Soul Alchemy:
Shedding Your Old Ways of Being, Re-casting Your Mythic Story and Excavating Your Way Back to Your Wild Self
A retreat for women
August 16-24, 2023
8 days, 45 miles of canoeing, daily writing,
delicious food, 15 participants max.
Guides: Hannah Lee Jones, Linda Abrams, Lauren Bond, Monika Denise, and Kathy Beadle
Pricing: $2695, payment plans upon request
The deposit and cost of The River’s Path Canoe Adventures are non-refundable. We strongly recommend purchasing travel insurance through our partner Outward Travel to protect your investment.
“I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.“
— John O’Donohue
“Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.”
— Roshi Joan Halifax
There’s a moment in one’s journey when life as you’ve always known it cannot continue as it has. Call it hitting bottom, a mid-life crisis, or a dark night of the soul — but there’s a looming sense that an old way of being must die away so that something more authentic and vital can take its place. Like a snake in its phase of molting, during these periods in our lives there is much to “shed” and release. And in that shedding is an opportunity to enter a life in which our losses and struggles, pain and grief, joys and triumphs are incorporated into a new identity that can be embodied and expressed in our communities and in the world.
The wild setting of the Green River is the perfect live metaphor for the journey you’re invited to take: answering the call to adventure, re-visioning your life story as one in which you’re the author and hero, and being led by mystery into the ever-unfolding miracle of who you truly are: the wild self you were born to be, before others and society tried to change you.
Our experience together will include journaling and writing, therapeutic art, poetry, and personal ceremony, all in the context of a mytho-poetic approach that holds the uniqueness of every story as sacred while also remaining intimately tied to the life of the world. Unstructured time will be included along with flexibility and responsiveness to whatever arises for the group throughout our adventure.
Here’s a chance to radically re-vision your identity and story by raising it to the level of myth, and to meet the challenges of your path through life with imagination, resilience, creativity, and courage. Bring your willingness to be surprised, to stay awake and open, and to face and embrace all that you encounter on this wild journey of your one precious life.
Where I Lived & What I Lived For
Green River, Utah
By: Hannah Lee Jones
To be alone on this red earth
where no one comes to visit me.
To crawl there, the words entering
sidelong where the skies lift open.
To be the night whose songs unsing
themselves in the space opened by just words.
To be equal parts light and darkness.
To be the light whose chains on me
were god once, and shall be again, in darkness.
To be wholly dusk and dawn,
the hours closing with dulled stars
the marked distances between.
To become nothing of importance,
for good and forever,
never asking each other what we’ve made of our lives.
To be springtime, ebbing greenly even as she brightens.
To be the soul on fire, declaring that it’s time.
Meet Your Instructors
Hannah Lee Jones
Author & Spiritual Mentor
I’m a poet and writer whose soul work is witnessing and guiding others so that they can find and follow a more authentic life. Early in my career, in the midst of starting my own organization and helping to plan and promote retreats for spiritual and social change at the Whidbey Institute, I gained a powerful and essential lesson: growth is not just about transcending and enduring life’s tests and challenges but also about patiently and reverently transforming them into gold for the fulfillment of one’s personal calling. A crisis in my late 30s took me into the harsh beauty of the southwest desert where I embarked on several years of nomadic travel. This changed everything, and my book, WHEN I WAS THE WIND (June Road Press), which explores the contours of pain, grief, descent, and personal transfiguration, was born out of that wild experience. Since then I’ve been blessed to show others that even the longest and most uncertain journey can lead to a life of passion, self-knowledge and immense creative power. As an Asian American I’m also interested in how to re-vision and re-write various forms of difference in ways that enliven and connect us more deeply to the world. I run Primal School, a coaching resource devoted to literature and ideas that promote a life of meaning, and am currently at work on a poetic reimagining of the teachings in the Tao te Ching.
Linda Abrams
Depth Psychotherapist, Expressive Arts Educator, & International Retreat Facilitator
I am a Wild Wisdom Seeker and Transformational Soul-Guide with over 35 years of diverse experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, expressive artist, and international retreat facilitator. My greatest joy is working with people who commit to heal, grow, and align with their soul’s deepest truth. An introduction to soul-work might begin with the “unbidden initiation” of trauma, or perhaps with contemplation of the great Sufi question: “What Universe is waiting to be born in your heart?” My work is devoted to creating the invitation and issuing the call to adventure of overcoming and re-becoming so that individuals facing loss, heartbreak, woundedness can move beyond fear into a more brave, authentic, and joyous way of being in the world. I draw from a broad professional background that includes depth psychology, spirituality, expressive arts, and cross-cultural healing modalities, and love bringing my own curiosity and passion to individual and group processes for co-creative change.