Brian Stafford
Bio
Brian Stafford, MD, MPH follows the golden threads of allurement — the wild, the mythic, the poetic, the soulful, the intellectual, and the heartfelt. A lover of the far countries of consciousness and a witness to both the beauty and the grief of the world, he has studied, taught, guided, and lived across continents.
Raised among the creeks and foothills of Golden, Colorado, with summers wandering the aspen and pine forests of the Rockies, Brian grew early roots in what is wild and beautiful. His academic path wove through biochemistry, mythology, and literature in Chicago, Boulder, and Oxford. To serve a broken world, he pursued medicine and public health in New Orleans, training in pediatrics and the full span of psychiatry — adult, adolescent, child, infant, perinatal, and transcultural.
He practiced in Kentucky, Louisiana, Colorado, Ghana, and South Africa, often with those who had the least, co-founding state-wide care systems and innovative training programs. His scholarly work — articles, chapters, and essays on psychiatry, human development, and culture — accompanied these endeavors. At forty-five, he became the Anschutz Chair of Early Childhood Psychiatry.
Then came the call to adventure. A vision fast with Bill Plotkin, PhD, of the Animas Valley Institute returned him to the wild, the poetic, and the mythic. Medicine was honored and set down; the thread of eco-depth psychotherapy and Soul Initiation Guiding was taken up. At Animas, Brian has become a senior guide, trainer, board member, and Co-Founder and Director of International Programming and the Wild Mind Training Program — a holistic, earth-anchored training in psychotherapy with over 300 trainees worldwide.
Another turning came with psychedelic medicine. Brian trained with the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, returning to academia as an adjunct professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he teaches Human Development and Psychedelics and mentors graduate research in ecotherapy and psychedelic studies. He directs Pacifica’s Psychedelic Certificate and Training Programs: Psychedelic and Depth Psychology — Treatment and Transformation in an Animated Cosmos.
Today, Brian makes his homes in Ojai, California; Cape Town, South Africa; and the Costa Brava of Spain. He guides vision fasts, eco-depth retreats, and ceremonies worldwide and offers wild mythopoetic talks to any who will listen. He is completing his first nonfiction book, Pathways to Ecological Awakening: Finding Our Way Home and into the Future.
Program - An Exploration of the Work of the Animas Valley Institute: Implications for Therapy, Analysis, Psychedelics, and Cultural Evolution
“We’re being summoned by the world itself to make many urgent changes to the human project, but most central is a fundamental re-visioning and reshaping of ourselves, a shift in consciousness. We must reclaim and embody our original wholeness, our indigenous human nature granted to us by nature itself. And the key to reclaiming our original wholeness is not merely to suppress psychological symptoms, recover from addictions and trauma, manage stress, or refurbish dysfunctional relationships but rather to fully flesh out our multifaceted, wild psyches, committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than ourselves. We must dare again to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor our kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape ourselves into visionaries with the artistry to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.” Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, p2.
On this January morning we will walk together into a wild and soulful story — the story of how the work of Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute found its bones, its heart, and its song.
We begin where many good pilgrimages begin, by a high alpine lake in a forested wilderness. A lone figure filled with longing, curiosity, and wonder beneath the tilt of stars, listening for the old language carried on whispers, wind and wings. From these nights and days of longing and wild conversation with the others, the first maps, the wild practices, and the models for the descent to soul began to take shape.
Deep listening and close tracking of this and future wanderers — their visions, their apparent blockages, their thresholds, their unfastened hearts — gave rise to the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, a cartography of wholeness and a basket of practices now walking under the name the Wild Mind Way, an Eco-Depth Psychotherapy.
We will also descend together into the phases of the Journey of Soul Initiation — that narrow, treacherous and marvelous passage between the life one has fashioned and the one that has been waiting for us one— and meet the Soulcraft™ practices the guides of Animas have honed to stir such transformations.
We will place our eyes, hands, and hearts on the Eco/Soulcentric Developmental Wheel, feeling its deep structure, a developmental compass for the whole arc of a human life, and for the slow turning of culture toward beauty and mystery again.
In our time together, we will not only speak of these things — we will taste them. Wild Mind and Soulcraft practices will be offered as experiential nourishment: an imaginal descent into the otherworld, the speaking of soul poetry, and the deep listening and troubling questions that brings the unseen into the daylight.
I will bring my own pilgrim’s tales — both the years I’ve wandered and through the years I’ve guided — and we will borrow the lantern-light of others: Bill Plotkin’s encounter, Carl Jung’s dreams, Joanna Macy’s revelations, and Daniel Quinn’s awakenings.
At the end of our morning soul-trek, we will lean in to listen for the larger reverberations: how these ways might cross-pollinate with analytic work, with psychotherapy, with the deep waters of psychedelic-assisted therapy — and how, if we are lucky, they may loosen the stubborn stones that block the wild waters within ourselves and the stagnant waterways of culture itself.
Hang on for a wild and soulful walk into a world that is both “worse than you thought and better than you can imagine.”
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