetic visions to life through multimedia storytelling.

The Opening: A Mythic Invitation into the Edge of Everything

In this offering, Jon will share The Opening, a groundbreaking Provocumentary short film that fuses speculative fiction, documentary, and mythic inquiry to provoke a fundamental question: What is being asked of us in this time of unraveling? We will explore the ruptures in our world and what they might be inviting us into and how to orient ourselves when old maps fail and new ones have yet to be drawn.

4th of April, 17.00 - 18.15 - KeyTurner (Tracey Forest)

Tracey is the founding co-director of Spirit Hollow, a small, non-profit wilderness retreat in the Vermont mountains dedicated to transforming consciousness through inspiring and supporting purposeful humans in bringing forth their most Earth-rooted and soulful gifts to shape a new world. She has 35 years of experience in guiding others and is a soul mentor.

The Cave of the Ancient Grandmothers

Description of the Offering: 

KeyTurner will share her unfolding, deep-time understanding of how women are being called by the Ancestors to step up as soul-initiated Wise Women in this time of unraveling. Women and femmes can source the raw, ancient, mythic Earth wisdom that has the power to repair and reweave us into a new tapestry of wild women and matriarchs who are willing to step up as the visionary leaders our starving world needs.

4th of April, 18.30 - 19.45 - Deer Ryder

Deer Ryder is a devotee of wild mysteries rooted in the American Southwest. Poet, storyteller, writer, wilderness guide, ritualist, and passionate lover of mysticism and myth. Explore his work at The Honey Cave. 

Stories for the Altar of Soul

Description of the Offering:
Language is a libation to the holy. Stories are animate forces sniffing for those who might offer them a birth of beauty in this world. In this offering, Deer Ryder shares an oral story conjured in collaboration with Soul and sacred wild ones. He will then guide you on a journey to discover a story-creature that longs to feed the unique altar of your soul. 

4th of April, 20.00 - 21.15 - Sage Magdalene - Spider Woman at the Gate 

Sage lives in a tiny community in a hollow held by sacred trees and flowing waters in the Willamette Valley of northern Oregon in the USA.  She currently devotes herself to exploring what happens when we gather in Granny Spider's garden and tend portals to Upper World and Under World, supporting the passage of travelers between the worlds.  

Gathering in Granny Spider's Garden

Description of the Offering:
We will be invited on an imaginal journey to gather in Granny Spider's garden, a very real, mythical, and liminal place.  We'll visit portals to other worlds and travel to unexpected places where anything might happen. We will practice carrying abundant blessings between the worlds.

DAY 3 - 5th of April 

5th of April, 15.30 - 16.46 - Salmon King (Brian Stafford) 

Salmon King is a guide to the wilderness of nature, wildness, and soul. He serves as a guide to the depths and an agent of cultural awakening and transformation. He guides with humor, playfulness, fierceness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be. 

Pathways to Ecological Awakening: Finding Our Way Back Home and Into the Future

Description of the Offering:
In this experiential workshop Brian will define and offer several narratives of ecological awakening, including stories from historical figures, psychedelic journeys, and his own return to mystical ecological consciousness. Attendees beware: intrusions of myth, poetry, tears, and laughter may complement definitions, bar graphs, and neuroimages. 

5th of April, 17.00 - 18.15 - ahlay (Alexandra Blakely) 

ahlay is a singer-songwriter, artist, and community organizer devoted to elderhood and ancestral healing. A descendant of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk, she breaks cycles of intergenerational trauma through song, storytelling, ritual, and deep relationship with the natural world. 

Resonant Kinship: Community Singing as a Living Technology

Description of the offering:

An offering weaving collective, participatory songs where we echo each line until the song lives in our bodies and we can sing it together. This isn’t about perfection or performance, but about the way it feels in our bodies, how our voices lift together, and the connection we create. The songs hold space for unspoken emotions—grief, praise, joy, shame, and the healing of ancestral wounds—inviting us to remember what was meant to be forgotten.

5th of April, 18.30 - 19.45 - Rebecca Wildbear 

Rebecca Wildbear is the author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth. Those whom Rebecca guides learn to attune to the mysteries in the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild nature, so they may offer their soul-rooted presence and co-creative service to the world. 

