My name is Alyssa Ellegaard and I am a first-year student at Southwestern College. My journey at SWC began before classes started during this past fall’s Wilderness Fast in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. I had just moved from Northwestern Minnesota a week before I was to embark on the Wilderness Fast. I knew very little…
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"We cannot heal the earth until we heal ourselves. We cannot heal ourselves until we heal the earth."
Kari-Oca Declaration of the 1992 Parliament of Indigenous Peoples
In 1992 I attended the World Parliament of Indigenous Peoples as an environmental journalist. I was one of a handful of non-Native people allowed to witness the proceeding.…
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Since beginning my apprenticeship as an art therapist/counselor in training here at SWC in 2014, I had my most challenging quarter in the spring of 2016. For the first two years I felt like I was doing a lot of personal transformation work in the safety of some of my cocoon-like classes. Since the beginning…
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Sylvan Schneider goes on a Vision Quest at Southwestern College, and shares his experience....…
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by Jessica Callaway, LPAT, LPCC, ATR-BC
I didn't know what to expect when I decided to go to Haiti. I realized when I was on the plane that I was partly, or mostly, going for selfish reasons. I was excited to practice art therapy and teach yoga in an environment I had never experienced,…
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In the last two weeks I lost my iPod, my apple’s hard-drive, my printer/fax followed by light flashes in my left eye, and my dog’s life.
The road has been bumpy, but I have strength garnered from the wilderness. There is a message: If I can learn to detach from the technology and embrace the…
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Southwestern College Santa Fe, NM