Manatee Swim Adventure in Crystal River, Florida

	Sanctuary For Souls Retreat & Manatee Adventure  $695
	Manatee Adventure Only option $495

Swim with the Manatees

Next 2 scheduled dates: Feb 21,22,23 2010- Dec 6,7,8 2010 Peace & Gentleness

Click Here for NY Times article about swimming with Manatees in Crystal River.

Customize dates for your group of 5 or more people - Nov/Dec & Feb each year.

3 full Days of the 'Spirit of Peace' Manatee Adventure & 'Sanctuary for Souls' Workshop through SpiriTravel.com

(Group size limited to provide quality experience for participants. Reserve your space early if you want to make sure to go on this trip)

In Crystal River Florida the Manatees 'winter'. It's the best place on the planet to swim with these gentle mammals. Over 300 Manatees gather in the Crystal River bay. 'The Three Maidens' is the name of the crystal clear magical springs where we will swim with these emissaries of Peace and Gentleness.

Please Click Here or on Picture for a great video of swimming with Crystal River Manatees

We will have a private pontoon boat just for our group. We will leave early in the morning and be back in afternoon. You will be able to easily get in the water and swim with the Manatees. You can choose to stay on the boat and watch them from there if you don't feel comfortable in the water. Someone will literally take you by the hand and guide you in the water if you need it. Bring your own snorkel,mask, fins and wetsuit if you have them. Otherwise for about $20/day they can be rented easily right where we'll launch from.

Since we can't control mother nature the amount of interaction and direct contact with the Manatees will vary. They are an endangered marine mammal and we can interact with them by touching and petting only if they initiate the contact. Manatees are curious creatures and often approach us for contact.

With the right respect the Manatees respond to us. We had magical occurrences on last years trip. We had 2 females with babies play with us. The baby manatees came and gently rubbed up against us and allowed us to touch them. Nature responds when we are open.

We are limiting the space to a max of 8 people so that we can offer a quality experience and interaction with the Manatees.

In the evening we will meet and allow the days experiences to settle into us with wisdom and understanding about what the Spirit of Manatees is wanting to share with us.

I recommend this Journey for anyone wanting more peace, more flow, more not getting triggered, stressed by the world around them. Someone wanting their world to flow more smoothly, more easily will benefit greatly from this trip. The reason I originally wanted to experience the wisdom of the Manatees was to allow, receive, accept the spirit of Allowing, Receiving, Acceptance into my life as an energy that would assist me in dealing with the world around me, in work, in personal relationships and with family. "Yield to overcome" is a saying among master martial artists. This is another way to describe the wisdom of the Manatees.

Cost: $695 includes 'Sanctuary for Souls' - Retreat & 3 days swimming with Manatees. (Click for Details on Sanctuary for Souls Retreat)

$495 -Manatee swims only option! for families, couples or individuals who want to participate in the swims with the Manatees only and not the Retreat portion - we have this option
To reserve your space -
928.451.9068

Cancellation Policy: We would love to keep it absolutely flexible and be able to let people cancel at anytime but because of small groups and occasionally having to turn people away these are the policies we believe are fair.

90 days+ out: full refund minus $100 re booking fee which is applicable to any of our future SpiriTravel Eco Adventures.

60-30 days out: 1/2 refund and other half applicable to any of our SpiriTravel Eco Adventures.

30 Days or less out: full credit applicable for future SpiriTravel Eco Adventures.

Note: if you or we find a replacement to take your space we will give you a full refund minus a $100 handling fee at any time.

Spirit of the Manatee
Trust, Gentleness, Surrender & Non Violence

The Inspiration behind our Manatee Spirit Adventures...

Note: on our Manatee Adventure you are guaranteed to see the Manatees at the Crystal Springs - the following account occurred late in March when the water is warmer and the Manatees leave to feed out in the greater Crystal River, but we share it here as the inspiration for organizing these adventures.)

The baby Manatee brushed up against the side of my sisters leg. She started laughing. We all got in the water to join her. My mother had 'adopted' Manatees over the years and wanted to experience them for real in the wild now. We had been watching four adults and two baby Manatees from our pontoon boat in Crystal River Florida for awhile when my sister, bravely got in the water to swim with them. We were pointing them out to her as she would slowly approach them and let them choose if they wanted to interact. Here in their feeding area the water was murky so we couldn't see them easily underwater with our masks. We would see a manatee only 3 ft from Anna and point it out to her from our vantage point up on the boat, but when she would look underwater and not be able to see it. So we had to get in the water and trust that these large gentle mammals also known as 'sea cows' would be gentle with us.

The Mother Manatee was trusting her baby to come over and interact with us. I got in the water and walked slowly over in her direction. I stood still for a minute and I felt something brush up against me...I shivered and let out a 'Wow!' and started laughing. There was something amazing about trusting a wild free animal that I couldn't see come up and brush against me. This is what I had felt that I wanted to learn more about...how to let 'the world', something free, strong & wild come to me and that I would be able to allow it, and trust it, be able to let it in. I felt shivers up and down my body, and I couldn't help feeling happy and enlivened. I had felt that there was something that the Manatees had to share with me that would be helpful for me. I had an idea that it was something about acceptance, allowing life, not 'fighting back', something about 'turning the other cheek' but in a real practical powerful way that would help me in the 'real world'.

