The Craft of Council as Ceremony
A Training for Facilitators, Guides and Space Holders
April 4 - 7, 2024
Beginning Thursday evening, ending 2pm on Sunday
Guides: Tracey Forest and Kimbers Wattendorf
For budding or blossoming holders of sacred spaces, soul-centric leaders and guides, this long weekend will give you a basket of resources you can begin to use immediately in your own communities.
In these unprecedented days on Earth, we need leaders who are focused, dedicated, and well-resourced to create beautiful, ceremonial containers for safety, deep listening, soulful sharing and powerful mirroring, where each participant’s voice is truly heard and supported.
More than just a process of passing a talking piece, council is a ceremonial offering of reverence and communion.
Ceremony alone is a potent way of being in stirring conversation with Mystery and nature, of invoking the Sacred, of gifting our ecological selves in a rapturous participatory dance with all that is. When council is consciously conducted as ceremony, participants enter into this dance, surrendering to the magic of being alive and to being shaped by the depths. Voicing and moving from that source are exquisite and consciousness-shifting.
Ceremonial council invites us to put aside the strategic mind, to step outside of our daily lives, to drop into our own depths, to be worked by forces beyond our human minds, and to say yes to being surprised and changed in sacred reciprocity.
As much as it is a practice of speaking from the heart, ceremonial council is also a practice of listening from our roots, of tracking each other, of beholding each being as truly holy.
Council allows us – as guides and facilitators – to hold deep and non-hierarchical spaces, where profound communication happens, where everyone is equal, valued, seen as a sacred being, and where all the other-than-humans are cherished, invited and listened to.
We will spend the weekend weaving a gorgeous basket of ceremony and council. We will also spend time together and solo out on the land, listening and offering.
Guiding ceremonial council is constellation of practices and approaches, guidelines and skills.
You will learn to:
Set gorgeous, evocative spaces that feel alluring and timeless
Invoke the sacred others (using your own language) to be present
Create safe containers that drop people in and allow them to be authentic
Understand the guidelines for council
Attune to nuances of reading and responding to the field (and including the other-than-humans in that field)
Seed a council in a ceremonial way
Rescue a council that is spinning out
Track participants for themes or patterns
Attune to the signs and synchronicities happening in the greater field around us
Offer different forms of council to use with different groups and for particular purposes, such as:
Embodiment and Image councils
Deep Time Councils (ancestors and future ones)
Deep Imagination journey councils
Participation in councils with other-than-humans in the forest
Question councils
Reflection Councils (where you offer mirroring of participants)
As a culmination to our training, participants will design and hold their own ceremonial council based on the community that they serve. Feedback will be given afterwards from both the guides and the circle.
“I did this last year and it was amazing! It crystallized so much of what I already knew but made it feel so clear! And also expanded my range with so many options to really hone this skill of holding space! Not to mention Spirit Hollow is such an epic place!! ”
TUITION: $350
Food
Bring your own lunches and breakfasts. We will be sharing a potluck meal on both nights, so you’ll bring two dishes to share.
Coffee and tea will be provided all weekend long. You will have access to our indoor kitchen and a guest refrigerator. Please bring easy-to-put-together or reheatable foods (premade might be best) as we will not have time for extensive prep and cooking.
Lodging
Spirit Hollow is a rustic retreat. Lodging is slumber-party style in the yurt (bringing your own bedding and padding. This is a shared space, so if you need more privacy, we suggest you book a room nearby or stay in your own tent). Our outdoor showers are ONLY available in the warm months. We have four outhouses for your use.
A What-to-Bring list will be sent upon registration.
There are plenty of inns and Airbnbs for staying in the area.
We recommend all of the following hotels/motels/inns, all within 20 minutes of Spirit Hollow:
Harwood Hill Motel, Route 7A, 802-442-6278
Governor’s Rock Motel, Route 7A, Shaftsbury, 802-442-4734
Serenity Motel, Route 7A, Shaftsbury, 802-442-6490 (closed in winter months)
Henry House Inn, Route 7A, N. Bennington, (802) 442-7045
Eddington House, A Village Inn in North Bennington, 802-442-1511
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 threshold midwife and soul initiation guide, KeyTurner 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, soul centric mentor, 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 25 years 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 seven 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.
Council and Ceremony have been cornerstones in KeyTurner’s guiding and personal journey for her whole adult life. She has used Council with a variety of groups over the years, including kids as young as 7, teens, young adults, women’s circles, shamanic groups, college students, and re-wilding groups of all persuasions. As part of her SAIP training with Animas, KeyTurner did a focus in Depth Council, including trainings and immersions and a Focused Mentorship in the ways of council.
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.
