Description
Crossing the Threshold is a four-month sacred journey, combining ecotherapy and expressive arts and culminating in a wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony.
“What happens when you open to the biggest conversation you can have with the world and your deepest self?”
Crossing the Threshold is a rite-of-passage disguised as a four-month conversation with the more-than-human world, your purpose, and the parts of you that have been waiting for permission to arrive.
The voice of our true self beyond our inherited scripts does not give up easily. It is always there, whispering-and sometimes shouting-amidst the other sounds and distractions of Modernity. After frequently ignoring it, or batting it away, there comes a time to set aside sacred time and space to touch back into the layers of connection with our heart, spirit, and body. We hear the call and we answer. We choose to intentionally cross the threshold into the next layer of our deepening life and how it serves the world and liberation in the ecosystem of the Great Turning.
Join us in Crossing the Threshold, a four-month sacred journey combining elements of earth connection and creative arts and culminating in a wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony. We hold it as a powerful container to navigate these liminal times together and deepen our understanding of our unique paths forward.
What This Journey Invites:
- A Deepening of Your Listening—to Earth, to the unseen, to the parts of you silenced by speed and paving over
- Sacred Time outside the world’s scripts, so something truer can surface.
- A Deep Apprenticeship with the four elements and wild nature as teachers and mirrors.
- Earth Community that doesn’t fix you or coach you, but truly witnesses you – what is here and what is becoming.
- A Ceremonial Container that honors the ancient arc: severance, threshold encounter, return.
The Arc of the Journey:
- February–March: Two online gatherings each month to prepare the inner and outer ground—tending intention, fear, nature connection, longing, thresholds, and the call of your next phase.
- Spring: A six-day wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony in the desert, including two nights solo on the land.
- Incorporation: A council circle for integration—because crossing a threshold is only half the story; living into it in an embodied way is the work of a lifetime.
Beginning in February, we will gather twice a month online to connect, deepen our intentions for our next steps aligned with our purpose, experiment with the 4 elements, and attune to our inner and outer wilderness landscapes. The program culminates in a 6-day renewal rite-of-passage ceremony in the Mojave desert in Southern California, where you will have two-nights out solo on the land and 4 days connecting in earth community, allowing yourself to be witnessed in your authentic story. Because integration and incorporation are core parts of bringing our vision and gifts into the world, we will hold a post-ceremony council over Zoom in May.
Who This is For:
- People at a crossroads, who sense a turning point in their lives—grief, transition, a calling, burnout, completion, emergence, celebration—and want to meet it with ceremony, community, Earth, and clarity.
- Not people seeking to fix themselves, but those ready to listen, shed, stop preteding, and step through.
- For those who feel a part of you is already dying, and a part that is yearning to be born through that death.
- For those who have been carrying a gift or medicine quietly—maybe even hiding it—and know in your bones it is time to bring it forward.
- For those exploring the big questions is life: What are my gifts? What parts of me long to be seen? What patterns or habits no longer serve me or others? How can I hospice modernity and return to values and lifeways that are nourishing and liberatory? How can I show up for myself and others in this time of polycrises and opportunity?
To be clear: This is not another retreat and not a workshop-It is a ceremony stretched across a season, woven through ecotherapy, expressive arts, elemental practice, and a wilderness solo that marks your passage from one chapter of life into another.
We hold this journey as sacred and we will be with you every step of the way!
DATES: On-the-Land Ceremony, FALL 2026 (dates TBA)
+5 Online Gatherings: 5 Monday evenings
ENERGY EXCHANGE: $1300-1600 (with some sliding scale spots with priority given to BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+) – payment plans available)
LOCATION: Mojave Desert, Southern California
Group limit: 12 Participants
Each online gathering includes:
- Nature-connection and expressive arts components, somatic and soulful experientials, centered around the four elements and deep listening
- Invitations for the in-between to practice and deepen connection with our other-than-human kin and our most authentic selves as it serves the collective
- Council Circle and Mirroring
- Clear Steps of Preparation for our time on the land
(See this doc for more detail about our gatherings leading up to the on-the-land Immersion. See this doc for Frequently Asked Questions)
Once you register, you will receive a welcome email with links to the 5 zoom classes, along with registration forms, a packing list and more details about our time together on the land.
