// What to Expect //
Air & Eagle & Arrows
Session 1: Sat 10am - Sun 4pm
Remote location, Camping on Vancouver Island
Connecting to Breath and our ability to soar as Eagle. Initial weekend to meet, connect, set intentions, build containers, create a craft that will be sent off with you on a mission, offerings of prayers and feeding our reciprocity. With a focus on air, we will sing, share stories, connect to our inner fire and unfold our intuitive myth making ways. We will embody and claim our power at this time in our lives with our voice, our prayers, while keeping an eagle eye on the sacred within.
Craft: ceremonial arrow made from obsidian, oceanspray, sinew, and feathers
Earth & Plant & Medicine
Session 2: 10am - 5pm
Local Venue
Honouring the earth, where all life comes from, we lay beside her and seek plant allies for support in medicine making. What songs and myths are alive in the mossy forest floor? How does the earth hold us in this time of transformation to the elder and aging self?
Craft: herbal tinctures and salves with local and indigenous plants
Water & Salmon & Skin
Session 3: 10am - 5pm
Local Venue
Diving deep into the water allies and medicine of the sacred salmon, who swims away and returns home again. What lessons can we learn and where is our home in our body, heart, spirit, soul in this time as women? What skins are we shedding and what are we transforming into? Who are we now? Who are we becoming? What are we releasing? How does the water hold us and change us? What messages are we receiving from the waters as we grow into our crone years.
Craft: processing a salmon skin into richly beautiful leather
Fire & Bear & Copper
Session 4: 10am – 5pm
Local Venue
The fire lives within us all, what is burning and wanting to become ash and coal? As a wild animal, how can we embrace and embody the sensual crawl of the bear? What lives inside the magic and beauty of copper? Fire as medicine is potent and life giving, giving answers to our scared questions. Working with alchemy copper may invite us into the realms of magic and transformation.
Craft: working with fire and copper, we will craft a copper pendant
Reciprocity & Prayer & Ceremony
Session 5: Friday 6pm – Sunday 4pm
Remote location, Camping on Vancouver Island
Weaving and Bringing it together in an embodied and ceremonial space, we will stand at the threshold of our questions and go into the wild for a solo quest; bringing with us crafts from previous sessions, animal and plant allies. Returning to a sacred holding and witnessing of each participant in celebration of the becoming, the accepting, the surrendering, the awakening, the letting go, the renewal, the mystery, the magic.
Note: this session involves spending up to 24hrs alone on the land
About your guides
Cari Burdett
Cari is a new mentor with Thriving Roots and is so happy to be mentoring children and teens out in nature. Cari is a mother to three wild, creative, musical children who bring her great joy each day. Over the past two years, Cari’s commitment to her nature journey has deepened while taking part in the Adult Nature Immersion Program with Wisdom of the Earth on Salt Spring and the Tend the Fire Apprenticeship Program with Thriving Roots Wilderness School. Cari is now an official mentor of Thriving Roots and comes to these programs with bundles of diversity and grounded offerings.
Cari is trauma informed and has been studying and training with Myrna Martin, in her pre and perinatal trauma program over the past seven years. Allyship with our local indigenous hosts is near and dear to Cari’s intentional living practices, where she offers her time in service and a percentage of her work back to the First peoples of the Cowichan, Coast Salish Peoples. Cari is a trained and certified Way of Council leader with level three from the Ojai Foundation, practicing and leading council circles for over 15 years. Cari lives on a small farm on the traditional lands of the Cowichan, Coast Salish peoples, where she gratefully tends the land, growing food, plants and flowers, working with permaculture and organic farming practices. The farm is also home to Lila Music Centre, bringing music to the Cowichan community for over 17 years. With over 30 years of teaching music, voice, choir, music improvisation and performance practice, Cari adores supporting others to sing and explore creating music. She is trained with a BMus and MMus in music performance.
Stephanie MacKay
Stephanie MacKay is the founder of Myth Club and Co-founder and 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.