Director of Crows Nest Wilderness Retreat and Conference Center, Dowagiac, Michigan, Mikkal is also director of Crows Nest Centers for Shamanic Studies International in France and Belgium, and currently teaching in Paris and Payzac; Captetown, South Africa, and Iquitos, Peru.
An active clinical psychologist and medical anthropologist, Mikkal is author of PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED (Chicago), and JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE (Paulist, Trafford),and has served as peer reviewer for the Journal of Anthroplology of Consciousness, and published his research with Kye Nelson on “Heart, Health and Disease: A Medical-Anthropological Study” (NOVA Science Publishers). Mikkal is a Keynote lecturer and workshop teacher in the field of Jungian psychology in creative dialogue with shamanic studies, presenting and keynoting at various shamanic conferences and Jung Societies in North America. He was keynote speaker for the 8th Annual International Conference on Shamanism in Iquitos, Peru in July, 2012, and a featured presenter in 2013. He and the maestro of plant medicine, Raul Diego Nelson Falch, Ph.D. also a presenter in Iquitos introduced him to several different plant medicine recipes, and Mikkal became very impressed with Dr Falch’s way of bringing out the psychological and physical healing capacities of the plant medicines using a scientific framework. Together they collaborated in a conjoint workshop in Iquitos, in 2013.
A research consultant to graduate students and writers in the fields of depth psychology, shamanism, myth and ritual, and transpersonal psychology, Mikkal has served for years on doctoral committees of Pacfica Graduate Institute, California Institute of Integral Studies, Argossy University, and Andrews University. He has lectured in the University of Chicago Divinity School in Healing Systems Across cultures, and has taught Jungian studies and Shamanism at the Chicago Theological Seminary, at Institut Ressources, Bruxelles, Belgium, and Centre Trimurti in Cogolin, on the Riviera.
He has led more than 200 workshops and retreats on shamanism, Jungian psychology, and his method of Sacred Breathwork, world-wide and for many years is a teaching faculty and member of the the international circle of shamanic teachers, Le Cercle de Sagesse Ancestrale de l’Union,. He was elected into Le College de Chamanique in Paris in 2014.