KEY AND COMPASS

Doors and Pathways to the Radical Remaking of our World

An Earth-Rooted Training in Soul-Centric Leadership

We begin our two-year journey January 2026

We are still mapping out the program’s terrain, so sign up to be among the first to receive updates and more information as the pathway unwinds. Doors will open for applications Fall 2025.

For what are we
if not the dreams of our ancestors?
What are we
if not the earth
and the great wild mystery
dreaming itself into being?

— Caroline Mellor, from “Hold Fast to the Vision of the Bright New World”

CONTEXT & CALL

We are living in a time of profound unraveling—ecological collapse, political polarization, systemic injustice, spiritual disconnection. The dominator culture has led us to the edge of a precipice, severing our ties to Earth, Soul, ancestry, and the Sacred. Many feel the grief, the disorientation, the urgency—but don’t know the path forward.

Yet beneath the noise and numbness, a deeper current is moving. A new/ancient way is stirring—a way rooted deeply in Soul, ceremony, and kinship with the Living Earth — a way that honors mystery, welcomes the unseen, and calls forth the unique gifts each of us carries for the healing of our world.

We know that this shift cannot be made alone.

It takes a village of visionaries, guides, artists, and edge-walkers.

It takes those willing to do the inner work of wholing, self-healing and descent,

and the outer work of weaving community, tending grief, and leading with humility and heart.

🗝🧭

Key and Compass

is a training ground for this emergence.

We are calling in those ready to midwife a new culture—one born of Earth’s dreaming and our Soul’s devotion.
Those ready to lead — not from dominance but — from deep listening.
Those who carry seeds of the future and are longing for the skills, tools, mirrors, and community to help them grow into their most

soul-rooted leadership.

🗝🧭

If you feel the ache of the world and hear the call of something more whole, more real, more beautiful,
you belong here.

Program Outcomes

By the end of Key and Compass, trainees will be able to:

🗝 Hold Transformational Space

  • Create ceremonial containers of safety, deep listening, and soul-rooted sharing where every voice is truly heard

  • Design and guide a wide range of soul-honoring ceremonies and rituals

  • Guide various forms of Council and community dialogue

  • Offer powerful mirroring to help others deepen their self-discovery and soul initiation

  • Weave nature immersion, ceremony, and council into potent experiences of transformation

🧭 Guide Soul-Centric Practices

  • Lead deep imagery journeys that open portals to the mythopoetic realm

  • Work with dreams in a soul-centric way—for both personal and collective insight

  • Guide somatic practices including, basic yoga, authentic movement and soul-infused wanders on the land

  • Navigate the terrain of the soul journey and offer guidance to others on the path of transformation

  • Track soul threads—your own and others’—and help midwife their unfolding

🌎 Practice Earth-Rooted Healing & Leadership

  • Practice shamanic and earth-based healing modalities in respectful, culturally aware ways

  • Guide processes from The Work That Reconnects, supporting ecological grief and empowerment

  • Model reciprocal relationship with the living Earth and more-than-human kin and help others reanimate that connection

  • Articulate your unique soul vision and claim your ecological niche of service in these times

  • Continue your own soul work and inner healing while guiding others on their journey

WHO IT’S FOR

KEY AND COMPASS is for all genders and ages who have heard the whispers of their true soul calling and are committed to offering their gifts in service of Earth’s Great Turning.

This two-year training for those who:

🗝 Are on a soul-discovery path and ready to bring their visionary essence fully alive

🗝 Long to support radical change through healing, teaching, creating, or guiding

🗝 Are dreaming into or tending nature-based, soul-centered offerings, circles or community

🗝 Feel called to unplug from the dominator culture and reconnect with the living world

🗝 Carry the fire of the future and need tools, allies, and inspiration to bring it forth

Come if you’re a bridge-builder, edge-walker, cultural midwife, or peace-weaver—ready to walk through the doorway and lead from the deep heart of the world.

The DeTaiLs

Key and Compass is a never-before-seen program that grows out of our life’s work in deep listening to Earth, cultivating decades of tools and skills, and guiding hundreds of humans of all ages and stages. Much of our work is rooted in intensive guide training with Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute, the Work that Reconnects, the Ways of Council, as well as our many years’ passion for and experience with creating spaces, programs, immersions and vision fasts where transformation into our deepest service can occur. Join us for our maiden voyage into Mystery’s terrain!

  • Spirit Hollow is on historically Mahican land at the end of the road on 100 forested acres and enveloped by thousands of acres of National Forest Land on the slopes of Grass Mountain in Shaftsbury Hollow, VT.

