California Woodland Institute was founded in 2024 with the intention of integrating depth psychotherapy, equine therapy, and ecopsychology in a place-based, rooted institute that offers therapeutic services, research, and clinical training. Temenos is a Jungian concept that invites us to consider how the places and partners of healing are specifically related to the material realities of the ecosystem we are in. CWI is an attempt to consider what a holistic and integrated therapeutic practice could look like in a culture that is so often disconnected from its own history and place. 

On a basic level we want to answer the question: What would it take to provide a healing space in nature that acknowledges the historical and present wounds in individuals, cultures, and ecosystems? The practice of finding home is an ancient, winding, and treacherous path that requires support, challenge, care, and compassion. For us here at CWI, this journey has required human connection, animal connection, and plant connection; it has required periods of conversation, periods of silence, and movement in our bodies.  

CWI intends to be a place where you can take your time to be invited into your own connection. These connections matter to us. We tend them together. And the desire to relieve suffering doesn’t just end at the boundary of one ego, but extends into the web of the wild.