Sunday, July 4th, 2010
BC Wilderness Visions and the Monkey Valley Retreat Centre celebrates its 5th anniversary of nature programs this summer! The first program was a medicine wheel teaching in the summer of 2005, when 25 people came to Monkey Valley and created a beautiful medicine wheel. Teachers Joyce Lyke and Tracy Leach ...
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Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Karen Rempel is the director of Monkey Valley Retreat Centre. She leads retreats at the centre, and also apprentices on vision fasts in Colorado and California. She teaches tools to help people find healing and guidance in nature, including the medicine walk, medicine wheel, four shields of (human) nature, other ...
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Friday, October 23rd, 2009
The School of Lost Borders California Fall Vision Fast was amazing! I was an assistant for the 11 fasters and the two incredible guides, Ruth and Larry. Some people marked their passage into adulthood, and others into elderhood. It was such an honour to witness the courage and vulnerability these fasters ...
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
As I mentioned earlier, there were four rounds in the sweat lodge: The first round was for calling in the ancestors and spirits. The second round was for praying. The third round was for healing. And the final round was the “going home” round. At the beginning of each round, ...
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Meeting in Circle with the Wilderness Guides Council
Fire is the element of the east, the direction of springtime. When I first sat in circle at the Wilderness Guides Council, on Monday, April 13, I deliberately sat in the east. This is a part of the wheel that I am least ...
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Monday, May 4th, 2009
I wasn't always a happy camper at the 4th International Wilderness Guides Gathering, held in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains this April. Previous gatherings have been held in Germany, South Africa, and the UK. People from these countries attended, and many more besides. The gathering was hosted by the Wilderness Guides Council, ...
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Sunday, April 12th, 2009
I seem to be a little reluctant to make the turn into spring. So here's one last look at the winter of '08. This is my sister Katherine, shoveling snow off the roof of her shed in Horsefly, BC. This picture was taken in March! That's a lot of snow. ...
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Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Next vision fast: July 5 - 11, 2009 at Monkey Valley
This week I had the great pleasure of giving a presentation on the vision fast to the Vancouver chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. Our March STC program was a Pecha Kucha event, in which speakers each discuss 20 slides for ...
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Sunday, November 16th, 2008
When you are on a vision fast or medicine walk, you enter into a mystical realm where all events and encounters take on a significance that is bigger than what most of us experience in ordinary waking life. During this time, an encounter with an animal is not just a ...
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Friday, September 12th, 2008
Indian ice cream—a gift from the land
At the August vision fast at Monkey Valley, the spot where our council circle met had some translucent reddish-orange berries that looked very succulent. I licked one and found it to be very bitter. The faster asked what they were, but I didn't know, and ...
Posted in Recipes, Vision Fast, Wild Nature | 2 Comments »