Overview

“A wilderness journey for encountering the hidden splendors of your own being.”

The Journey:

For all of time, deep Wilderness Journeys have provided the setting and means for finding oneself.

Feral Recall is a guided transformational wilderness journey.
Unique not only in the outer beauty and adventure of the rugged landscape of canyons, mountains, rivers, and vistas of southern Utah, but more importantly, as an encounter with yourself and with the hidden splendors of your own being. 

“Return home with a new vision of who you are and what you want from life.”

We recognize that the demands of modern life often do not allow humans to experience themselves and their own essence. Many people feel trapped in roles, jobs, and family dynamics that do not really serve their deepest inner needs of self-expression and soulful purpose.  On a Feral Recall journey, we invite students to “drop in” and revisit parts of themselves that may have been forgotten or abandoned, often for years or decades.

Wandering the vast canyons of southern Utah, your guides will open up gentle techniques of allowing the wilderness, dreams, and deep, honest sharing with the group, to uncover the lost or forgotten parts of ourselves. We enable our clients to return home with a new vision of who they are and what they want from life.

We will explore questions like:
• How do we recall and reclaim that animal part of ourselves that is ancient and wild, and that wants
to be integrated into the wholeness of our beings?
• How do we understand our place in this Universe and the purpose that we have come here to
embody?
• How can we create harmony in our lives that will ripple out into the world?
• Are we willing to explore the wild terrains of our deeper psyches that are mirrored by the vast
earthly terrains without?

Your Instructors

With over 70 years combined wilderness and transformational guiding experience, David Holladay, Ania Chapska, and Loch Wade are uniquely qualified to show you some amazing natural beauty, both in the red-rock wilderness of southern Utah, and the hidden gems within your own being.”

Your Feral Recall 5 Day Journey:

(See upcoming dates below) Adventures start and end at noon.

Day 1: We will begin our adventure at the trailhead at 9AM with breakfast followed by an introduction and orientation meeting, some safety conversations, and a general outline of what to expect for the next five days. Then, we will take a comfortable 5-mile hike into the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Students will then be guided in the skills needed to make a comfortable evening camp. Dinner and a download of what the day’s experience has been for each person will be followed by sleeping under the stars.

Day 2: Dream work (the practice of unpacking and deciphering inner thoughts and feelings) and a discussion of personal intentions for the trip will begin the day. You will be encouraged to stay conscious of feelings and for outward signs that will guide you into your personal communication with the inner and outer world, as your own inner voice and the land itself begins to tell you who you really are.

The plan now begins to form itself as the group explores an open understanding of questions. Do we move or stay? If we move, which way do we want to go? How do we know when we stop? The guides offer knowledge of the outer landscape, but clients are encouraged to listen to their own inner voices for guidance. The day ends with a discussion of how this unplanned, “not-doing” has opened up channels of “innerstanding” for each participant.

Day 3: Morning “dreamwork” and group discussion drops each person deeper into their own inner landscape. Clients are encouraged go inward to explore traditional methods of asking the land itself for a dialog. What does the land speak to you? How do the animals and plants you encounter affect you emotionally, spiritually, intuitively?
Is it possible to synthesize a coherent voice from the incoming information? Dreams, the reflections from other clients and from the guides, past experiences, the environment- how does all of this inform you of who you are right now? This is the deep time, the heart of the experience.

Day 4: We begin the journey back to ordinary reality. As we journey back towards familiar territory, both in the inner and outer worlds, we begin to assimilate our experience into a coherent narrative. Yet we are not home yet, we are still in our wilderness, and as we are both here and now, and yet also beginning to imagine the future, clients are asked how their vision of what lies ahead has changed from what it may have been when the journey started. Who are we now? How has that shifted from who we were when we began?

Day 5: We return to the ordinary state of being, all the while recognizing that we are no longer the same person we were when we began our journey. Something has shifted. Priorities have been reordered, some things are more important now, others less so. Back where we started, clients are encouraged to share the process of transformation, and to restate their intentions. Ongoing support is offered, and a final dinner and closing ceremony ends the experience in a manner of symbolic completion and energetic commitment of honor to the authentic soul expression of each participant.