Dreaming with Nature & Community

Description of the offering:

We will approach dreams like wild landscapes and listen for what the images, places, and characters want us to experience. We’ll immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of our dreams and wander in the mysterious terrain of our souls. I will offer practical skills for cultivating a relationship with your dream world through art, imagination, embodiment, and creating dream communities.

5th of April, 20.00 - 21.15 - Rene Aish 

Rene lives in Aotearoa New Zealand where he is a father to three boys, counsellor, mentor, a wanderer of wild places. His heart is devoted to re/membering, coming home, into the greater community of Life to which we have always belonged and were born to inhabit with the fulness of our wild selves. 

Turangawaewae – A place to stand

Description of the Offering:

At such a time as this, our culture and world is in deep need of people who are rooted deeply into the Earth and who are willing to stand and make the world in such a way that offers our future ancestors an inheritance worth receiving. This offering is an invitation to re/member through experience and exploration the world that we belong to and our place to stand within it – what Maori call Turangawaewae.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

Please register your participation by filling in this form: https://forms.gle/f9huYCJqJQRYgJQ57
There are NO costs involved. Participation is for free. 

CONTACT:

If you want to contact us, please write us at: sandra.horea@gmail.com

FUNDER AND ORGANIZER:

This SUMMIT is organised by Actions for Change from Romania (in partnership with Inspiration Path and VulcanicaMente) and is part of the project ‘From Caterpillar to Butterfly’ which is co-funded by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Soulcentric Dreamwork Intensive   23rd - 27th July - Romania 

Soulcentric Dreamwork: The Secret Alchemy of the Nightworld

The soul yearns to dream itself into the world. Every dream emerges from the mystery of the soul and is an opportunity for our conscious self, our ego, to be further initiated into the secret stream of our deeper life.

On this 5-day immersion, you’ll learn what it’s like to enter dreams as mysteries; to boldly and vulnerably interact with its denizens and dreamscapes; to be moved by the deep intelligence of its living images; to open to non-ordinary ways of perceiving; and to experience the underdream of your everyday waking life.

Soul speaks through images, including those that comprise dreams. While most modern forms of dreamwork focus on interpretation and analysis, soulcentric dreamwork invites us to do something radically different — to fully surrender to the experience the dream wants us to have, however strange it may be. A soulcentric approach holds every dream as an embodied invitation to our unfolding soul story.

In this intensive, we’ll wander slowly in the disturbing splendor of the nightworld’s rich symbols, images, and emotions. We’ll courageously commit to an extended stay in the soul’s mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on the ego. Instead of trying to figure out the meaning of the dream, we’ll submit ourselves to its atmospheres, landscapes, and characters.

Earth is always dreaming and inviting us to dive into our own dreamstream. The inner wilds of dreams and the outer wilderness of the world are two of the most potent guides to soul. Unlike any other Western form of dreamwork, we’ll enter both wildernesses at the same time, amplifying the initiatory effects of both. We’ll apprentice ourselves to the mystery held within our dreams while approaching the animate world as if it is listening and wanting to participate. We’ll re-enter our dreams while deepening our conversation with the other-than-human world.

Through a variety of modalities — including direct dialogue with the dream itself, expressive arts and movement, deep imagery, and wandering on the land with (and in) our dreams — we’ll explore how our dreams want to shift us, what doors they want to open, what underworld thresholds they want to usher us over.

Join us and deepen into your dreams and your unfolding soul story!

There is an opening downward within each moment, an unconscious reverberation, like the thin thread of the dream that we awaken with in our hands each morning leading back and down into the images of the dark. – James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld

Guide:

Rebecca Wildbear

Rebecca is a soul initiation guide guiding programs for Animas Valley Institute. She is also the author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth and has offered Wild Yoga™ programs since 2007. She guides people to listen to the mysteries within nature and their bodies and dreams so they can belong to and serve the Earth community. She has been a wilderness and soul guide for decades and has spent most of her adult life in wild places. Rebecca has extensive somatic therapy and dreamwork training and loves to tune in to the mythic stories of humans and the animate world. An Earth lover, activist, feminist, and writer, she fiercely supports radical social and cultural change. Rebecca often guides alongside her canine muse-beloved, Xander, who is guide to love, joy, presence, and play.

