Example of a High Threshold Invitation
Many of you have been excited and interested by the concept of a high-threshold invitation, so we thought it'd be good to offer you a concrete example. Note that this event has already happened.
Invitation Email
This is an invitation from Tuesday and Gibrán Rivera, working in partnership with the Animas Valley Institute (AVI)
We are delighted to invite you to participate in a special offering.
Wild Mind Intensive: A Mythopoetic Journey Centering Racialized Leaders
You will not have to pay tuition for the program, but you will have to cover your travel costs as well as borrow or purchase camping equipment suitable for potentially low temperatures. It is also likely that you will have to schedule a travel day including lodging before and after the workshop.
Attached, you will find a very LONG High Threshold Invitation. We want to be clear that the language of the invitation comes from work we (Tuesday and Gibrán) have been developing on moving From Fragility to Fortitude. This is work that extends well beyond this specific immersion and beyond our partnership with AVI.
Apologizing again for writing so many, many words, we think it important to share the story about this unique partnership with AVI.
Some years ago, we began working with the AVI through offering our workshop “What Should White People Do?” We developed that workshop as an alternative to the dominant racial justice discourse that solidified as dogma in response to the racial uprisings of 2020.
Our work with AVI evolved into the development of a Racial Justice Community of Practice for Depth Guides, specifically for white depth guides. This community includes people doing the nature-based work that AVI excels at, as well as therapists, somatic practitioners and psychedelic guides. During this community of practice, we became convinced that there was something important for us and our communities to learn from the work of AVI.
In the process of this work, it became clear that an ongoing partnership would be best served if we had a direct experience of the power of their work. To that end, we both participated in a Soulcraft Intensive. Later, Tuesday participated in Coming Home to an Animate World, and Gibrán participated in Sweet Darkness.
It is not an overstatement to say that our experience of these potent immersions along with Bill Plotkin’s writing, a series of separate partnerships with other Animas-trained guides, including our ongoing partnership with our friends at the Wolf Willow Institute have re-oriented our lives. The process has moved us to do our part to make this life-changing work available to racialized communities, who have very little access to it.
At the same time, this experience made us aware of a whole set of landmines that could get in the way of both accessibility and integration.
To that end, and thanks to the vision and direct invitation of Geneen Marie Haugen, we began to dream up this specific offering of the Animas Valley Institute’s Wild Mind Intensive, centering racialized bodies.
Please take a careful look at our invitation, and let us know whether you feel called to be a participant.
With great care and respect,
Tuesday and Gibrán
High Threshold Invitation
Wild Mind Intensive
A Mythopoetic Journey Centering Racialized Leaders
What This Invitation Means
When we invite you to consider this work together, we want you to know that it is a High Threshold Invitation.
We want to be clear about what we mean: This is an ask that makes the real stakes visible. Instead of making participation sound easy, convenient, or cost-free, we will name the difficulty and the commitment required.
We call you into responsibility and choice.
The Work Itself
This gathering will center the mythopoetic, soul-oriented work of the Animas Valley Institute, experimentally adapted for Black and Brown participants and including selected white participants and guides.
By agreeing to be part of something in development, you are agreeing to participate in something that is not yet complete. In this way your participation is both a consent to risk as well as a form of service for those who will follow
You will discover:
How to recognize and consciously cultivate the four facets of the Self — your innate human wholeness
How to identify the subpersonalities that supported you in childhood and adolescence to adapt to the challenges of family and social life, but ultimately became barriers to your full and authentic humanity
Practices and guidelines for cultivating relationships between the Self and your subpersonalities, enabling you to heal your subpersonalities, discover their gifts, and foster Self-actualization
How each facet of the Self provides essential resources for the underworld journey (the descent to soul), its radical transformation of personal identity, and for living as a visionary artisan of cultural evolution
You will be invited into:
Deep nature immersion and its wisdom - the land itself as teacher and guide
Work with your own soul's purposes and gifts - discovering what you were born to offer
Shadow work - meeting the parts of yourself you've kept hidden, including internalized oppression and survival strategies
Exploration of the collective wounds we carry as people of color - held with dignity rather than as identity
Practice in holding your sovereignty while in mixed-race spaces
The cultivation of wholeness across all dimensions of your being
We'll explore the landscape of the psyche through a variety of practices, including creative expression, self-designed ceremony, solo exercises while wandering on the land, group work, movement, voice dialogue, arrhythmic music, journaling, and deep imagery work.
