Meet Andi Chatburn.

Dr. Andi Chatburn is an abundant human who was trained originally as a hospice and palliative care physician and now works full-time as a bioethicist for a healthcare system. She is also a ceremonialist, leading personal Rewilding Retreats with a mission to enliven our relationships with the more than human world and cosmos. She is committed to creating a world filled with animate intimacy. Her calling in life is to bear witness to the living and the dead amid what ecologist and Elder Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning. Some of how she bears witness

A lifelong learner and continuous explorer of edges, Chatburn is currently engaged in a Ph.D. in Philosophy with a focus on Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at the California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS). Committed to her own ongoing growth and transformation, Andi is currently exploring dreamwork and deep imagination through Animas Valley Institute.

Andi lives in Spokane, WA, with her husband John, two Bernese Mountain Dogs, several chickens, and a burgeoning urban micro-homestead.

For over 20 years, Chatburn served among many friends, family, and colleagues as a lay priesthood member and sacramentalist for the Community of Christ, a Christian denomination that was birthed out of the American Reformation and believes in the worth of all people, a commitment to social justice and care for the Earth and creation. During the pandemic, a deeper calling to explore the expansiveness of the Divine and the Universe led her to pivot. She finds relationships with the Divine in all beings, including animals, plants, fungi, the wind, and water.

”Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”

-Meg Wheatley, Turning to One Another

During the COVID Pandemic, Chatburn experienced what St. Teresa of Avila calls the dark night of the soul as she bore witness to suffering and chaos in healthcare, race relations, clashes in worldview, and in faith communities. Others, like depth psychologist Bill Plotkin would call this a journey into the Underworld of shadows, and other similar associated archetypes and mythologies. In response, she responded to her soul longings and went into the wildernesses of Washington and Montana, communing with the trees and forrest creatures who became her community. Andi trusted Spirit and this more than human Earth community to hold her in solidarity as only a community who knows crisis can.

Chatburn transitioned her approach to Spirituality during this time and trained with the Companioning Center in the art of Spiritual Direction, completing a two year certificate in May, 2022. She now delights in holding space for others of any faith tradition, mutually listening for the ways the Divine, or Spirit shows up in our lives, world, and cosmos.