Program Details
May 31 (Sat) – June 8 (Sun), 2025
$2,500 (Guiding) + $500 (Camping/Food)
Adults age 21 and older
Lyons, Colorado
Praveen Mantena
Kelly McClelland
Jeffrey James
Our lives are shifting, the climate is changing, and the old ways of being as adults and leaders are no longer serving. Archaic societal structures and worn out paradigms that cause harm are breaking down. These significant transitions invite our hearts, minds and bodies to open to new ways of being, both personally and professionally.
How do we tend this collective rite of passage? What leadership styles or old ways are no longer serving you? What is dying in your personal or professional life? What is emerging? What does listening and joy look like now? What is being called forth in your unique ways as a leader for this next chapter? What seeds do you want to plant for the future as your legacy?
This rite of passage will specifically focus on leadership in our personal and professional lives. Leadership grounded in connection with the earth, living in integrity with our personal values, and what serves our constituents in this next chapter of our lives.
Who this program is for:
First let’s start with who this program is not for. This is not a program for curious dabblers, busy biohackers, or personal development consumers looking for their next fix. This is a ceremony and commitment for mature and emerging leaders alike, whatever form that leadership takes, be it parenting, partnership, organizational leadership, a path of entrepreneurship, or a career change. If you are a leader who wants to engage deeper to serve your calling, the people in your lives, and the well-being of the planet, then you’ve come to the right place.
As your guides we will support you on this journey physically, psychologically, and spiritually. There will be an intention setting process that will help you clarify the truth of who you are, and to ground into what is emerging in this next chapter. We will help prepare you for three days of fasting and solitude in nature. During this solo time you will reconnect to a more timeless and aligned place, to allow what’s dying to come to its rightful end, and bring forth what’s needing to emerge with greater clarity, wonder, and conviction.
Upon returning from the fast, we will mirror and reflect the story of your time on the land. After that, our integration process will support you to bring the fullness of who you are into your daily life, and the world you now co-create as a leader.
The Vision Fast will take place in a private and remote wilderness outside of Lyons, Colorado (an hour’s drive from Denver International Airport). Breakfast and Dinner will be provided with healthy organic food that will accommodate personal dietary restrictions. Lunch will be your own food or snacks.
As part of the preparation you will have an interview and prep call with one of the guides, and a group prep call before we meet in-person. We will have 3 follow-up group zoom calls to support you in the integration of the openings, experiences and learnings back into your life.
The journey in-person will happen in 3 phases:
01
Preparation & Intention-Setting
May 31st-June 2nd
02
3 Day Wilderness Solo Fast
June 3rd-6th
03
Return, Storytelling & Incorporation
June 6th-8th
Your Guides:
Praveen Mantena: A world traveler and cross-cultural nomad since childhood, Praveen (he/him) comes from an upbringing in Asia and the Middle East before calling America home. A life’s passion for guiding wilderness rites of passage was preceded by wide-ranging and eye-opening stints in the military, academia, the corporate/start-up world, and narrative art photography before the ceremony came calling.
He currently coaches, advises and mentors the leadership teams of start-up businesses and non-profit organizations in the principles of conscious and inclusive leadership. Praveen’s own journey in wilderness rites of passage first began with guiding programs for the School of Lost Borders, before transitioning to adapting and evolving the ceremony into both broader and more specialized contexts.
He is committed to bridging the timeless wisdom of the greater natural world with the sensibilities and challenges of our contemporary times, and finding one’s own courage, passion and guidance through it as a community leader.
Kelly McClelland: (she-ish) is a bi-lingual (English & Spanish) rite of passage guide and Nature-based Psychotherapist. She has guided outdoor programs for under-served youth, Corporate leadership teams, and higher-education clients for over 8 years. She also serves as a global educator for social and environmental justice programs in Central and South America for Where There Be Dragons. As a guide, she brings realness and an open heart. She shares her continuous reckoning and unlearning of white supremacy culture and re-rooting the earth honoring traditions of her Scottish, Irish, English, and Eastern European heritage.
Kelly is in the inquiry of how “modern-day” rites of passage can serve as a liberatory practice. How our ceremonies can tend to our lands, our culture, our kin. And help us embody the truth of who we are – divesting from the inherited stories, oppressive systems, and identities prescribed to us by society. To live what we know to be true – that we are not separate from nature. Our bodies and lives go through cycles and seasons, we don’t fit into binaries or boxes, and that the more diverse an ecosystem is – the more it thrives.
Currently, Kelly is on the Board of Wild Mountain Retreats and is the Creative Director for the Global Biodiversity Narrative Project. She also serves as part of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, Decolonization, and Inclusion (JEDDI) Council for the Wilderness Guides Council.
What makes her come alive is feeling the pull of catching that first wave, the sweet song of chickadee-dee-dee, connecting with plants, and side cramps from belly laughs.
Email: kelly@kelly-mcclelland.com
Website: kelly-mcclelland.com
Jeffrey James: Having lived for periods of time in all states on the west coast of the United States–including Hawaii and Alaska–for the first 4-1/2 decades of his life, he made his way inland to Colorado in 2016 and continues to make home in the hard-scrabble mountains and burbling streams that make up the Front Range Mountains.
Jeffrey came through the portal of traditional psychotherapy–he’s been in private practice since 2012–and he has been leading men’s group since 2015. He first encountered wilderness work via a training designed to help adults guide youth through rites of passage in 2015. At that time. his fire for the power of initiatory rites was lit. He’s assisting and guiding wilderness work since 2017 and continues to be more and more deeply called into the wilds within and without. Jeffrey’s work continues to shift from psychotherapy into the terrain of the Mystery, Soul, and the deeper work that is ours to do.
As a guide, Jeffrey brings a grounded calm, a quiet holding, and an intensity of presence with a fierce heart all in service to what most wants to emerge in each individual and in each group organism. He comes most alive in the realms of purpose, soul, and Mystery and is increasingly devoted to listening differently and deeply to what is his to offer to the world.
