Fire Within Weekend

The Fire Within: Weekend Session

Through myth, ceremony, creativity, song, and community, we gather to welcome the profound transformation of perimenopause and menopause as an initiation into the mystery of Cronehood.

“Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path?”

- Martín Prechtel

A Rite of Passage into Elder Womanhood

There are seasons in life when who we have been begins to loosen.

Parts of ourselves we once depended on — our strength, our mental clarity, our capacity to keep carrying everything, the identities we have built our lives around — begin to shift, soften, or fall away. This threshold can feel disorienting, grief-filled, and strangely beautiful. Yet in our culture, there is so little ceremony to honour it.

This gathering is an invitation to step into that threshold consciously — not as something to fix, but as a rite of passage to be witnessed, honoured, and entered with reverence.

Over the course of the weekend, we will gather in circle to explore what it means to release what is complete, grieve what is passing, and welcome the mystery of who we are becoming.

Through myth, song, handwork, ceremony, and time on the land, we will create space to listen deeply to what this season is asking of us.

Join us for this beautiful journey.

Dates: June 12–14, 2026. Friday, 6–9pm | Saturday, 10am–5pm | Sunday, 9am–3pm

Location: Lila Music and Nature Centre, Duncan

Cost: $375

~ Why This Matters ~

For most of human history, the great transitions of life were marked and held in community. Puberty, marriage, birth, death, and elderhood were not private experiences to navigate alone, but sacred thresholds recognized by the people.

Today, many women enter perimenopause and menopause without meaningful rites of passage, without elder women to guide them, and without cultural stories that help make sense of what is unfolding.

Yet beneath the symptoms and uncertainties, something ancient is occurring.

A life is shedding its skin.

An identity is loosening.

A deeper voice is arriving.

The Fire Within is an invitation to meet this transition not as a problem to solve, but as an initiation into a new way of belonging to yourself, your community, and the living world.

“Every month I looked forward to gathering with the women in my cohort, to be together on the land. For me it was a time to be in my aging/changing body and to explore what is my fire within? what lights me up? what do I need to let go of as I move into this next phase of life? Cari and Stephanie created a safe, supportive space for these explorations and expertly guided us on the journey with myth, song, movement and nature crafts. A healing, inspirational, sacred journey. ”

- Pamela Williams (Fire Within 2024)

At the heart of our weekend will be a powerful ceremonial practice: the crafting of two handmade cattail dolls.

One will represent the self we are releasing — the identities, roles, capacities, or ways of being that are falling away.

The other will represent the self that is emerging — the mysterious new shape of who we are becoming.

Through ritual, one will be offered back — released with gratitude — while the other will be taken home to tend, nourish, and deepen relationship with in the months that follow.

This is not a workshop about having answers. It is a gathering for women willing to sit honestly in the questions — to listen for longing, and to welcome transformation as sacred work.

Who am I becoming in this season of life?

What ways of being are ready to fall away?

What gifts, responsibilities, and forms of beauty are ripening within me?

What does it mean to become an Elder in a culture that has forgotten how to welcome its elders?

If you feel yourself standing at this threshold, we would be honored to gather with you.

Fire Within Weekend Session

Dates: June 12–14, 2026. Friday, 6–9pm | Saturday, 10am–5pm | Sunday, 9am–3pm

Location: Lila Music and Nature Centre, Duncan

Cost: $375

Cari Burdett

Cari is a mother of three wild, creative, musical children and brings warmth, groundedness, and a rich diversity of experience to her work. Deeply rooted in nature connection, trauma-informed practice, and community leadership, she has trained in pre- and perinatal trauma work with Myrna Martin and is a certified Level Three Way of Council leader through The Ojai Foundation, with over 15 years of council practice.

Cari lives on a small farm on the traditional lands of the Cowichan, Coast Salish peoples, where she tends land, food, flowers, and community through permaculture and organic practices. A lifelong musician with Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in performance, she has spent over 30 years teaching voice, choir, improvisation, and music, and helping steward Lila Music Centre, which has served the Cowichan community for over 17 years.

Stephanie MacKay

Stephanie MacKay is the founder of Myth Club, and Founder and Executive Director of Fianna Wilderness School. She specializes in ancestral knowledge, earth-based skills, ceremony and myth. She has a degree in literature, and her work is informed by over 15 years of practice and study through Animas Valley Institute, Haven Institute, Wilderness Awareness School, and 12 years of study with Martín Prechtel.

She is a fiercely compassionate facilitator, mentor and guide in search of perspectives and practices to deepen the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Stephanie is dedicated to uncovering the vestiges of intact cultural origins within the body of old European mythologies, within our own bodies, and within our ancestral memory.