Join us for our 6th season of Healing Camp with the Coyote Institute—a 4-Day program focusing on healing trauma.
This four-day program is an immersive healing camp at The Nest in Woodstock, co-led by Lewis Mehl‑Madrona, Barbara Mainguy, Peter Blum, and Stefanie Frank, dedicated to personal transformation and the healing of trauma through story, ceremony, and relationship with land and community.
Together, we will explore the nature and spirit of healing. We will use story work, sacred drama, and ceremony to bring us closer to the muses of healing. We will use hypnosis, song, movement, and drumming - and laughter, to help us unfold the blocks to finding our joy.
Healing Camp Highlights:
Join us at our forest sanctuary on Mount Guardian, a retreat space explicitly devoted to holistic transformation through storytelling, ritual, and earth‑honoring practices. The overarching intention of the four days is to create a safe ceremonial container in which participants can lay down old trauma‑shaped stories and step into renewed ways of living, supported by community, the elements, and Indigenous‑inspired teachings about balance and harmony.
A concluding purification lodge, sometimes referred to as “inipi” or “stone people’s lodge, followed by a shared potluck meal.
Whether you're healing, helping others heal, or simply seeking transformation, this is camp for the soul.
Activities:
Wednesday and Thursday:
During the first two days of camp, we focus on arriving, connecting, and listening deeply to ourselves and to one another. Through a series of guided exercises and group processes, we begin to understand the unique healing needs each guest brings. Drawing on the expertise of our guides, we’ll work with storytelling, imagery, hypnosis, movement, drumming, mask-making, and sacred play to create a flexible, responsive environment where the direction of the work emerges from the group itself. These days are about building trust, opening imagination, and laying the foundation for meaningful transformation.
Friday Evening: All‑Night Sacred Fire
On Friday, a sacred fire is lit and tended throughout the night as a living center of prayer, reflection, and community presence. Participants will join us in moving between silence and shared song, drumming, storytelling, and quiet time by the flames, using the fire as a place to offer grief, fear, and trauma‑laden narratives, and to call in new possibilities, guidance, and courage. Participants are encouraged to stay by the fire as long as feels right, resting whenever your body calls you to sleep.
Saturday: Inipikaga (Inipi / Sweat Lodge)
On Saturday, those who choose to participate enter an inipikaga, a sweat‑lodge ceremony rooted in Lakota tradition, in which heated stones, steam, and prayer are used for purification and rebirth. Inipi, meaning “they breathe,” is understood as a rite of purification and spiritual renewal; the lodge is experienced as the womb of the universe, a place to release burdens and emerge with a sense of being made new. A community potluck will be held after the Inipi.
Coyote Institute at the N.E.S.T. 2021 - 2025
Facilitators
Lewis, Barbara, and Peter bring their long‑standing work with Indigenous‑informed healing, narrative, and ceremony—using story, movement, guided imagery, hypnosis, and talking circles to help people find their “inner healer” and reshape the stories that organize their lives. Stefanie, as founder of the ESKFF Nest, weaves in music, sound healing, earth‑based ritual, and nature connection, grounding the work in the land and in the Nest’s community‑centered vision of metamorphosis.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, focusing on what Native culture offers the modern world. He has also written Narrative Medicine; Healing the Mind through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative Psychiatry; and his most recent book, with Barbara Mainguy, Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story. He graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.
Barbara Mainguy studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Toronto and received her master’s degree in Creative Arts Psychotherapy at Concordia University in Montreal. She has co-written Remapping Your Mind: the Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story with Lewis Mehl-Madrona. Currently, she works with Lewis in Orono, Maine, and is the Director of Education for the Coyote Institute in Orono. She is affiliated with the School of Social Work at the University of Maine.
Peter Blum, C.Ht., M.S.C., lives in Woodstock, where he has practiced Ericksonian hypnotherapy, NLP, and sound healing for three decades. He is a Certified Instructor for the National Guild of Hypnotists, and is Director of the Hypnotic Education Division of Coyote Institute. Peter has been honored with numerous awards in the field of hypnosis and in 2021, was inducted into the Hypnosis Hall of Fame.He has studied with Beautiful Painted Arrow (Joseph Rael) and Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and is also well known for his work in the field ofsound healing.
Stefanie Frank is a dynamic and multifaceted individual known for her diverse contributions to the field of healing arts and community building. She is the founder and director of ESKFF Nest, a healing arts refuge and retreat center located in the serene surroundings of Woodstock, NY. As a visionary retreat leader, Stefanie is committed to creating transformative experiences that cater to the spiritual and holistic well-being of individuals.
Learn more about Coyote Institute: https://www.coyote-institute.org/