ANIMA TeRRA

Come to the forest, sister.

Reach out and take our hands.

You’ve been called in whispers

Into the sacred lands.

 

Your wild soul beckons.

Come now, while the light wanes.

Leave all that which binds you.

Enter Mystery’s terrain. . .

A NiMa TeRRA

Yearlong Journey of Wild Descent and Soul Emergence


This is a journey of soul initiation for women who feel the call from Earth and Soul to dive more deeply than ever before, to cross a one-way portal and fall back into the “source of everything,” to dissolve and open to the Muse, to Mystery, to the mythopoetic underworld, to finally access their own ecological niche in Earth’s dream.

This transformational journey is one of descent and return. The descent is into the underworld of Earth and psyche to let go of attachments to the roles and identities of a life that no longer feels like yours, so you can encounter the pure voice and true expression of your soul.  Courageously releasing the cultural and personal mindsets that have bound you, you will cross many thresholds, confront your shadows, your fears, and your wounds as well as your light, passion and inspiration, and explore the edges of your grief and longing.  In relationship with the clear reflections of nature, you can allow yourself to be radically reshaped by the elemental forces of wind and water, moon and sun, rocks and trees, owl and coyote, and return to your communities in wholeness, with your mythic soul now guiding your life.

Earth willing, during this yearlong journey, you will have a genuine soul encounter that shatters illusions and makes it impossible to stay small or to inhabit any world except the one to which you truly belong.  The risk is you won’t be the same woman you used to be The reward is you will potentially be irreversibly changed into the one you were born to be.  By gaining profound inspiration and vision for your life, you will return to your community with precious seeds and gifts that only you can offer the world.

By committing to this extended journey in a circle of sisterhood, you will be invited to cross more deeply into Mystery’s terrain than perhaps you ever have before.  As the voices of the over-culture fade, and you leave behind the distractions of your daily life, you will finally come home to true belonging on Earth supported by loving guides and the wild ones in nature.  By creating the space for your Soul to come through, you will finally partner with your ego to more fully live your sacred purpose into the world.  

DEAR SiSTeR ~

~ Do you feel a longing-ache to seek your unique, yet-to-be-revealed gift for your people and for the greater Earth Community?

~ Are you ready to tear away the masks of the tame and domestic self and feel your pure wildness come through?

~ Have you done much work around your own healing yet there is something you still haven’t gotten to the core of?

~ Do you feel like your center of gravity is shifting away from concerns about career and social belonging and toward the depths and the unknown?

~ Do you feel like the life you’ve been living (even if you are “successful”) is too small and that there is something more raw and real that is drawing you in — something both terrifying and breathtakingly exciting?

~ Are you undeniably pulled to spend time delving into the realms of dreams, longings and wild nature?

~ Do you feel you must dissolve old identities and release attachments to what is holding you back from accessing and offering your greatest service to the World.

~ Are you ready to be challenged and encouraged by seasoned guides to look fearlessly in your own mirror with both love and ferocity?

If so, we have designed this yearlong immersion for you.

OUTLINE OF THE YEAR

The journey unfolds over five sessions – four five-day sessions and one eight-day vision fast.

SESSION ONE – PREPARATION

We are passionate ones holding the flame of ideal and healthy culture where humans live in deep relationship with the land and one another. Thus, the whole first gathering is to come home to these ways–to enchantment with nature, to the ways of council, to sacred speech, to our beautiful facets of wholeness, to healing childhood wounds, understanding our survival strategies and the inner protectors that have kept us from living in our wholeness and authenticity, to working with dreams as messages from the subconscious, and deep imagery journeys to access soul guides. Together we land in the context, language and tools and begin our journey down soul canyon.

 

SESSION TWO – SEVERANCE

This work of healing, wholing, tracking and journeying out into the wild continues on your own between session one and two, and during session two we begin the descent into the underworld where Soul/Mystery is hunting you, and you are hunting it. You enter the stage of the Wanderer, psychospiritually ‘leaving the village’ in order to shed attachments to the old ways you have inhabited the world through relationships and social roles.  You will be invited to lean into not-knowing, to listening to, trusting and following the call from the depths, and be supported in allowing yourself to feel all the grief and gratitude for what you are leaving behind. By falling apart, you are falling toward the underworld.  By listening, feeling, seeking, answering the invitations, letting go, you are creating space for Soul.

