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.
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.