Contact ryan@wildnatureheart.com or jillynn@ecotonescounseling.com with questions, to arrange a payment plan, or to set up a chat.
% of the program proceeds will go to front-line indigenous water and earth protectors.
About our Location: Mojave Desert, Southern California
Mojave National Preserve offers a variety of treasures, with sweeping views, solitude, dark night skies, and nearly 700,000 acres of designated wilderness. We will be there at the start of the wildflower blooms. Our basecamp will have a vault toilet. You will find your sacred solo spot (or it will find you), within a half mile or so of basecamp.
YOUR GUIDES:
Ryan Van Lenning and Jillynn Garcia
Jillynn Garcia – Witnessing, Tending, Transmuting
Jillynn Garcia is a creative healer and explorer of the deep within and great beyond. Jillynn draws on ritual, plant medicine and the guidance of her Tainos ancestors and animal kin as she makes her way through this lifetime; paintbrush in her hand, riverstone in her pocket and birdsong in her heart. She believes that our authentic selves emerge from the juiciness of leaning into liminal spaces and ecotones.
As an Art Therapist, Marriage and Family Therapist, Ecotherapist and Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy practitioner, Jillynn brings her deep care, compassion and creativity to supporting the unfolding of one’s
own innate inner wisdom. Through creativity and connection with the more than human world, Jillynn specializes in supporting individuals from the LGBTQIA2S+ populations, neurodivergent individuals and those unwinding individual and multigenerational trauma. Jillynn also runs expressive arts ecotherapy retreats for individuals navigating various life transitions. Jillynn is a highly relational therapist and holds a core belief that growth and healing happen best in connection. As such, she is a weaver who brings people together so that we can hold one another’s pain and mirror back our beauty.
Jillynn holds a dual Master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and Clinical Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University. She is certified as an ecotherapist through The Earthbody Institute and as a Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy practitioner through Synaptic Institute. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the Graduate Art Therapy Department at Lewis and Clark College.
Jillynn has a private Eco-Art Therapy practice on the native lands of the Clackamas, Cowlitz, Grand Rhonde and Siletz Nations, (Portland, Oregon) where she lives with her human and more-than-human family.
Learn more about me and my arts-based ecotherapy work here.
Ryan Van Lenning – composting, re-imagining, co-liberating
My name is Ryan Van Lenning, Founder of Wild Nature Heart, and I am an earth-lover with a deep desire to be of service in the work of re-connection and re-membering during this Great Turning/Great Composting. My life changed when I really started listening and apprenticing to Water and the seasons. I started Wild Nature Heart to support people to re-connect with the wisdom of both inner and outer wild nature, to live their soul callings into the world, and to assist in the work of repairing broken belonging. I believe each of us has unique gifts that the world needs as we birth new imaginations and ways of being beyond Empire, and I love mirroring people’s stories as they deepen into their wholeness and next aligned steps.
I am an inner/outer wilderness guide and poet (author of Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony, From Inside These Wild Ones, One Bright and Real Caress, Re-Membering: Poems of Earth & Soul and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest). I am certified as an Ecotherapist through The Earthbody Institute, at which I teach the Level 1-3 Ecotherapy courses. I am trained as a rite-of-passage/wilderness vision fast guide through the School of Lost Borders, and am a Certified Wilderness First Responder through Foster Calm. Prior to moving to California years ago, I taught Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Environmental Ethics at Sinclair College in Ohio. I live among the forests and rivers in northern California, ancestral Wiyot and Yurok land.
MORE ABOUT WILDERNESS CEREMONY
“Doing a vision fast or wilderness rite-of-passage will not make your life easier, but it will make it more authentic.”
