The Sacred Grove
Entering the Feminine Mysteries
July 21 -26, 2024
$675, five nights
EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION by MAy 15 = $645
For 13 - 18- year-olds, who have entered adolescence and who are drawn to be in circle in an earth-based community of other teen female-identifying people and soulful women guides.
Let us gather in the forest!
In a culture where so much emphasis is placed on the linear and the hierarchical models of ‘power over,’ we invite our daughters to return to the intuitive intelligence of the divine feminine which empowers from within, through community and collaboration.
We welcome young women into the awareness of the wisdom inherent in their own bodies and support them as they come into alignment with the larger cycles of nature of which they are a mirror and a part. By exploring women’s mysteries and connections to the Earth and the Moon, campers will be encouraged to embrace their authenticity, their sense of belonging, their true beauty and deep longings while immersing in eco-centric ways of living in community.
In a world filled with media images of false perfection and beauty, this week-long sleep-away camp brings young women together to honor the real, sacred beauty in us all.
Returning to the Earth, to the forest and to a sacred circle is a potent antidote to the separation and over-saturation of technology and consumer culture we are exposed to.
By exploring women’s mysteries and connections to the Earth and the Moon, campers will be encouraged to embrace their authenticity, their sense of belonging, their true beauty and deep longings while immersing in eco-centric ways of living in community.
Sisterhood, inclusion, and nature immersion are at the heart of the Sacred Grove. Together we will embrace the sacred feminine and share from our souls our vulnerabilities, our dreams, our fears, our desires to live an earth-rooted life.
As a rite of passage, campers will be welcomed into the sisterhood of women.
We welcome trans, cis, gender fluid or non-binary folx who are drawn to working with the divine feminine and women’s cycles.
ACTIVITIES INCLUDE
Council
CREATE THE SACRED GROVE
Moon cycle teachings
Self Care teachings and sharings
Making herbal medicines and wildcrafting
Sacred Bathing at Waterfall or nearby SH
Self Esteem activities/body positivity
Wild craft herbal teas and balms.
Yoga, hiking, authentic movement
Primitive skills (fire starting, shelter making)
Self Knowledge
Oracle cards
Poetry
Dream Work
Reciprocity with the other-than-humans/forest wanders
Evening Ceremonies and Dream Journeying
Cooking all suppers together with some wild foods and garden foods
Poetry writing, journeying, musing, music making, drumming
Crafts to support rite of passage (basic basketry, staffs of power etc)
Plant dying of cloth
Possible rattle making
Afternoon nature solo on Thursday for visioning
Exploration of each participant’s GIFTS and passions
Adorning the body (henna, etc)
Craft power objects (staffs, wands, pendants with a symbol from a journey)
Fire Ceremony by the creek
Rite of passage into young womanhood
Final day ceremony with mothers and siblings present – moms (or grandmas) are invited to the final day for a celebration of their daughter
Food:
THE SACRED GROVE begins Sunday afternoon with supper provided by Spirit Hollow. Arrival will be between 4 - 6 pm.
Campers will bring their own breakfasts and lunches (5 days). Every night, we will cook together in community. There is an outdoor stove and sink, as well as a guest refrigerator. Please bring easy to put together foods (premade might be best) as we will not have time for extensive prep and cooking for lunches. All campers will be asked to bring food to contribute to our evening meals (Monday - Thursday). Once we get closer to the event, a food planning link will be sent so everyone can plan what foods they’ll bring to contribute.
Lodging:
Spirit Hollow has four tent cabins that have cot-style bunks. Campers can expect to share space with 2-3 others. There is no electricity in these tent cabins, but there are lanterns. We have hot outdoor showers and four outhouses. Campers are also welcome to bring their own tents to pitch if they’d like more privacy.
A What-to-Bring list will be sent upon registration.
Guides:
Tracey Forest (KeyTurner)
is passionate about helping others step through the doorway into the mystical and the mythical, the sacred and the sublime, the earthy and the erotic, the dark depths and high heights. She is a fearless and compassionate facilitator who has “been to the mountain” and descended into the abyss to lament for the earth, to celebrate the beauty and pain and who knows the rich gifts that lie in the dark to be mined. She stands in the portal, holding a lantern, singing ancient songs, dangling a key, inviting you to step through into the vast landscape of your Soul.
As a soul midwife she is committed to helping people cross from the old world to the yet-to-be-revealed one, with owl wings outstretched across Deep Time, across millennia, born with a broken-open heart, tapped into the magma in the Earth’s core, singing and making the lament beautiful.
Co-founding Director of Spirit Hollow, Tracey is a shamanic healer and teacher, yoga teacher and singer of soul-stirring songs. A graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies’ Three-Year Program in Advanced Shamanism, she has been training shamanic healers for over 20 years through the Seeing with the Heart Apprenticeship Program and running transformational immersions and camps for that time as well. With 30 years of experience guiding others, she has been studying with Bill Plotkin for the last six and a half years. She is a Certified Level 1 Wild Mind Nature-Based Underworld Guide with the Animas Valley Institute. Currently, she is in the second half of the Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program (SAIP) with Plotkin learning the nuances of Soul Initiation Guide and cultivating more tools to assist in the Wholing and Healing of this broken, beautiful world.
