Group Dynamics & Astrology:
Using the Astrological Wheel to explore 12 facets of human nature
Cynthea Jones

Twelve needs, twelve facets, twelve desires. Discover the mystery of human nature and group dynamics by stepping into the desires and concerns found in each of us. This workshop will explore twelve key needs within community and within each of us. These follow the archetypes found within the 12 astrological houses.

The Astrological Wheel holds the mystery of human nature. Each astrological sign is a product of the season, of what is happening to the earth around us, and how we, as humans, interact with the season. This workshop explores the seasons of the year and the mystery of the growing cycle to unlock the mystery of the seasons within our souls. Understanding this wheel will give you a better understanding of yourself and community, and the gifts and challenges within each sign. Get a hint of the work of this workshop with this PDF overview of the Wheel>>

Stepping Into Deathwork:
Priestessing to the Dying
Sisalfish and Laurie Dietrich

In times past, the transition into death was considered to be as natural as birth - a time when the tribe gathered to offer unflinching support and reverent witness. Amid the sterility of our modern, death-denying society, Earth-based approaches to death and dying offer ways to reclaim the sacred nature of this passage. Join us to share what you already know about supporting this transition (you may be surprised!) and to explore the leadership skills you can call on to support this sacred work.

Rites of Passage
Birth, Becoming an Adult, and the Mysteries of Transitions
Robin Murphy & Caroline Baughman

Birth is one of the great mysteries of life, as is growing up. Our culture regards birth as a medical emergency, and puberty as a purely scientific and psychological process. How would our lives be different if the rites of passage of our lives were acknowledged as sacred transitions? How can we hold space for these transitions as spiritual passages for our children, our youths, and our adult selves?

Together, let us create sacred space and explore ways to bring spirituality back to these sacred processes. Birth, the passage from youth to adulthood, the passage into parenthood, and other rites of passage and transitions can be acknowledged in an empowering way, honoring the person that was, the person that will be, and the change in between.

Doulas and midwives currently work to advocate for birth as a sacred, spiritual process. Parents and friends can hold sacred the cycle of life as the children of the family and extended community come of age. We can acknowledge the rites of passage that perhaps no one acknowledged for us, and we can acknowledge them now. What issues come up when looking to honor these transitions? What topics are taboo? Miscarriage, masculinity, menstruation, death, puberty; how do we hold safe space to compassionately discuss these critical pieces that take place within any community of human beings? Will you envision with us a world where the passages of birth, life, and death are honored, and you are a part of that?

Finding the Poet Within Us
Shaun Perkins

A belief exists that all of us have a poet within us who might have died in our youth. Yet, the urge for poetry continues. In honor of Brigid, goddess of poetry, let's bring that poet back to life. In this workshop, you can journey in words to create poetry that speaks from your soul. By composing poems—both on your own and in a group—and sharing that poetry with others, we will find the poet within and see what we can learn from him or her.

Leadership Tools Introduction
You might not want to be a leader and you might not think of yourself as a leader, but if you are the one who called a group together, you hold the experience of others in your hands. As you step out to serve your ideas and your ideal, your experiences and the people in your community or group will teach you. They will shape you. You will become a tool honed to deliver the work that you believe in. These workshops are a place for us to discuss professionalism, excellence, facilitation skills, and group dynamics.

Leadership Tools: Foundations for Leaders & Healthy Community
Michelle Solvej
A number of dynamic leadership tools have come out of the Diana's Grove Leadership Training Program. Michelle will introduce some of them with discussion and exercises to help relate to your own experience.

Many of these tools have become the platform for healthy communities using the service-focused leadership model found at Diana's Grove. We'll begin with the Cornerstones of Healthy Community: Choice, Thinking Well of Self, Thinking Well of Others, Stewardship of Self, and Sacred Wound. The session will also address other foundational tools for leaders including nonviolent communication, creating safety in a group, and we'll explore what it means to be a leader serving community.

Leadership Tools: Power and Structure in Groups
Shauna Aura & Cynthea Jones
Through discussion and exercises, this workshop will demonstrate and teach concepts that offer opportunities for participants to take an active role in becoming the leader they want to be. Whether you are already a community leader, or would like to become one, these tools will offer you a new perspective on your power and impact in groups.

A foundational tool of the Diana's Grove community leadership is establishing group agreements and intentions. We'll explore this, as well as the relationship of power and impact, and discuss how hierarchy plays a role in group structure. Learn tools for healthy group dynamics beginning with understanding yourself and your role and community.

Sacred Warrior:
The Warrior Archetype as a Model for Personal Growth & Leadership Development
Steve Smith & Laurie Dietrich

In this session, we will explore the ways in which the lifelong path of the warrior provides a seeker with not only personal growth in all aspects of life, but also the development of graceful and skillful community leadership. Join us for a discussion of how these two benefits are interwoven for any who dedicate themselves to constant growth and learning. Can we redefine the very word, "warrior," to include those who fight not only with sword or firearm, but with heart and mind? How far can our understanding of courage reach?

This session will include a guided meditative offering intended to allow each participant to deeply experience the path of the warrior and to allow the warrior within each of us to reveal its wisdom, wherever we are on our path.

Energetics for Ritual and Groups: Rhythm, Movement, & Song
Lucinda Sohn & Shauna Aura
How do you build energy? Whether you would like to learn tools for energy building in ritual, or in a group meeting, this session will offer you tools for facilitating of this often-mysterious piece of group work. When we participate in a ritual or session, we add our energy. We join together to become a community, a tribe, and we each put our individual energy forth to support the intention and the community. What does it look like to add our energy? How can we make space for others to add their own vital life force to the work that we are offering?