—Scott Eberle, School Of Lost Borders guide
Cultures across the globe and from time immemorial have incorporated rites-of-passage ceremony as meaningful ways to mark stages of life and to become fully human. We believe wilderness rites-of-passage ceremonies or vision fasts are a missing component of our modern culture.
The modern day wilderness rite-of-passage is a new/old practice of setting time aside in sacred ceremony to be in/with/as wild nature in order to leave behind the voices of the consumer society, cross over into a liminal space where your senses re-awaken, you reclaim your belonging, and you re-member your place as a part of and a-kin to the other-than-human world.
It is an opportunity to claim what is alive, to mark a transition, to clarify your vision and meaningful action, to step into your power.
In wilderness ceremony, we cross a threshold and what we find there is a world alive with sentience and with meaning and we come into a conversation with animals, trees, rocks, sky, and our own true natures. From this conversation we may come away with treasure; inspired and imbued with pieces of our truest voice and wild purpose.
One way to hold rites-of-passage is through the three stages of Severance Threshold, and Incorporation:
1)Severance: You sever ties to the old life, the old habits, the old ways of thinking and doing-those no longer serve you or your people. Preparation for the threshold involves forming and refining your intentions and saying goodbye temporarily to friends and family. An inner circle will help hold your journey. There is a dying to the old, to make space for the new that is emerging and already alive in you. On the land, you will be given earth-based tools and toys to support you psychically and physically for your time solo on the land.
2)Threshold: After preparation and deepening with your cohort and guides, you are blessed as you step across the threshold with intention into a liminal state to fast solo on the land for a period of time. Here you will have the largest conversation you can have with the world. You will have a buddy and your guides will always be at basecamp, holding your intentions.
3)Incorporation: You cross back across the threshold and return to Council Circle. nourish your body and re-join community. The Circle will hear the stories that your journeys into wild nature and your psyche have gifted. Your guides and cohort will listen, and then mirror your story back to you as medicine for yourself and for the group. Celebration night with dance, fire, and song affirms what has been undertaken. Finally, Incorporation Council is held to support carrying the vision and new understandings back into the world and your community and find ever-deepening ways to embody that experience.
It is important to remember that the point of going out (on the mountain, as we say) is to come back in our wholeness as medicine for the people and Earth, to serve Life and Liberation. For more, Read “The Purpose of Going Out is to Come Back” on Medium.
APPRECIATIONS:
“Jillynn and Ryan created a space where I was able to spend two days with nature and the river as my only external companions. I re-connected with younger selves who’d been working nonstop to protect me since childhood. I listened for my inner voices and they responded with clarity and a call for rest and rejuvenation which I followed these past months. I am more attuned to the voice of my spirit and my ancestors since being on the land and at more ease in acting in accordance with spiritual and ancestral guidance.” —Participant, Crossing the Threshold, Lesley G Delapaz (Summer 2025)
“Ryan and Jillynn are skilled facilitators, authentic, genuine and embody eco-expressive arts therapy in their work and life. I felt held by them, seen by them and transformed parts of myself through this experience. I highly recommend working with them!” —Participant, Crossing the Threshold (Summer 2025)
“This was a powerful experience! Powerful in that subtle way that comes with feeling heard and cared for and understood – a camaraderie.” —Participant, Crossing the Threshold (Summer 2025)
“Ryan’s facilitation was superb. I felt his presence like a steadfast oak, and his ability to hold and meet everything that was brought to class was refreshing. He held the space with a lot of grace and created time for us to meet the grief & pain that lives beneath all that paves over it. It was more than just being given information – he invited us into embodied states of being with the wisdom, and created a structure which offered us to meander like streams through different ideas and concepts together.” —Participant, Level 1 Ecotherapy, Spring 2025
“I have worked with Ryan in different courses and contexts, both virtually and in person on the land. I find him to be a skilled guide, gentle but powerful, who creates invitations to experiences that provide safety to swim in liminal spaces where deep work blossoms into growth, all in the absence of ego. Not only is Ryan very knowledgeable but he listens deeply and provides mirroring that leaves you feeling seen and honored. The spaces he creates encourage productive struggle and growth with a healthy dose of play.”—Participant, Deep Belonging in the Great Turning, 2025