Joy and I had gone the week before to swim with the Manatees. We had anchored our pontoon boat, gotten in the waist high water and swum over to the entrance to 'The Three Maidens', the crystal clear springs that gives the name to Crystal River, and as we swum up the narrow channel into the springs a mother and her baby were swimming out! We had to share the stream and passed within a foot of each other. We reached out and felt the mother. How sweet, how trusting she was.

It was like a fairy landscape in the springs. Amazing clear water, sunlight filtering through the trees and playing in the water. Fish, cormorants, the resting manatees, the quiet, the deep springs. The quiet was still palpably present even though people were swimming in and out to see the manatees. It was like the hush in a great cathedral. We later sat on a fallen tree log by the far spring lagoon and just 'felt' the magic there.

When You Trust - Everyone gets what they want

A week later when we brought my mother and sister to see the Manatees both Joy and I thought that the ultimate experience would be in the magic springs again and that we should head straight there. But when we arrived there were no manatees at the springs! Not a single one. This made no sense. (It was 'after the season' in late March) The guides and dive shop owners didn't understand it either when asked later. But my intuition said to just accept it and go with it and we lifted our anchor and headed out into the bay. I felt to pull into a little spot on a little island. From there we saw some other boats back in a off the main route cove....followed that hint...and we turned the engine off and drifted as we saw several manatees cavorting, playing with their babies...and we got to spend an hour in the 'wild' with the two mothers their babies and a large male manatee.

My mother later said - "That's what I really wanted, I wanted to see them in their natural feeding places out in the wild." She got exactly what she wanted! And we all know that mothers are very powerful!

Along the western coast of Florida the West Indian Manatee gathers in large numbers to 'winter'. Crystal River and Homosassa Springs are two of the main areas the Manatees congregate. Manatee's are a gentle sea grass eating mammal that the Indians honored. The Three Maidens are three springs where the Manatees come and rest. The pictures above are taken in those three springs.

Lodging:
There are many lodging options in and around Crystal River

Best Western -(click for more) - The best thing about this place is it's right on the water. You'll be able to walk to our pontoon boat in the morning from this hotel that is located right by the dock. Pets are welcome for small fee.

"Appreciating Nature"

A Message from Mother Earth

"Walking on Water"

"West Fork Sedona"

After a day by Oak Creek in Sedona, sitting in a chair with my feet in the water, hopping on the rocks, sharing blackberries with a skunk and swimming --I received a message from what felt like Mother Earth herselfan easy way to heal ourselves and the planet.

The word 'appreciate' according to Webster's new universal unabridged dictionary means:

1. to value, to esteem...

2. to recognize gratefully...

3. to increase the price...

4. to be fully or sensitively aware...

Shamans use a technique called 'gazing' to expand themselves and connect with deeper aspects of the world around them. This happens naturally whenever we slow down and enter the "Be still and know that I am God" space. Most of us naturally do this as kids, often while playing in nature, when we get absorbed in something that fully captures our attention and we become one with it, merge with it. Patanjali, the 11th century mystic-saint in his sutra teachings called this 'making samyana' on an object or idea. It meant to become one - merged with the object or idea and yogic powers would then open up with this perfect attention - merging.

As I sat and allowed my attention to expand while at the same time becoming more focused and relaxed, I saw-felt how when we love - 'appreciate' - feel gratitude for Nature, we actually lift nature up in vibratory rate. Our love-gratitude-appreciation energy actually infuses the plants, the rocks, the water, the very air around us. We feed them with our Love (God's Love). We are the God seeds, we are the 'made in God's image' creatures-creators that can be the vehicles for Divine Energy.

"The seed of God is in us...Pear seeds grow into pear trees,

hazel seeds into hazel trees,

and God seeds into God."

--Meister Eckhardt (12th century Christian mystic)

The plants, rocks, water around us get 'excited' by our love. The same way an electron gets excited by heat energy and speeds up. Love is the highest energy form in the created universe, it excites everything. The plants, rocks, water, the air - subtle ether feed off of our Love. They want to play with us, they want to share, dacne, exchange energy with us. When we give them our attention they notice, when we give them our love they dance.

And then they automatically want to give back to us in the form(s) of beauty they create.

Nature is the most chaotic, rambunctious, dis-organized system there is. Look at the fallen logs, the leaves, the 'dirt', the plants trying to grow through rocks, the rains washing 'away' the earth etc. Yet there is a perfect Order running through-out all of it. No matter how hard we try to imitate her, build aquariums with millions of gallons of water, try to recreate 'natural' zoos, try to 'landscape' our yards --we never even get close to the beauty of what Mother Nature does easily, naturally. We instinctively are awed by Nature's grandeur and beauty. We feel the majesty of the creative force just behind the vista of Nature. A friend of mine once told me that when taking an Alaskan cruise, just sitting on his balcony watching the mountains, the water, the sky...he 'broke open' and started to sob...just from the overwhelming beauty of the pristine, wild, free nature he was seeing.

This is the power, the gift, the efforless love that Nature can share with us.

If we let Her.

Sitting there by the creek Mother Earth said to me:

"There is no 'work' involved with 'appreciating' Me. Just come out into my spaces and Love me, enjoy me, drink me, breathe me, sense me. It will fill you back up. And you will 'save' Me as well. Your Love for the trees, the streams, the rocks, the animals will feed them and keep them safe. Your appreciation of me will 'appreciate' me, will lift me up in vibratory rate, will strengthen me and I will be able to give you more of my beauty and love in return."

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"One feels as if one is dissolved, merged into Nature."

Albert Einstein

Copyright © 2001-2008 Tobias Lars