This is not therapy. This is not racial justice activism. This is soulcraft - the work of becoming who you are meant to become, in service to the world that needs you. It is depth psychology meets nature-based soul initiation, in a container that honors the specific complexity of racialized experience without being reduced to it.
Who This Invitation Is For
This is an invitation to individuals who are committed to developing the kind of self-sovereignty necessary to enter a collective inquiry in which no one loses their autonomy.
This work is for you if:
You are developmentally ready - You have done enough healing work that you can hold your own sovereignty in complex, emotionally charged spaces. You don't need others to protect you from your feelings, though you may need support to process them.
You are resourced - You have access to support systems (whether therapeutic, spiritual, community, or otherwise) that help you tend to your wounds outside this container.
You are oriented toward maturation and liberation - Not just your own, but for all beings. You see your development as in service to something larger than yourself.
You can hold multiplicity - You can sit with the discomfort of multiple truths being true at once. You don't need to resolve complexity into simple binaries of right/wrong, good/bad.
You can weather edgy provocations - You are willing to have your assumptions challenged, to sit with not knowing, to be uncomfortable. You understand that transformation requires crossing thresholds.
What We (Tuesday and Gibrán) Believe
We believe we live in a society that produces racialized outcomes. We also believe that we are subject to all kinds of trauma - personal, cultural, and generational trauma.
What we no longer have time for is the politics of resentment. Nor the politics of identitarianism.
We no longer want to create spaces where people feel entitled to police each other's language, practices and ways of being.
We want to nurture fortitude, not to center fragility.
We are committed to work that heals. And we understand that many of us might need time to tend to our healing before we develop self-sovereignty. This is good. It is part of the process. But this particular gathering is for those who have already done enough of that work to show up with agency and presence.
We no longer have time for a trauma discourse that focuses on blame. We don't have time for a trauma discourse that makes everyone else wrong while we make ourselves and our tiny group of friends right.
We also don't believe it is wise to foster the illusion of absolute safety. No one in the course of human history has ever had anything like it.
We want to hold spaces where it is not only okay, but essential, for people to "not know that they don't know."
About the Guides and the Container
The guides are white. We name this explicitly because it matters. They have been doing this work for decades and have deep integrity in their practice. They know the territory of the psyche, the language of nature, the arc of soul initiation. They are also learning - about how to better do this work with people of color, about their own blind spots and limitations, about the white shadow that has shaped their organization for 40 years.
This is part of the experiment: We understand what we are calling “depth work” as work that must fundamentally challenge our previously held identities.
We want to find out whether:
Depth work that was developed primarily in white spaces be adapted to serve racialized participants without losing its essential power?
We can hold both the universal human journey AND the specific racialized wound?
We can create a container where transformation happens precisely because we're not trying to make everything safe, but rather safe enough for wholeness?
As racialized participants, you may experience moments where you feel hurt, misunderstood, or where something lands wrong. The language may feel like appropriation. The practices may trigger complicated feelings about indigeneity and cultural reclamation. You may feel the weight of being brown bodies in a space shaped by whiteness.
We are creating structures to support you in those moments:
Pre-workshop calls to build relationship and set expectations
Tuesday and Gibrán as seed participants (not guides, but fellow travelers who can hold some of this complexity)
Space to process outside the main container when needed
Explicit naming of racial dynamics rather than pretending they don't exist
Post-workshop integration support
But we are not creating a space where:
White people must be perfect or never cause harm
Racialized people must be perfect or never cause harm
You must protect white people from their discomfort
The work stops every time something feels racialized
You must perform either strength or woundedness for others
We are creating a space safe enough for wholeness - for everyone's wholeness. A space where you may feel hurt AND you are responsible for how you respond to that hurt. Where you can name impact without requiring perfect understanding. Where you can hold your sovereignty even when things are imperfect. Where transformation happens not despite the difficulty, but through it.
