[
lire en français]
About Crows Nest Center for Shamanic Studies
Crows Nest is both a educational program and a vital spiritual community, with home location in the SW Michigan woodlands, in the USA, but with communities and teaching programs going in France, Belgium, and South Africa.
Our mission is to provide education in the heart-centered and earth-honoring medicine traditions and resources and the bridging these with resources from modern Jungian and archetypal psychology, neuroscience and consciousness research. In this way we offer you the best of resources from modern culture and ancient wisdom for you to apply in your daily life and professional practice. We aim to offer you tools to create a life you really want, and shape your destiny in heart-centered and earth-honoring ways.
The crux of our service to the world is to offer retreats and workshops in natural settings that help us learn, expand consciousness, develop our potentiality, and put it to work in the world. When we meet, we call this a Wounded Healer School.We invite you to come,because it is about igniting the fire of your deepest Self within your local self. Its about exploring and reclaiming all that you are.
Here we access enter and download the shaman archetype/hologram—an archive of inexhaustible possibilities, of alternate selves, of nonphysical guides and teachers. You will learn things you probably didn’t learn in public schools, such as Who you really are, What you really want, what you can be, and in the future will become. How to put your local self in service of your deepest Self,—how to create your future, how to step into your power to be of co-creative service in a way that crowns your life with fulfillment and joy. How to self-assess, find your problematic obstacles and dissolve them with a consciousness alternate to the one which created the obstacle or problem. How to spontaneously self-heal and how to be a hollow bone channel for others. All this happens with the support of community, amidst chanting and healing tears, dancing, joy and laughter.
Another important thrust of our mission is to train solid professional practitioners from conventional and alternative health care and service professions (medicine, psychology, chiropractic, social work, education, ministry, massage and healing touch, Reiki, and so on– because we believe that increasing the number of visionary professional practitioners will be highly beneficial in helping shape-shift world-views and those ways of living that are not honoring of the soul of humans nor of the planet, to one of respect and caring for the soul of things, human and non-human. Those who come are not limited to professionals. Many who join us in Crows Nest Wounded Healer workshops and retreats come out of intrinsic interests, a desire to self-transform, develop a spiritual path that fits them well, and step into their power to make a heart-open and earth-honoring difference in the world.
We offer introductory level teachings for the public and those with a new interest in shamanism and journey work, and advanced training programs in shamanic healing, shamanic counseling, sacred breath and trance-dancing, and various methods of responding to soul injuries with various forms of soul recovery and care. All of our events take place in the context of sacred ceremony, drumming, chanting, dancing, story telling and beauty. The practices and the wisdom we teach are either sacred ceremonies, or occur in their ambiance.
Crows Nest USA is situated at the edge of a 648 acre forest in SW Michigan, with miles of hiking and cross country trails, and surrounded by lakes and marshes for canoeing and fishing. There is a guest cabin in the deep woods, and many campsites, two sacred fire pits, a Medicine Lodge for workshops, a conference room, and two scholarly libraries well stocked in the areas of medical anthropology, mythology, depth psychology, and shamanism. Some Ph.D students in areas related to shamanism and Jungian studies, as well as those seeking individual work or apprenticeships with Mikkal make use of the guest cabin and libraries.
On the Resources tab you will find links to articles and sacred practices in English, and French.
Founded and directed by the Jungian psychologist,medical anthropologist,and shamanic teacher Dr. C. Michael Smith (Mikkal), Crows Nest Center for Shamanic Studies offers several professional certification programs which can be found on the Workshop page.