CLOWN HEART: Prismatic Clown

---

June 13-20, 2025 | Hillsboro, WV

2025 REGISTRATION IS OPEN!

SIGN UP NOW ⇒

Clown, Magic, Art, & Nature

What is the nature of clown? What is the nature of your clown heart?

How do you want to engage with the world and how do you want the world to engage with you? 

In times of tumult, violence, sickness, and distance from nature and our spirits, we need to come back to the trees, waters, grasses, stones, earth and stars, and come back to our caring and playful hearts—our clown hearts— in order to rewrite our personal balance and give back to the world(s) at large. 

Join us for a week on the beautiful Gesundheit! land in Pocahontas county, West Virginia, where we will commune with the clown, nature, one other, and learn skills and play for being with the world in which we live. 

You will be well tended and will tend others in the circle—A beautiful lesson from Patch, a core principle of Gesundheit!, has been to become more tribal, more communal— to become aware of ourselves in community and to take care of our community. This will be a week of diving into what it means to be in radical, caring, joyful community.

 

What is Prismatic Clown?

Like a faceted gem, the prismatic being shines from multiple surfaces. During this week you will have the space and time to discover/recover your own facets and how you can shine through, in a multitude of ways, into the world. The world needs our radiance, our compassion, our tears, our joys, our beautiful shining hearts, and our commitment to the future. And we need these each of these things too.

We will explore clown for compassionate connection with the world around us. We will explore human nature through prismatic, humanistic, transpersonal, creative lenses—We will deep dive in to “seeing the old landscape with new eyes.” (Proust, via C. Hammerschlag)

We will…

… access and develop our clown hearts

… talk care philosophies and the who, what, when, and where of how clown appears and can appear

… create circles of communication and reciprocity, fun, delight, and deep listening 

… walk the lands and collaborate with what we see/hear/feel

… explore art-making with the land and one another

… share our gifts and have them witnessed

… honor our lineages and ourselves with play, curiosity, and remember together our teachers who have become ancestors, including GI docs/mentors/ancestors Johnny Glick, MD and Carl Hammerschlag, MD

… listen for heart-messages and give back what we can of our beauty and our hearts to one another and to the world around us

… play! lounge, frolic, swim, and co-tend our container with depth and delight

We will have Clown and Connection workshops morning and afternoon, special land walks and group activities with the folks who live on the land and have much knowledge to share, Plants and Arts and Tarot, oh my! Co-teachers TBA!

 

Who is offering this?

Facilitators and presenters include:  (Co-teachers TBA!)

​​Charlotte Smith Huggins — mother, artist, diviner, psychedelic clown, lover of worlds, holds a Masters in Transpersonal and Ecopsychology from Naropa University; is a 20-year friend of Gesundheit! Institute and has traveled on and facilitated dozens of clown trips with many amazing teachers, friends, and clown-hearts. Post-pandemic, a deep love was re-kindled with the land Gesundheit! inhabits and the peoples and spirits of that land. Charlotte has spent the last 20 years being led by clown-as-spirit on a winding journey with profound teachers, human and other, and continues to be a student and ally of diverse land-based spiritual practitioners, that we may all see a world of potential, joy, and gift-giving. May it be so. Blessings.

FB: Charlotte Smith
Insta: @csavagearts
Website: sphericaleducation.com
ClownVets documentary film on Youtube: ClownVets Full Film 

 

Who is invited?

You are! Come out and meet your clown heart. You will be well tended and will tend others in the community. International participants and clown trip alumni are warmly welcomed!

 

 

General Information

Tuition | $1,100 lodging and meals are included.

Where? | The program takes place on the Gesundheit Institute’s 320 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with mountain trails, waterfalls, extensive gardens, and a lake. Gesundheit’s project-in-progress is a  unique model of holistic health care that will serve as an inspiration for us to coax each other to dream big—in our personal lives, in our community involvement, and in our contributions to global peace and justice

Facilities | Gesundheit lays on a pristine tract of farm and mountain land in rural West Virginia. The dacha, with its onion domes and Russian architecture, serves as a residence and meeting place, and has won awards for its unique design.

Meeting Spaces | Gesundheit Institute offers many unique meeting spaces and classrooms. There are quiet spaces for meditation or study and large rooms to house workshops and classes. Gesundheit hosts events focused on education—at the site of the future hospital and elsewhere.

Accommodations | Accommodations are in dormitory-style group settings. There are laundry machines at Gesundheit that you can use. We offer very slow WIFI (cannot download, cannot use skype, sorry!). Clean sheets and towels are provided.

Travel | Gesundheit staff will shuttle people to and from the train station in White Sulphur Springs and the airport in Lewisburg on the first and last day of the course.

⇒ If you would like to sponsor a tuition please reach out.

 

 

Questions?

Contact Charlotte cstarocean@gmail.com for more details and for a brief check-in before registration.