
VISION FAST – The Art Of Living And Dying (international, english)
VISION FAST
(international vision fasting ceremony and vigil in wild nature)
THE ART OF LIVING AND DYING
COME TO FIND YOUR WAY, TO FIND THE ANSWERS OR
TO MARK SIGNIFICIANT MOMENTS IN YOUR LIFE
12-days deep dive in yourself in the heart of wilderness
according to teachings of
SCHOOL OF LOST BORDERS
(Meredith Little a Steven Foster)
“If the rites of passage are a practice of living and dying,
then what does it mean today?”
Meredith Little
This ceremony is a deep and essential rite of passage, significant marking of your new life stage or situation through solo time with yourself and fasting 4 days and 4 nights, without company, without shelter, on the land, in deep listening with the land, with the nature within and around, on the body of the Earth. Unlearning separation, relearning human nature; in a world in massive transformation, in an era of mass extinction, hospicing modernity comes with a sense of what needs to die, for our people to live, for life to grow, for a desirable future for the younger generations.
This ceremony is an invitation to belong to a group of courageous people, peace gardeners, tending the fire of love and peace building, going out in their solo time in Nature to learn to die and rebirth in a new paradigm, a new story, a new narrative of what it means to be human on this earth, to care for all living beings and find what it takes to manifest one higher self, vision and gifts
Everything is within us.
Who we really are, our dreams, our desires, our nature, even what we need in life.
In order to realize who we are, what our role is in the world, we sometimes need to shut down, to retreat into silence, into a retreat, we need a space where we can be alone with ourselves, with our thoughts, experiences and processes.
Don’t you know who you are? Don’t you know where you’re going? Do you have or are you losing the meaning of life?
Do you have questions you don’t have answers to?
Are you making decisions but don’t know what to do?
Do you find yourself repeating the same situations over and over again and feeling like a hamster in a wheel?
Do you feel you are at a crossroads in life and don’t know which way to go?
Are you going through a life change and feel you need to „mark“ the moment appropriately?
Are you going through a crisis in your life and want to bounce back from the bottom already?
Are you not living your life according to your life values and maybe you don’t even know them?
Have you realized that you need to stop looking outside for answers and start finding them within yourself?
If you’re answering mostly YES to these questions, it’s time to go out to your retreat for a while and take this Vision Fast, for example.
Something needs to die so that something new can be born within us.
We perceive that something has metaphorically died,
but we do not know yet what has been born.

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WHAT IS THE VISION?
“Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.” Robin D. G. Kelley
VISIONS ARE A CALL, a conjuring, a glimpse into what can be, but as my grandmother would often say, quoting scripture, faith without works is dead. We name our visions; we say them out loud to bring them into being, and we move them toward fruition by staying the course.
Commitment is the path between your vision and this moment. It is the day-to-day building, practice, and intention that transports you forward to that changed place, whether it’s internal or external to you. When Harriet (black slave in America) first escaped the plantation in Maryland, she left with her brothers. Scared, they turned around soon after, and she was alone, but com-mitted. She found the North Star in the sky, and she followed it through forests and swamps, freezing temperatures, and hunger to a new and more free life. On later journeys, close calls and the danger of the unknown made some try to turn back, but she insisted that they stay the course. Her dedication is almost hard to fathom, but she never lost a passenger on her train because of her commitment. At times, she dealt with harsh conditions, narrow escapes, but there’s something about the unanticipated that allows commitment to activate.
When we set out with a vision, it crashes into backlash, bar-riers, fear. Commitment is what gets us through the middle of change, when the outcome seems bleak, when it seems we’re lost or can’t go any further. Commitment expects our despair but doesn’t waver. It comes from inside of us, keeping steady when we lose hope, or give up, or decide to step away.
What lives inside us does not go anywhere, but waits, so we can return to it. Commitment to the North Star, our vision, brings us through. To what and to whom are you committed?
What do you long for? And what is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?