Apprentice Guide: 

Sandra Horea 

Sandra is a soul-centric human development guide and mentor to the depths who wholeheartedly invites people to be in intimate and meaningful conversations with their Soul. She calls humans to fall in love and be in relationship with Mystery, Eros, Death, Soul and live their larger story delivering their gift to the hungry world. As a guide, she creates deep purposeful spaces of inner-discoveries incorporating in her work her experience regarding depth psychology and soul-based practices, eco-centric development, embodiment, storytelling, poetry and deep imagination. She has a wide experience of 13 years in working with youth and adults in facilitating spaces of personal and community transformation.

She graduated the Wild Mind Program and currently on the verge of completing her training in the Soul Initiation Apprenticeship Program at Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute in the USA. 

Apprentice Guide: 

Bogdan Romanică 

Bogdan is a human development guide, trainer, and mentor, from Romania. In his work, he intuitively combining elements of eco-psychology, nature connection, experiential learning, outdoor education, storytelling, and art. He loves exploring nature and the human soul. He feels in his element when inspiring and empowering people to become the trues versions of themselves. He has worked locally and internationally in the field of human development since 2010. He developed his craft by engaging consistently in deep and meaningful work and training with the Animas Valley Institute from the USA (graduated the Wild Mind Program), the Mankind Project, Illuman and other organizations and teachers. Born in Romania, he feels deeply connected with the lands where he lives, the hills, mountains and forests that spread not far from his city, Cluj-Napoca.

The Venue: Caps, Cluj, Romania, Europe 

Nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, Eastern Europe, this landscape beckons you into a quiet sanctuary of reflection, healing, and renewal. Kilometres of secluded, ever-shifting terrain - deep valleys and shadowed forests - unfold in pristine, untamed beauty, home to bear, wolf, fox, and hawk. All of it set to the timeless song of the Iara Creek, weaving its melody through the wild.

DATE & TIME DETAILS: July 23 - 27, 2025 - Start Time 1pm End Time 1pm

LOCATION: Căbănuța, Caps, Cluj, Romania 

WHAT TO BRING: This program is priced for indoor lodging or camping. If camping, participants are responsible for bringing their own personal camping equipment. Everyone is responsible for personal transportation to Cluj-Napoca (60 km from the location). From Cluj-Napoca we will ensure the transportation until the venue. 

MEALS : Participants will be offered fresh, organic and vegetarian food. 3 meals/ day. Beginning with lunch on the 23rd and ending with breakfast on the 27th. 

PRICES

Camping on site - access to toilets and hot showers - 850 Euro

Single room (King bed)- 1000 Euro

Double room (Queen bed) - 950 Euro

Double room (Single bed) - 900 Euro

Use this link for application process: 

https://forms.gle/tNeV5GRnr5CRjLFv6

For more details please contact: sandra.horea@gmail.com

Wild Mind Dreamwork Training   28th July - 1st August - Romania 

This program is designed and primarily intended for trainees in Animas’ Wild Mind Training Program, but other guides and human development facilitators are warmly invited to apply. The Dreamwork Intensive is a prerequisite for this training.

Our focus will be on learning techniques for providing soulcentric nature-based dreamwork in the Animas style. If you are more interested in deep exploration of your own dreams, please consider participating in the Dream Intensive.

There are many methods of working with dreams. Soulcentric dreamwork holds the view that the soul wants to initiate us into the next step in our soul path by familiarizing the ego with the nightworld or underworld. Other forms of dreamwork might attempt to import some images from the nightworld of soul into the dayworld of personality — to support the ego’s healing, therapy, self-understanding, or entertainment. But in Soulcentric Dreamwork, we commit ourselves to an extended stay in the soul’s mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on us rather than the more common approach of doing our work on the dream. For further information about soulcentric dreamwork, please see Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft, chapter 7.