 

SESSION THREE – SOUL ENCOUNTER

Our third gathering is the deepest dive of the year.   You will enact a wilderness vigil alone out on the land for four days and three nights–just you and Earth in that timeless space where the voice of Soul and mystery is as palpable and present as the trees, stars and streams.  Through this death-rebirth experience and revelation, you will open to receive new vision and clarity for your life and understand more of your personal mythos- who you are as a mythic being in deep reciprocity with the Earth Community.   Our hope is for a genuine Soul Encounter which reveals to you your unique ecological niche for and with the world.

 

SESSION FOUR – METAMORPHOSIS

What major shifts and changes is your Soul asking of you?   How are you being rearranged by Earth’s dream, your soul and Mystery?  What metamorphosis is underway? How is your Ego being reshaped into a form capable of carrying the vision you received on your fast?  How can we continue to make ourselves vulnerable to the shape-shifting images and longings of Soul? As Bill Plotkin says, “The Ego gets transformed directly by making itself vulnerable to the vision, by inviting the holy thing, the revelation, to do its alchemical work on it. How this happens and how the Ego cooperates with and amplifies the process are what we are exploring– a transformation that enables you to enact your vision, to ‘carry what is hidden as a gift to others.’”

 

SESSION FIVE – EMERGENCE AND EMBODIMENT

How is your more mature ego now of service to the missive of your Soul- that unique expression of mythos that is your way of showing up in the world? What strengths, what skills, what tools are needed now to do your Soul’s work?  How will you embody and deliver your gifts? This is the time of fulfillment and celebration–a rite of passage into a more mature and mythopoetic identity–knowing your self, knowing your place, your power and your voice and beginning to deliver that to the Earth Community.


“The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories. If we go for the deeper, and the darker, and the less known we will touch the bones.”

―Clarissa Pinkola Estés

 

DATES

April 17 – 21, 2025

July 3 – 7, 2025

September 1 – 8, 2025 (longer session with vision fast)

November 13 -17, 2025

January 8 -12, 2026

The DeTaiLs

Anima Terra is creation that grows out of our intensive guide training with Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute as well as our many years’ passion for and experience with women’s work. We recognize and tend both the cultural and personal wounds of women so that participants can come home to themselves and embark on the individual soul journey as deeply as possible. This transformational program has emerged through our own mythos and guidance. This will be the third time this yearlong is offered, and each time we guide it, it gets deeper and more honed.

We welcome all women to apply– cis, trans or otherwise – and nonbinary individuals who find their homes in women – and femme-centric spaces.


  • Anima Terra is for women who are already engaged in worthwhile lives and work, have achieved one or more successful, functional roles in society and have cultivated a sense of responsibility to themselves and the world, YET they hear an undeniable call to something more — to something beyond the edges of the known — something wild, rich, and even a little scary. 

    Through murmurings and imaginings, they have been urged to uncover more deeply why they are really here and to hear what their Soul is beckoning them to embody.

  • Spirit Hollow is at the end of the road on 100 forested acres and enveloped by thousands of acres of National Forest Land on the slopes of Grass Mountain in Shaftsbury Hollow, VT.

    Our sessions will be held in our 30’ yurt and out on the sacred land. Tracey Forest lives with her family and animals in the geodesic dome on-site. Along with organic vegetable and medicinal gardens, Spirit Hollow has begun the process of building a food forest, to leave a food legacy for those yet-to-come.

  • We are committed to your evolution; likewise, we expect a full commitment from you in return.  This journey will ask a lot of you–psychospiritually.  It is NOT for those who are currently unstable, in a healing crisis or in active trauma.

    It IS for you if you have come far on your journey, done significant healing work, and are emotionally and psychologically strong.  It requires you to be willing to take risks and confront fears, to lean IN to edges and be willing to enter new, rich territory in yourself and in the natural world.  It requires your ability to release attachments with a fierce devotion to creating and protecting the space required for your Soul to come through. It requires you to spend extended time alone out on the land, doing the work we offer you to do. You will be uncomfortable, you will be challenged, you will have to find deep courage, and you will find your strength and your gifts.

    If you are feeling a strong magnetism to the words we speak here, then we welcome you to apply.

  • The journey consists of five, in-person gatherings: four five-day session and one eight-day vision fast, one zoom circle between each session and four private mentoring calls.

    Exchange is $4200.

    Early Bird rate of $3900 is available if you register by Leap Day, February 28th, 2026.

    We require a non-refundable $700 deposit (applied toward your full tuition) with 5 additional installments, which can be paid before each session.

  • Please fill out the below application. We try to reply to your application within two weeks of your submitting it.  