    Our sessions will be held in our 30’ yurt and out on the sacred land. Tracey Forest lives with her family and animals in the geodesic dome on-site. Along with organic vegetable and medicinal gardens, Spirit Hollow has begun the process of building a food forest, to leave a food legacy for those yet-to-come.

  • We are seeking those hungry for their truest, most soul-infused ways of being of service in these days of crisis and potential.

    This is a two-year program, and your solid commitment to the unfolding that will occur together over our 24 months together is crucial.

    As fiercely loving guides, we are committed to both your individual evolution and the evolution of the whole group; likewise, we expect a full commitment from you in return. 

    This journey will ask a lot of you–psychospiritually.  It is NOT for those who are currently unstable, in a healing crisis or in active trauma.

    It IS for you if you have come far on your journey, done significant healing work, and are emotionally and psychologically strong.  You should be excited to spend extended time alone out on the land, to delve into the inner workings of your soul, committing to ALL of our in-person and online meetings, and be willing to make time in your life to really work with the practices we give you to do between sessions.

    If you are feeling a strong magnetism to the words we speak here, then we welcome you to apply.

  • Details forthcoming about monetary exchange and payment plans.

  • Please fill out this application

  • Spirit Hollow is a rustic retreat. Your options for lodging are sleeping in one of our two yurts (slumber-party style), or personal tents. We have hot outdoor showers, an outdoor kitchen, and four outhouses for your use.

    If you require more amenities or privacy, we encourage you to stay in a local inn or Air BnB.

  • You will be responsible for bringing your own lunches and breakfasts to all sessions.  We will form meal teams to share shopping and cooking responsibilities for our group suppers.

PrograM Dates

Following the cardinal directions and map of the human psyche, we meet in person seven times over 2026 for Year One. Between sessions, there will be Zoom councils and e-sharing as well as invitations to engage with to keep the conversation alive.

Year Two dates are forthcoming!

  Session 1

NORTH

January 22 - 25, 2026

  Session 2

EAST

March 26 - 29, 2026

  Session 3

SOUTH

April 30 - May 3, 2026

  Session 4

WEST

July 16 - 19, 2026

  Session 5

SKY & COSMOS

 September 3 - 6, 2026

  Session 6

EARTH & UNDERWORLD

October 7 - 12, 2026 (vision fast session)

  Session 7

MYSTERY

 December 4 - 7, 2026

OUR PRACTICES

KeyTurner and NorthStar are excellent at seeing straight through the fog and debris that clouds you, and seeing right into your potential and your gifts. They are true guides that will not force you or try to change you or bludgeon you with unhelpful spiritual platitudes. They come with a palpable sense of love and integrity.”

— Emily, "WayShower"

GuideS on the Journey

  • Northstar radiates her unique luminescence as a Soul Guide. She is deeply committed to assisting women and young ones who are adrift in the darkness of these times of fracture and forgetting to reorient to their own True North.

    The early stages of her own journey were spent in a desperate search for the divine that took her down a long and winding road, replete with myriad wrong turns and dead ends. Through apprenticeships and trainings in Raja yoga, core-shamanism, and the initiatory priestess path of 13 Moons, she finally found her direction Home.

    Now, she serves as a co-guide of various nature based, soul-centric workshops and immersions at Spirit Hollow in Shaftsbury, VT where she sits on the board of directors, as well as being a co-founder of The Goddess Grail, a virtual Mystery School devoted to the oracular arts. Northstar is a core-weaver of Forest & Village, an annual gathering for the Rites of Women in Sandwich, NH.

    Her life’s mission is to be a navigator of spirit, dedicated to holding space and shining light so that lost girls and lost boys of all ages might chart their own course back to loving, regenerative relationship with Nature, with Community, with Mystery, and with Self.

    You can learn more about her work at http://northstar-soul-navigation.com. 

  • Tracey (KeyTurner) is a soul initiation guide, who 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.

    Director of Spirit Hollow, the center where she lives and guides in SW Vermont, she is a healer and teacher, yoga teacher and singer of soul-stirring songs. She is a graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies Three-Year Program (1998) in Advanced Shamanism and Shamanic Healing under the direct teaching of Dr. Michael Harner; also, she’s a Certified Yoga Teacher at the 200-hour level, having studied with transformational teacher, Shiva Rea.

    With 30 years of experience guiding others, she been studying with Bill Plotkin for the last nine years. She is a Certified Level 1 Wild Mind Nature-Based Underworld Guide with the Animas Valley Institute.  KeyTurner just graduated from the multi-year Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program with Plotkin where she learned the nuances of Soul Initiation Guide and cultivated many tools to assist in the wholing and healing of this broken, beautiful world.  Visit her at KeyTurner Forest

    KeyTurner is a Certified Wilderness First Responder.

“A Vision”
By Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.