During this training, we apprentice ourselves to the mystery held within dreams. With a variety of modalities — including direct dialogue with the dream itself, expressive arts and movement, deep imagery, and wandering on the land with (and in) our dreams — we will seek the “underdream” that lies beneath the everyday conscious self.

We’ll employ lecture, discussion, experiential demonstrations, and — most importantly — lots of supervised dyadic and small-group practice in dreamwork guiding.

We’ll explore several themes and principles including: guidelines for individual and group dreamwork, soulcentric attitude, intuitive abilities, understanding archetypal themes and dream characters, working with sub-personalities, accessing archetypal facets of Wholeness, subjective (Jungian), archetypal (Hillmanian), and other approaches, identifying specific middleworld work to be done in preparation for underworld journeys, incorporating dream elements in the design of ceremonies, designing nature-based invitations to deepen into a dream experience, employing the four windows of knowing: imagination, feeling, sensing and thinking, identifying Sacred Wound themes, working with dark or shadow figures in dreams as possible reflections of disowned or repressed elements in the psyche, use of poetry and expressive arts in dreamwork. We will consider dreamtime indications that the dreamer may be approaching a journey to soul initiation and discuss what support a dreamer might need in that case. This training is not designed to teach the art of soul initiation guiding, but will explore dreamtime clues that the soul initiation journey may be imminent.

Guide:

Rebecca Wildbear

Rebecca is a soul initiation guide guiding programs for Animas Valley Institute. She is also the author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth and has offered Wild Yoga™ programs since 2007. She guides people to listen to the mysteries within nature and their bodies and dreams so they can belong to and serve the Earth community. She has been a wilderness and soul guide for decades and has spent most of her adult life in wild places. Rebecca has extensive somatic therapy and dreamwork training and loves to tune in to the mythic stories of humans and the animate world. An Earth lover, activist, feminist, and writer, she fiercely supports radical social and cultural change. Rebecca often guides alongside her canine muse-beloved, Xander, who is guide to love, joy, presence, and play.

Apprentice Guide: 

Sandra Horea 

Sandra is a soul-centric human development guide and mentor to the depths who wholeheartedly invites people to be in intimate and meaningful conversations with their Soul. She calls humans to fall in love and be in relationship with Mystery, Eros, Death, Soul and live their larger story delivering their gift to the hungry world. As a guide, she creates deep purposeful spaces of inner-discoveries incorporating in her work her experience regarding depth psychology and soul-based practices, eco-centric development, embodiment, storytelling, poetry and deep imagination. She has a wide experience of 13 years in working with youth and adults in facilitating spaces of personal and community transformation.

She graduated the Wild Mind Program and currently on the verge of completing her training in the Soul Initiation Apprenticeship Program at Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute in the USA. 

The Venue: Caps, Cluj, Romania, Europe 

Nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, Eastern Europe, this landscape beckons you into a quiet sanctuary of reflection, healing, and renewal. Kilometres of secluded, ever-shifting terrain - deep valleys and shadowed forests - unfold in pristine, untamed beauty, home to bear, wolf, fox, and hawk. All of it set to the timeless song of the Iara Creek, weaving its melody through the wild.

DATE & TIME DETAILS: July 28 - August 1, 2025 - Start Time 1pm End Time 1pm

LOCATION: Căbănuța, Caps, Cluj, Romania 

WHAT TO BRING: This program is priced for indoor lodging or camping. If camping, participants are responsible for bringing their own personal camping equipment. Everyone is responsible for personal transportation to Cluj-Napoca (60 km from the location). From Cluj-Napoca we will ensure the transportation until the venue. 

MEALS : Participants will be offered fresh, organic and vegetarian food. 3 meals/ day. Beginning with lunch on the 28th and ending with breakfast on the 1st. 

PRICES:

Camping on site - access to toilets and hot showers - 850 Euro

Single room (King bed)- 1000 Euro

Double room (Queen bed) - 950 Euro

Double room (Single bed) - 900 Euro

Use this link for application process: 

https://forms.gle/vw3jhnbFaadhk4cf9

For more details please contact: sandra.horea@gmail.com