Learn more about our forming 2024 cohort!

Slate Creek Sanctuary is a 300+ acre property in the foothills of the Ozarks near Colombia, Mo.

I invite you to imagine…

A deeply heart-connected community

Honoring Earth and Spirit and all the sacred beings in-between

Creating beauty through song, dance, and creativity

Breaking open to personal transformation through co-created ceremony

And offering together our souls’ gifts in service to the world’s healing.

This is the essence of A Year in Ceremony!

A Year in Ceremony provides apprenticeship within a deep, immersive community for those called to ritually tend to the life’s sacred passages, to the wholeness of their communities, and to the balance between the human community and the other-than-human-world.

During our ten month journey together, you will be supported to further your unique practice of holding sacred space and of creating original ritual forms attuned to the culture and needs of your community.  

Our journey together is organized around four gatherings which will take place at Slate Creek Sanctuary in Hartsburg, MO.

What’s included:

• Four in-person gatherings, one per season,  where you will be immersed in deep ritual practice within a community that is held  with great intentionality and care.  Each gathering is three and 1/2 days.

• Bi-monthly gatherings by Zoom to strengthen our bonds of community and to grow your practice of holding space within your community/ profession.  

• Our first monthly gathering will include checking-in around our ceremonial invitations of that month such as: creating an ancestral altar,  showing-up for a loved one in grief, creating original rituals, and deeply listening to your soul. 

• Our second monthly gathering will center song, prayer, and spiritual fellowship. Family and friends are warmly invited to join us.

• Three one-on-one soul-guidance sessions with Carolyn to support your soul's journey and your practice of holding sacred space and ritual craft.

• Ancestral medicine sessions (3 in total)  with a guest ancestral medium who will guide you to grow in relationship with your wise and well ancestors,  to honor ancestral grief, and to call upon ancestral wisdom for your soul’s journey.  

• Meals and Camping:   The cost of all your onsite meals is included in our program.  Rustic, on-site camping, including an outdoor shower and compost toilet, is available for no additional charge.

The Cycle of Soul-led Change:

The template of our journey together is the Cycle of Soul-led change, which reweaves bonds of belonging with the great web of life,  draws forth the gifts of our souls, and inspires transformative action in the world.   

This inspired flow of ceremony includes: Grounding in Gratitude, Embracing Grief as Medicine, Allowing Soul to Lead, and Surrendering to Service Each gathering includes potent teaching, soulful group work, and earth-centered ceremony, all infused with the beauty of song and dance. 

The Four Modules:

I. Grounding in Gratitude 

All healing provides a suture to the torn fabric of belonging—Francis Weller

The most basic ceremony of all is that of giving honor to the Sacred that hold us: Earth, Spirit, Ancestors, and one-another. In-so-doing, we reweave ecologies of belonging to the greater Web of Life. Furthermore, by opening to gratitude in any moment, we release victim-consciousness and become soul-powered agents of change. 

This model includes:

Foundations of emergent ceremonial practice; building earth altars to honor the spirit of place; re-membering ourselves through ancestral reconnection; steps towards transcending white supremacy culture; fire ceremony; ecstatic dance journey; gratitude feast.

II. Embracing Grief as Medicine

A heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.—Joanna Macy

Unexpressed grief blocks the heart and thus separates us from the passionate aliveness of our souls and our lover-relationship to Life. Through sacred grief ritual, we experience collective healing as we grieve not only our own pain, but also ancestral wounds and the wounding of our larger Earth-body, which calls us into action.  Grief medicine is essential to remaining resilient while facing the crises of our times.

This module includes:

Honoring ancestral grief, blessings, and complex legacies; ecstatic grief ritual; honoring lineage; and learning to hold grief and pain from a place of wholeness.  

III. Allowing Soul to Lead 

The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive...an awakening into our true nature, a releasing of our gifts.—Joanna Macy

Our souls are always speaking, reminding us of who we are and the essential gifts we carry as part of Earth’s dream of wholeness.  Yet, as a culture we have become illiterate in soul’s symbolic language and thus miss-out on the great adventure of soul-led living and the world misses out on our soul’s gifts. Together we will remember how to attune to soul’s guidance and employ the power of ceremony to say, "Yes!" 

This module includes:

Attuning to soul via dream work, reading the signs of nature, and consulting our ancestral lineages for guidance; integrating visionary experience through artistic expression; the art of self-designed ceremony to honor the threshold moments of your soul’s journey.  

IV. Surrendering to Service  

You don’t have to know the way. The way knows the way—Anonymous

As we surrender to our soul's leading, life gets really interesting…  We are given assignments that require us to surrender repeatedly as we go beyond the boundaries of what we once believed was possible.  In this module, we will collectively hold the question: What emergent ceremonial forms are seeking to be born through us in service to the needs of our times? And, What does it mean to each of us to become a holy fool in service to Life?

This module includes:

The inner/outer movements of spiritual surrender; the practice of pure-heartedness, co-creating a never-seen-before ceremonial offering in service to our community and our times.

Join us in 2024

We are accepting applications starting in summer of 2024. To create an intimate container of community, we are limiting enrollment to around 24 participants. In order to create a diverse cohort, we will be selecting participants according to the values of inclusion, alchemy, and maturity of life experience.  

Dates: Our quarterly gatherings will span 3pm Thursday-1:30pm Sunday and include the following dates:

September 12th-15th

December 5th-8th

March 6th-9th

June 5th-8th

We will be sharing more details about A Year in Ceremony on our new Website being released at the end of May!