Our ability to dream of something different, to name longing, to articulate a vision and commit to it, directly correlates to the likelihood that we will experience it, that it will be realized. It’s the way we bring about change for ourselves, and for the world. When we are besieged by visions that do not match our longing, some of which are sinister, it’s unlikely that we’ll stumble into freedom. Freedom is in the gaps, in the nascent and emergent, in the unexamined space between things but it is there. We can call it down. We call it down when we listen to our dreams. When we let the unconscious and the imaginal show us the way around what it is we see right now. We call it down when our present can be in conversation with what could be. In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them. There are already visions around you that have shaped most everything about our world. If they do not serve us, perhaps it is time to revisit our imaginations, perhaps it is time to dream new dreams. Underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be.”
You can decide how much longer you will be falling,
wallowing in regret, waiting to hit the bottom.
What is a VISION FAST?
A Vision Fast is an ancient rite of passage, marking a transition, a change in your life, a calling – sometimes unformed and uncertain.
It is a ritual that allows us to look and listen deeply into who we are and what our purpose is. What are we here to do and what is the legacy we are leaving behind?
The vision fast is a modern rite of passage that helps us to come to terms with the complexity of our times and to mark and celebrate the transitions and various stages of life.
It’s a time to pause alone in nature, without shelter or food, to honour the seasons and the cyclical nature of life.
A space, in ceremony, to ask essential questions and nurture a rich and full vision for your own life and what you want to do with it.
Vision fasting is intimately linked to the cycle of living and dying, to the constant movement of being, from birth to death.
Fasting and exposing yourself to the elements and to solitude brings the humility and calm you need to hear your own heartbeat and let your fears dissolve.
Saying yes to life, in its entirety and without believing you can control it, but taking full responsibility for yourself and for what you have to offer others.
We have chosen to call this ceremony a Vision Fast and not a Vision Quest for reasons ofcultural appropriation.
The Vision Fast is nonetheless largely inspired by Native American spiritual practices and wisdom, and we are forever grateful to the peoples who preserved and practised this rite of passage long before us and allowed us to remember to listen to the earth in ceremony – and to pray and dance and cry for a vision that inspires us to care for the beauty of nature and the world.
We come from the tradition of The School of Lost Borders founded by Steven Foster and Meredith Little.
We honour the way in which they both brought this ceremony back into our modern culture and we honour the importance of practising it to remind us of ourselves as Human Beings.
It is a visionary fast in which you see this and that,
the one you’ve waited so long for is really just you, just you.
The vision fast ceremony has three archetypal phases that have been identified by anthropologists in rites of passage around the world:
SEVERANCE
Severance begins when you decide to commit to this ceremony. It is preparation for the vision fast, and the time to ask: „Who am I now? And what do I need to leave behind to move forward?“ This process of „letting go“ can be difficult, but it is the first step in marking the truth of who you are and the gifts you bring to the world. The part of this initial part will be The Practice Of Living and Dying.
THRESHOLD
During the threshold, you will cross alone into the natural world for 4 days and nights. Throughout your solo you will find yourself in a liminal time, a realm between your old life, and the life that has yet to come. You will create your own ceremony that reflects your background, intention, value, and what you are honoring in your life.
INCORPORATION
Incorporation begins when you return from your solo and are reunited with your group and guides. They will listen deeply to your story and mirror it back to you. You will be supported to bring back the learning and gifts from your ceremony to your people. Incorporation is a year long process and an opportunity to show up in your life in new ways.
The Practice of Living and Dying is a special curriculum within the School Of Lost Borders that offers programs accentuating this dying-in between-rebirth process. It was started in 2003 by two of our guides: Meredith Little and Scott Eberle. Meredith, as one of the School’s co-founders, has been practicing “symbolic death midwifery” for over 40 years. Scott, working as a hospice physician, has offered “physical death midwifery” for over 30 years. Together they have created a program series that explores how a participant can move through their own “dying” process. Well after its inception, this curriculum was further expanded by other School guides drawing upon their own living and dying experiences.
The aim of a Practice of Living and Dying program is both educational and therapeutic. Educationally, this work draws upon the School’s years of symbolic death work in the desert, intertwining wisdom coming out of the modern hospice movement, the personal experiences of the guides, and the wisdom of the land. Therapeutically, time spent alone in nature exploring this living-and-dying material invites each participant to experience the wisdom of their own nature, especially their personal truths about living and dying.
