California Woodland Institute is a home for depth psychotherapy, equine-assisted clinical work, and psychoanalytic/ecopsychological training.
Located in Upper Ojai, California, CWI brings together clinical practice, professional education, and ongoing inquiry into the relational, symbolic, embodied, and environmental dimensions of psychotherapy. We offer therapy and equine-assisted psychotherapy for clients, as well as consultation groups, continuing education, and seminars for clinicians.
Our work is grounded in the belief that healing and clinical learning require more than technique. They require attention to relationship, imagination, uncertainty, body, place, and the living field between self and other.
Clinical Services
CWI offers depth-oriented psychotherapy and equine-assisted psychotherapy for individuals, couples, and families. Our clinical work is relational, psychodynamic, and attentive to the ways symptoms, relationships, histories, bodies, and environments shape one another.
Training & Continuing Education
CWI provides clinical training for therapists and helping professionals interested in psychoanalytic thinking, equine-assisted psychotherapy, crisis work, ecopsychology, and contemporary questions in clinical practice. Trainings may include CE courses, seminars, experiential intensives, consultation groups, and case-based learning.
Consultation & Institute Life
CWI is also a place for ongoing clinical thought, consultation, writing, and community. Through consultation groups, essays, reading, teaching, and conversation, we support clinicians in deepening their capacity for imagination, uncertainty, ethical responsibility, and relational presence.
our story
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.
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.