What Will Be Difficult
Let us be truthful about the cost:
You will be uncomfortable. This work goes into the places we usually avoid - our shadows, our wounds, our unlived potential. You will face aspects of yourself you may not like.
You will be challenged. Your ideas, your identity, your ways of seeing yourself and the world will be questioned. Not to tear you down, but to help you see what's underneath the constructs.
You may feel unseen at times. Despite our best efforts, moments will arise where you feel the whiteness of the container, the limitations of guides who don't share your experience, the weight of being a person of color in a particular space.
Your hurt is yours to tend. While we will create support structures and space for processing, you are responsible for your own healing. We will not control the world to keep you from feeling pain. We will help you build the capacity to meet your pain with wisdom and sovereignty.
This will disrupt your life. As Bill Plotkin warns all participants: this work can crack you open in ways that change everything. It is not safe in the sense of comfortable or predictable.
You will be asked to sit with paradox. To hold that racism is real AND that you are not only defined by racism. That white people have caused harm AND that they are not the enemy. That you carry wounds AND that you are not reducible to your wounds.
What We Are Learning Together
This is an experiment. We are learning how to do depth work, soul initiation work, in ways that honor racialized realities without being consumed by them. In ways that acknowledge collective wounds without making individuals responsible for healing them through controlling their environment.
You would be joining us in this learning. Your experience, your wisdom, your feedback will shape how this work evolves.
One of our highest hopes for this work is that some of you may be called to eventually train as guides yourselves - to bring this work into more communities, to deepen it with your own cultural wisdom and perspectives.
This Work May Not Be For You If:
You are looking primarily for therapy or healing support for recent trauma
You need others to manage their behavior to keep you feeling safe
You are not willing to have your ideas challenged or to sit with not knowing
You expect white people to be perfect or to never cause harm
You are invested in maintaining clear categories of victim/perpetrator/rescuer
You need this work to conform to a particular ideological framework
You cannot weather being in a space that is "white enough" to occasionally trigger you
You are primarily seeking validation, community, or belonging rather than transformation
You require that hurt always be acknowledged in a specific way before you can continue
The Invitation
We are inviting you to step across a threshold. To come into a space where we will tend to the collective wound of racialization with dignity and maturity. Where we will do the deep work of soul initiation. Where we will practice being in mixed-race spaces without giving away our power or needing rescue.
You are genuinely free to say no. The power of this invitation comes from the fact that acceptance is a conscious, voluntary choice. Those who cross the threshold are more likely to show up with seriousness, presence, and accountability.
We trust in your capacity to know whether this is for you. We trust that if you say yes, you will bring your whole self - your gifts, your struggles, your questions, and your commitment.
Practical Details
When: September 4 - 9, 2026
Where: Gros Ventre Campground, Grand Teton National Park, Kelly Wyoming
Cost: Animas has secured institutional funding for this workshop, so there is no cost of tuition for participants. All participants will be asked to cover costs for their own travel and any needed camping equipment.
Cohort Size: 12-16 participants
Guides: Doug Van Houten and Laura Gunion
Support: Tuesday and Gibrán Rivera will participate as "seed participants" - not as guides, but as people who model full participation and are available for support before, during, and after the gathering.
In Closing
This work is not easy. It is not comfortable. It is not safe in the way our culture teaches us to want safety.
But it is profound. It is transformative. It is in service to the world that desperately needs mature, whole, sovereign people of color who know their gifts and are willing to offer them.
If you feel called, we want to walk this path with you.
With care and respect,
Tuesday & Gibrán Rivera
In collaboration with the Animas Valley Institute