These programs invite the asking of an inseparable pair of questions:
How do we live, so we may fully embrace our dying?
&
How do we accept our dying that we may fully embrace our living?
Suitable for: women and men older than 18 years
When: Tue 29.7.2025 – Sat 9.8.2025
Logistics: The twelve day ceremony involves four days of preparation, four days and nights of fasting alone, and four days of incorporation. The program will be held on the ancestral, and present day homelands of the meadows and forests in the middle of Slovak Republic, between towns Zvolen and Krupina at 887 m above see level. The name of the location is PODSEKIER near the villages Pliešovce and Zaježová.
GPS 48.46682646794576, 19.20781279756949
Accomodation: in your own tent
Alcohol or psychedellics allowed: no
Health issues: All participants must submit the required health questionnaire and liability form.
Program Fee: 950€ – 2980€ sliding scale price (guidance, Art Of Mirroring, The Practice Of Living and Dying) + 250€ (plant-based food/accomodation)
To honor the vast difference of financial resources among us, this program fee is based on a sliding scale. We set forth no criteria and ask that you pay what is appropriate for your circumstances and access to financial resources. If the low end of the sliding scale is still too much, please let us know.
You can apply by filling in the application form
Payment in two or three instalments is possible.
Your place is reserved upon payment of the deposit, registration and administration fee of 300EUR upon invoice.
Cancellations: Cancellations are hard on the participant, the School, and the guides. We respect the unpredictability of life, and we are diligent about running an organization sustainably.
- If you cancel 60 or more days prior to the start date of your program, you will receive a full refund of any fee paid, minus registration and administration fee of 300EUR.
- If you cancel 59 days or less prior to the start date of your program, and we can fill your spot, then you will receive a full refund of any fee paid, minus registration and administration fee of 300EUR.
- If we cannot fill your spot, and you cancel within 59 days of the start of your program, then we hold you accountable for paying the program fee at the lowest end of the sliding scale.
To prepare for the Ceremony
Once you have registered and paid the registration fee, we will send you then our detailed Vision Fast Handbook and ask you to go through it, take part in a day in Nature to inform your intention for your fast and then write us a Letter of Intent.
We will have 4 days of preparation before the Fast, and 4 days of integration after the solo, to tell stories and gather the wisdom of our group, and understand the teachings and visions offered by the land.
The guides will hold space from basecamp during the entire time of the solo.
Safety is guaranteed by our staff members trained as wilderness first responders.
Please contact us for all your questions: jozef@mihalisin.com
Care Ethics
Environmental ethics that incorporate paradigms of caring conceive of environmental harms and the exploitation of nonhuman animals as failures to extend caring to worthy others and see those failures in relation to similar failures to care for other people. all species of animals and plants have an inherent right to exist and that wilderness should be protected irrespective of its usefulness to humans.
sincerely
Jozef and Carine

With joy, creativity, humor, strength, queerness and authenticity.

He spent 30 full days in the deep-dive training of THE SCHOOL OF LOST BORDERS. Today, he also leads a Institute’s autognostic SCHOOL OF HUMAN INITIATION, which is designed to guide people to psychic maturity and soul initiation.
He gladly a proudly facilitates a two-year-long self-discovery journey for men, THE MIRROR OF A MAN, as well as a similar retreat for women called THE MIRROR OF A WOMAN.
He also founded the project for families called THE JOURNEY OF A FAMILY in which he works on the themes of MOTHER AND SON, FATHER AND DAUGHTER . As part of the project the summer camp called FATHERS TO CHILDREN in Slovakia and the Czech Republic is included. Within the project I accompany boys on their journey to healthy masculinity and I am also involved in the transition rituals for fathers and sons „FROM BOY TO YOUNG MAN“ and last but not least I am happy to organize a summer camp for families and single parents called FAMILY TREE.
Each year I guide dozens of men and women through the 13-week online program called THE JOURNEY OF HERO (www.journeyofhero.eu).
I run the ROCK AND WATER psycho-social skills programme for schools and organisations. The aim is to promote the development of social and emotional competencies and to prevent and reduce intrapersonal and interpersonal problems.