“Thank you for your dedication to this work and for modeling new/old ways of being in leadership and community! I gained a sense of companionship on the journey of exploring some of life and death’s biggest questions. The community formed in the group gave me a glimpse into how we can come together to unlearn, deconstruct, remember, and create more natural and balanced ways of being and relating. One of my biggest take-aways is understanding belonging as something inherent rather than “found” or “earned”. Being witnessed and witnessing others after our solo time on the land was very powerful and deeply meaningful to me on my/our journey.” —Leslie Hammer, Deep Belonging in the Great Turning (Fall 2022)
“Thank you again Ryan for your mentorship prior to this quest of mine. You empowered me to trust in myself, in the wild, and in the ceremony and it seemed so fitting to receive these gifts of yours just prior to a decent. I love and am sincerely grateful for your poem. It certainly helped give me courage to unflinchingly make those leaps over trees and off every known cliff and will continue to do so. I feel super motivated to continue on this path of mine and stay open to all the wild mysteries that present themselves within myself and within this more-than human world of ours. And to taking the next steps in unfurling my own gifts and presenting them to the world.”— Brady W., Wisconsin, 1-on-1 Ecotherapy Client and Course Participant
“I loved this course! This is the second course I’ve taken with Ryan and both times I felt affirmed and supported as he led us on a journey delving into themes of belonging, being, grieving, healing, and growing. Ryan encouraged us to engage with the more-than-human-world on an intimate level of discovery and connection thus cultivating a more earth-centered life. I highly recommend this course to anyone seeking a deeper connection with self and with the natural world.” —Cecelia Futch, Deep Belonging in the Great Turning (Fall 2022)
“Ryan was FANTASTIC. He was knowledgeable and most importantly, a great listener and guide. I greatly admired his mirroring skills, which have clearly been learned from Mother Nature herself. I have learned so much from Ryan and look forward to incorporating his techniques into my practice as well.” — Participant in Spring 2021 Earthbody Institute Ecotherapy Certificate Course
“I find myself repeatedly touched by the depth of your caring for Earth and all her beings and by your dedication to practice and evolving new pathways of relationship and culture. I am moved by the presence that you bring to deep listening and your willingness to explore different perspectives. Your ability to express through poetry and action what’s in your heart and your desire for healthy relationship among all beings is a source of inspiration for me.” —Marianne B. Rowe, MS, LMFT, Summer 2022 Level 3 Ecotherapy Training, Earthbody Institute
“Ryan’s well-designed course on Deep Belonging for the Great Turning was just what I needed at a stressful time in life. The facilitation, knowledge and materials shared were generous and truly a gift to enhance my nature connection and learn about myself. This course also provided support for a solo experience which was rich and rewarding. I appreciated being in a group and connecting with other like-minded people.” — Lezlie Scaliatine, Psy.D, California, Deep Belonging for the Great Turning Course Participant
“Ryan is an amazing human being and teacher. This course will nurture your soul, challenge you, and open up new ways of seeing yourself and our wonderous planet. I will definitely be signing up for another Wild Nature Heart experience!” —Rob Daroff, MD, Deep Belonging in the Great Turning (Fall 2022)
“Ryan is a very thoughtful and sensitive guide. His background in teaching and poetry, along with his ability to effectively “mirror” our stories about our journeys make him an excellent facilitator. Ryan helped us to organize our thoughts and feelings in this politically and environmentally challenging time, gave us hope, and guided us towards developing a personal plan for coping with the future of our planet.”
— Nan S., California, Deep Belonging for the Great Turning Course Participant
“This course is a deep-dive across 6 weeks. Ryan’s skill and generosity of spirit has guided me through a variety of themes and practices that have been both thought-provoking and empowering. I’ve valued this time immensely, and the abundant materials provided will keep me moving through this journey for a long time to come. I’ve developed a richer relationship with my Urban Wild environment in very unexpected ways, and for that I am so very grateful.” —Claire (United Kingdom)
