People have always crossed their thresholds in company. Around a fire, in a lodge, at a long table with the dishes pushed aside, someone held the beginning, someone held the ending, and everyone between held one another. A group retreat gives that old arrangement back to you: a ring of people, a home with a fireplace in it, an evening or a few days set apart, and a guide who has tended circles for a very long time.
My days hold a good deal: executive wholeness coaching, work with other therapists, writing, dancing, creating art, teaching, along with all the other minutiae of living a life. When my time allows, my heart work is cultivating the connection that modern society has forgotten is the heart of humanity.
Before there were offices and diagnoses, people healed in the open, in the hearing of one another. Say aloud the thing you thought was yours alone and watch it be recognized in another face: the shame that kept it secret loosens, and a different kind of belonging begins. A circle makes witnesses of strangers and kin of witnesses. Some healing waits for exactly this, the company of others who are also becoming.
How I Hold a Circle
I’ve curated this space for warmth and intimacy. Through intimacy people begin to feel safe enough to be vulnerable, to deepen, to witness and be witnessed, to howl the unspoken wail, to speak the truths that have been held in secret, and to reveal what lies beyond the self they present to the world. Each person is trusted to know what they know, and the circle exists so that their own knowingness can live in its full sovereignty.
My own weave draws on many threads: somatic work and parts work, authentic relating, the research that explains why ritual changes a body, and the women’s ways of knowing that have always trusted intuition, dream and the pulse under the ribs as sources of truth. I honor the science and I honor the knowing that came before it, and I seat them at the same table. I cultivate circles in which each person feels met by the others, by their own wisdom, and by something larger than the room.
I hold these circles as a spiritual doula and an elder of the Scar Clan, with the wisdom that comes from years and a little more besides.
Medicine, as I use the word, is that which heals: movement, breath, song, tea, cacao, story, deep relationship and, where it is legal and right for you, the plant teachers. These gatherings are ceremony, education and community, held beyond the bounds of psychotherapy.
What Gathers Here
Here is the range of what I hold, guide and design. Some gatherings sit on the calendar. Others are made to order for a group that comes with its own purpose.
Circles of Connection
Authentic relating and circling, woven with presence practices and the language of parts, so that what is truly alive in each person can be named out loud and heard. Presence and Emergence is my monthly ceremonial circle for people who already have a practice and want to deepen into communion. STIR gathers people around a table and a story that changes shape as each person adds to it. Women’s circles in Longmont meet around the moon. Eldering circles are for those growing into the second half of life and for the ones who tend them.
Ceremony and Ritual
Tea ceremonies and cacao ceremonies in Longmont, often at the full moon, sometimes with ceremonialists I trust. Fire and water ceremony, sound journeys, ancestor altars, and rituals for the griefs that never got a funeral.
Rites of Passage
Many cultures held that a life turns on certain hinges and that a hinge needs a ceremony to swing on. I design rites of passage for the hinges of modern life: a first blood or a last one, the move into midlife, the long walk into elderhood, a divorce, a death, a retirement, a business sold, a calling finally said out loud. Sometimes everyone in the circle is crossing the same threshold. Sometimes the circle exists to witness one person’s crossing.
Made for Your People
Some gatherings I design for someone else’s occasion. A holistic alternative to the bachelor or bachelorette party, where the friends who love the bride or groom spend a day and a night honoring who they have been and who they are becoming, with ritual, blessing, laughter, good food and a keepsake they make together. A milestone birthday marked with ceremony in place of a reservation. A friendship circle at a crossroads. A day for a team that wants to bring the sacred back into work. A memorial for someone loved, shaped around who they were.
You bring the people and the reason. I bring ideas, shape the days, prepare the space and hold the container, and I can hold a great deal: sound healing, bodywork, ritual, music, food, the guiding of a journey. When a gathering calls for a ceremonialist in a lineage I do not hold, I invite a trusted collaborator into the design.
Trainings and Learning Circles
Some of my group work is teaching. I train people in Neoshamanic Internal Family Systems, my way of weaving parts work with ritual, ancestors, guides and the living world. I teach empathic and highly sensitive people how to tend their own energy: how to tell what belongs to them and what they have absorbed from a room, how to release it, and how to stay open without being flooded. Practitioners study Psychotherapeutic Touch with me, and any training can be shaped for a group, an organization or a company. Some trainings are open to all, some are held for a group that asks, and some ask that you come with a foundation of experience or training.
Creative and Embodied Arts
Wisdom Weaving, a collage card practice inspired by SoulCollage®, in which you make cards for the parts, guides, ancestors and spirit helpers who live in and around you, then sit in conversation with them. Movement practices, from authentic movement and freeform embodied dance to butoh. Writing and poetry circles, art making, chant and kirtan, and voice work for the ones who were told to be smaller than they are.
Animist Gatherings
The world is alive, and some gatherings are built on that fact: time with the land, the trees, the wind, the elements, the ancestors, the beings of a place, and rituals of thanks to those who are not human.
Soul Full Bloom
I also host gatherings for Soul Full Bloom, the entheogenic church I belong to. Founded by my dear friend Christy Thiel, it is a Colorado nonprofit church that supports sovereignty, embodiment and true alignment with self and others, and membership is free.
Soul Medicine Sanctuary
Most of what I hold in person meets at Soul Medicine Sanctuary, the lower level of my home in Longmont, Colorado. It has a kitchen, a great room and a fireplace. Some gatherings climb the stairs to my living room, a high-ceilinged room thick with plants and warmed by a fireplace of its own, where dinner is shared around the table, and when the weather allows, we spill into the backyard. House concerts happen here too: folk, kirtan and music for the soul. For retreats that stretch overnight it sleeps ten to fourteen. Some circles meet online, and every one of them is held with the care of a table set for guests.
The space is also available to rent for others who hold space: trainings, community gatherings, house concerts, and friendship groups who need a room for their own medicine work. It holds about thirty people seated or twelve lying down.
Staying in Touch
Gatherings fill by word of mouth and by the people on my list. The surest way to hear first is my newsletter, Threads from the Weave. Local gatherings are announced on the Soul Medicine Sanctuary Signal group, and the Longmont Conscious Kinship Collective on Facebook is a one-stop page for the creative and spiritual happenings around Longmont, where you are welcome to post your own. The Events page holds what is on the calendar now, and the Soul Medicine Sanctuary events page holds what meets at the Sanctuary.
Public gatherings are limited until 2027. Touch Matters, my psychotherapeutic touch consultation group for practitioners, is the one on the calendar.
How to Begin
If you carry a gathering in your mind, a group of people and a threshold to cross, tell me what it is. I will bring ideas back and we will shape it together. A free phone consultation is part of that; contact me and we will set a time. Group retreats are also the way to work with me when a personal retreat is beyond what you are able to invest right now.