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Wilderness Drum > Wilderness Schools > Spirituality and Counseling | |||||||||
— Edwin Way Teale The schools described on this page do not teach wilderness skills so much as they teach skills that wilderness guides – or potential wilderness guides – can use on the trail, from dealing with assaultive behavior to facilitating council meetings, from creating ceremonies to leading vision fasts, from working with journals to debriefing adventure experiences. These schools, too, range from one-person operations to large international institutions, like Project Adventure. What they have in common is that I have had positive experiences at every one of them, and I think that those who are interested in spirituality and counseling in the wilderness should check them out.
The idea of council is very simple, and can be described in a few sentences. In council, people sit in a circle, and pass around what is called a talking stick. Whoever holds the talking stick talks, and everybody else listens. There are no interruptions, no questions, no challenges, no comments. People speak one at a time, in turn, honestly from their hearts, and listen devoutly from their hearts to each person who speaks. The effect can be miraculous.
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For a great tree death comes as a gradual transformation. Its vitality ebbs slowly. Even when life has abandoned it entirely it remains a majestic thing. On some hilltop a dead tree may dominate the landscape for miles around. Alone among living things it retains its character and dignity after death. Plants wither; animals disintegrate. But a dead tree may be as arresting, as filled with personality, in death as it is in life. Even in its final moments, when the massive trunk lies prone and it has moldered into a ridge covered with mosses and fungi, it arrives at a fitting and noble end. It enriches and refreshes the earth. And later, as part of other green and growing things, it rises again.
Animas Valley Institute (AVI) offers courses designed for wilderness guides, therapists, educators, health professionals, and others who seek training in a wide variety of guiding, counseling, and self-discovery skills. In addition, AVI offers a traditional vision fast apprenticeship program. Among the courses offered have been Mirroring and Council Work, Vision Quest Training, Wilderness Skills for Vision Quest Guides, and Dreamwork and Ceremonial Design The intensives equally employ experiential work, didactic instruction, and time in dyads and subgroups for skill practice. Each training is designed as a stand-alone experience. Bill Plotkin, the founding director of AVI, has been guiding vision quests since 1980. Bill has been a wilderness guide since 1974, a licensed psychologist in private practice since 1980, and has been training vision quest guides since 1988. He has written on contemporary wilderness rites, ceremony, and psychotherapy. 
Sparrow Hart, the founder of Circles of Air, Circles of Stone (CACS), undertook his first wilderness rite of passage in 1971, a five-month solo pilgrimage in the Cascades and Canadian Rockies. Over the last twenty years he has practiced and familiarized himself with modern and indigenous therapeutic approaches and has apprenticed with a variety of native and non-native teachers. He also received training at the School of Lost Borders with Steven Foster and Meredith Little, who described him as ’perhaps the best who ever enrolled in the program.” Since that time he has undertaken over fifteen quests of his own, and he leads several quests each year in various parts of the country. CACS offers training in vision fast guidance which are twelve days long and scheduled around existing quests. The training is tailored to the trainee’s level of experience and intention. The training includes discussion of the myths and allegories of the vision questing process; the dynamics of initiation and rites of passage; dreamwork and ceremonies; logistical concerns; and medicine wheel teachings. In addition, CACS offers apprenticeship training in what Hart calls the Search for Soul – in-depth training and instruction in organizing and leading various groups and workshops integrating spirit, ritual, and depth psychology. 
One thing a wilderness leader – or, in fact, anyone in a wilderness group – should know is how to defuse disruptive and assaultive behavior. Especially in emergency or long-term survival situations, even ordinarily calm people can lost control. Since 1980, the Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) has been training professionals in all areas of human services in ways to manage disruptive and assaultive behavior. CPI’s training program, Nonviolent Crisis Intervention®, is the foundation of CPI and is considered to be the worldwide standard for the safe management of out-of-control behavior. This training program teaches professionals how to safely manage disruptive and assaultive behavior. Along with learning CPI’s proven methods for defusing explosive behavior, participants leave the program with confidence to handle most any type of threatening or challenging situation with minimal anxiety and increased confidence. Over 3.5 million professionals have participated in CPI’s training program. In addition, CPI offers a DocuSystem® Training Program, which teaches participants how to document virtually any situation that may require thorough, professional explanation, allowing programs to improve the documentation skills of their staff, take positive measures to prevent recurrence of incidents, and reduce their risk of liability.
The Center for Council Training offers comprehensive training, apprenticeships and ongoing support to those bringing council into their professional and personal lives. It was created as an extension of the Ojai Foundation to provide ongoing council training, an array of related courses, in-service and retreat-based internships, and support for schools, business organizations, communities, and other groups implementing council. The Center's focus is the teaching of council, and its courses on council facilitation, from introductory to advanced, are among the best in the country. 
When you say “ropes course,” the first thing you think of is Project Adventure (PA). With over thirty years of experience, and with offices and licensees throughout the United States and the world, PA offers books, equipment, activities, and programs for people using adventure in school, community, camp, therapeutic, and corporate settings. PA offers workshops in adventure programming, adventure-based counseling, all technical aspects of ropes and challenge courses, and the use of adventure programs in teaching diversity, peacemaking, and wellness. The basic workshops cover such subjects as high challenge elements, low challenge elements, and ground activities; low and high challenge course skills; adventure philosophy and theory, including challenge by choice, the full value contract, and the experiential learning cycle; and framing and debriefing the challenge experience.
There is no question that the School of Lost Borders has been the fountainhead of contemporary efforts to reintroduce wilderness-oriented passage rites into modern culture. To this end, they not only conduct two-week vision quest programs but also train guides to lead others on vision fasts. The training consists of two- or four-week participation in the severance, threshold, and incorporation phases of the fast while maintainining a training perspective; it is recommended that trainees have already fasted alone for at least three days in a wilderness place. In addition, Lost Borders offers training in council facilitation in a wilderness setting, and a series of training seminars in various areas of wilderness experience and therapy. 