    If accepted, you will be asked to make a non-refundable $700 deposit to hold your place. You will also be asked to fill out a Health Form and Liability Waiver. Then a preparation packet will be sent to you so you can begin your journey!

    Apply

  • Spirit Hollow is a rustic retreat. Your options for lodging are sleeping in one of our two yurts (slumber-party style), rustic tent cabins, or personal tents. We have hot outdoor showers, an outdoor kitchen, and four outhouses for your use.

  • You will be responsible for bringing your own lunches and breakfasts to all five sessions.  We will form meal teams to share shopping and cooking responsibilities for our group suppers.

  • Once you are accepted, $700 non-refundable deposit is required (goes toward your tuition).

    Make a deposit here.

Guides: Jonah Ruh Roberts & Tracey Forest

Jonah (Raven Windwalker) is passionate about helping women rewhole their soul, awaken to spirit and get strong and resourced on their soul path. She is devoted to Earth and Spirit and to helping humans come back into right relationship with earth and all the myriad beings and spirits that we share this world with. She sees that we are being asked to mature, to step up, to lead and to become the medicine people that will bring healing and wholing to our species. Jonah is a teacher, herbalist, and soul midwife empowering self-healing, resiliency and soul path alignment through the wisdoms and culture of sacred earth medicine.

She runs 13 Moons: A Year in the Temple. Now in its 5th year, this flagship program of the emergent Temple is a yearlong journey for women in molt to heal and whole through the archetypes of the women’s soul journey, steep in the arts of ceremony in sisterhood, and build the courage, wisdom and clarity to emerge into the medicine, confidence and resilience of her next life stage. She is co-guide for Anima Terra, and has guided many vision quests, wisdom councils, re-earthing programs and women’s gatherings and circles over the last 10 years. Her life’s work is in calling humans to the tender and precious sentiency of all life, raising earth-based, soul-centric culture, gathering the priestesses and resurrecting the initiatory rites. She is the lead visionary witch of Forest and and Village, an annual gathering of women listening: listening to Earth, to the Forest, to Mystery, to the ancient ones and to the future ones with the purpose of resurrecting our Rites and raising earth-based, soul-centric culture again, here, now.

She has been devoted to the soul journey for 30 years, having experienced her own many molts, soul encounters, visions and guidance and has gathered many wisdoms and skills along the way to now serve as a guide for the youngers. She tends Ravenwind, a sanctuary in Unity NH, where she holds many of her events and programs. She collaborates with movers and shakers on events that awaken responsibility, healing and culture creation. Learn more about her! 

Tracey (KeyTurner) is passionate about helping others step through the doorway into the mystical and the mythical, the sacred and the sublime, the earthy and the erotic, the dark depths and high heights. She is a fearless and compassionate facilitator who has “been to the mountain” and descended into the abyss to lament for the earth, to celebrate the beauty and pain and who knows the rich gifts that lie in the dark to be mined. She stands in the portal, holding a lantern, singing ancient songs, dangling a key, inviting you to step through into the vast landscape of your Soul.

KeyTurner is particularly called to help women and young adults to move from the outworn worlds, across thresholds into yet-too-be-revealed worlds that are coming. She is a deep listener of Earth's dreaming, of the "in-betweens," in communion with the sacred land that is Spirit Hollow, where she has lived and worked for the last 25 years. Co-founding Director of Spirit Hollow, Tracey is a shamanic healer and teacher, yoga teacher and singer of soul-stirring songs. She is a graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies Three-Year Program (1998) in Advanced Shamanism and Shamanic Healing under the direct teaching of Dr. Michael Harner, also, she is a Certified Yoga Teacher at the 200-hour level, having studied with transformational teacher, Shiva Rea.

For 20 years, she facilitated a three-year shamanic training, Seeing with the Heart, at Spirit Hollow, until Mystery called her to a new body of work. At Spirit Hollow, Tracey offers a variety of hands-on, nature-based, soul-centric programs, and experiments in ecological living, where individuals gain tools with which to live meaningfully in these unprecedented times. She also is a soul mentor, conducting one-on-one sessions with people from all over the world.

With 35 years of experience guiding others, she has been studying with Bill Plotkin for the last eight years.  She is a Certified Level 1 Wild Mind Guide with the Animas Valley Institute.  Currently, she is about to graduate from the multi-year Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program (SAIP) with Plotkin learning the nuances of Soul Initiation guiding and cultivating more tools to assist in the Wholing and Healing of this broken, beautiful world.