Kimbers Wattendorf (Northstar)
has spent her life seeking the mystical cloaked in the mundane, the spiritual concealed within the secular. As a child she had aspirations of joining the priesthood of her Roman Catholic upbringing, but despite her penchant for transubstantiating Ritz crackers and absolving her stuffed animals of their sins, certain accidents of birth in the form of improper plumbing barred that course of action. Thus she embarked on a roundabout journey back to Source that took her from the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows to Zen monasteries, rock shows to gem shows, dive bars to crystalline mountain summits. As T.S. Elliot enjoined, she “never ceased from exploration, and at the end of all her exploring was to arrive where she started and know the place for the first time.”
All her wandering eventually led to Spirit Hollow, where she finally found Here, on the Land, the divinity she had been so desperately seeking Elsewhere, down endless labyrinthine American highways of night. Through the Seeing with the Heart Apprenticeship, under the tutelage of the incredible beings, human and more than human, who steward this sacred place, Northstar finally found her calling and her medicine. Now, as a yogi, a shamanic healer, a daughter of Gaia and a priestess of the Goddess, Northstar is deeply committed to assisting our young ones who are also adrift in the darkness of our times to find their own direction Home.
Her life’s mission is to be a navigator of soul, and she is dedicated to holding space and shining light that lost boys and lost girls of all ages might chart their course back to loving, regenerative relationship with Nature, with Community, with Mystery, and with Self.
Nali Grace
is in service to the temple of Gaia as an ever-tuning instrument of soul, endeavoring to experience the spirit of love fully embodied. She is devoted to praising and dancing with the sacredness of life. Her personal journey of liberating her body and voice from the confines of an oppressed culture is one of deep listening and radical reclamation.
Her heart’s longing led her to Spirit Hollow as she was being ushered into a metamorphosis. Mystery sent her into the unknown on a quest to remember her unique soul threads within the universal tapestry. Re-Earthing opened the way for this journey of empowering wholeness, connecting with earth based community and returning home within the Tree of Life. She continues to be inspired by beloved guides and kin, Tracey Forest and Jonah Ruh Roberts, and channels her gratitude through continuing to weave together. She feels blessed to have the opportunity to assist their gorgeous offerings.
She has spent recent years steeped in sisterhood, re-wholling wounds from maiden years, moving with the cycles of the moon, tending the temple of her being, attuning to the wheel of the year, and stewarding the gardens of an herbal sanctuary. Much of this work has been poured through the kettle of 13 moons, a year long soul pilgrimage traversing the feminine archetypes, facilitated by Jonah Ruh Roberts, Una Gallagher and Katherine Allen. Nali currently assists 13 Moons and continues to weave with women that have also moved through this portal, diving deeper into the maiden archetype in Maiden Coven. It is her utmost joy to reflect the beauty and unique gifts that shine through her sisters and to stand together in unified luminosity. Through the active uncovering of her soul work, hidden within sacred wounds, she feels a potent call to support younger maidens as they navigate their own paths.
As a Shakti priestess, Nali pours her heart into facilitating sacred spaces for the multifaceted magnificence of the goddess to be experienced and expressed. She inspires others to deeply honor their bodies as temples of mystery, wholeness, and Gaian consciousness. A weaver of wildness, she aims to support sisters in the reclamation of their earthy, sensuous, inter connective nature and remember their innate belonging in the web of life.
Melodie Fallon
Melodie is a passionate earth & heart centered student to life. She draws inspirations from Gaia and her many forms. Melodie holds deep reverence for her teachers, plants, ancestral roots, and other cultures that continue to inspire her work. She has been practicing body work for 11 years encompassing a variety of modalities to help bring balance to the physical, mental and emotional body.
Her bodywork practice is also informed by her study to become a 200hr yoga teacher. Seeing movement as medicine in our healing journeys whether it be dance, embodiment, raw expression or a devotional yoga practice. Much of her work is centered with nourishing our beings through the ever spiraling journey back to wholeness.
Melodie has deep regard for her teacher Sage Maurer at the Gaia School of Healing who she studied 2 years with in folk herbalism. She since has apprenticed on the land working directly with the plants, and learning from her teacher. Women’s health is a big passion and portion of Melodies focus when it comes to bodywork, herbalism and education.
She studied uterine massage for all stages of womanhood with Dr.Rosita Arvigo. Spending time in Thailand as well learning from thai midwife Homprang, both teachers interweaving the power of plants along with hands on healing. Melodie has served her community as a Massage therapist, doula, yoga teacher and herbalist with continued learning in community living.
Melodie sees the gap in our culture with the ancient teachings of moon mysteries, menarche, empowered fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, plant medicine and living slowly. She inspires to re write the culture of her own life and share that magic with others. Feeling called in service to young maidens, becoming mothers, and the threshold after pregnancy.