"Diana's Grove rituals are based on involvement, on your participation. Involvement gives us the gift of energy....We increase our life force by breathing, singing, dancing, drumming, feeling, caring, speaking, dreaming, and interacting."
--Cynthea Jones

We will learn the energetic flow of inclusion to engage participation and explore ways to invite and engage participation with voice and body. We'll also look at models of energy and how various levels of energetic participation can shift the room, and discuss how what someone does for themselves is more powerful, and adds more energy, than watching someone else do something.

This highly-experiential session is accessible for beginners, and will offer tools for experienced ritualists and group facilitators. We will experientially work with raising energy, working with the layers of breathing, singing, chanting, moving, dancing, and drumming, to work with the physical energy that we each bring when we engage our life force.

The Wheel of the Year:
A Mandala of the Eight Seasonal Pagan Holidays
Mike Nichols

In this workshop, Mike draws upon classic studies in folklore and mythology to uncover the earliest folk customs, lore, terminology, and symbolism associated with each of the eight Sabbats. As opposed to being isolated events, Mike stresses how the eight Witches' Sabbats relate to one another and how, taken as a whole, they form the great mandala of the solar year and its seasons.

This workshop will focus on mythology, lore, and ancient customs more than modern Pagan rituals or activities for these Sabbats. Mike will demonstrate how many of the oldest of Pagan holidays were integrated into the Christian liturgical calendar with similar rites and patron deities.

Brigid/Bride/Brigantia is a Celtic goddess associated with the Sabbat of Imbolc, as the Christian saint Brigit is associated with the holiday of Candlemas, and we will discuss the synthesis of these traditions associated with these sacred holy days.

If you are interested in an introduction to the 8 Witches' Sabbats that hold the circle of the year, or if you are an experienced practitioner with a desire to deepen your knowledge of these 8 holidays, this workshop will offer you insights. Join Mike to experience the cycles of the year and the eight points that honor the transitions from one season to the next.

Creating an Itza Mayan Altar:
Ritual tools from the Mayan Tradition
Barbara Criswell
Explore the basic spiritual beliefs and practices of the Itza Mayan tradition. Learn the colors, directions, elements, sacred geometry and honor of the Goddess as involved in creating an Itza Mayan altar. The creation of an altar in the Mayan tradition is often to create sacred space for harmony, balance, and healing for community.

Create a Mayan altar and learn the cosmology, energies of the directions, elements and colors. Learn simple Mayan shamanic breathing and chant and the reverence position for the Goddess. The Mayans believe that all is Divine. Part of the workshop is experiencing the practice of In lekesh/Ala k'in, acknowledging the divinity of ourselves and one another.

The session will also discuss the sacrament of the fire bowl and water blessing that is sometimes offered during Mayan ritual. This session will introduce you to the powerful community-focused Itza Mayan ritual tradition.

Grandmother's Wisdom for Flame Keepers:
Native American Spirituality Traditions
Kara Hawkins
Gathering in sacred circle amidst our relatives, the Earth, Water, Fire and Air, we will journey to the Dream Time to reconnect with the Source of All that Is to renew our heart fires. Using the Medicine Wheel as our journey's guide, and with the help of our spirit allies, we'll make our intentions and prayers at the East Gate, experience the Dreamtime realm in the South, move into the watery region of the West to reflect and release, then transition into the North, the Great Mystery. Accompanied by medicine song, drum and rattle, we are welcomed home to our Earth Mother, ready to manifest our vision.

Fire in the Head:
Opening to Creative Inspiration
Kimberly Gier and Carey Oxler
The Universe constantly flows with blessings of inspiration, and each of us is capable of receiving these blessings and responding creatively. When we respond with creative work, we inspire in turn, redoubling and returning the blessings we were given.

In this workshop, we will examine our own creative capabilities, to discover what blocks us from fully receiving inspiration, and to shift those blocks so that the blessings can flow into us unobstructed. From this place of openness and clarity, we will work to ignite the "Fire in the Head" that Celtic mystics and poets refer to, and to discover how to feed that flame.

Please come ready to think, to play, and to change. A notebook and writing instrument may be helpful to have along as well.

GoddessFire: Celebrating Imbolc with the Four Faces of Brighid
Tessa Lynch
Celebrate and explore the Western European festivals of Spring's beginning with a Priestess of the Goddess and a flamekeeper of Ord Brighideach. Warm yourself at the secret fire, ready yourself for emergence, and renew the bridge between Tribe and Land.We will wash away the Winter's chill, work the magics of the holy well and the sacred flame, and weave the stories of the Lady Brighid. Far from the virgin handmaiden or the sweetened version of the "Good Mother," come and discover the hidden side of this powerful tribal Goddess of sex and sovereignty. Learn about the Lady of hill and mountain and the dark mistress of the "hearth beneath the hearth."

Forge the links between myth and history, between the Pagan Brighid/Brig/Brid/Brigantia and the Christian St. Bridget/Brigid/Brigit, between the archetypal Virgin and Bride. Welcome the promise of the Spring in the fertility rites of early February and prepare the ground of your being for the seeds of the Season to be planted. Dare to ask and be asked, "What is it that you desire?"

Tarot: Tools for Transformation
Patricia Storm
Description coming soon!

Energy Play: Engaging our Vital Life Force
Lucinda Sohn
Did you know that your cells sing? That the energy and vibration of the beating of your heart can be heard, measured, from fifteen feet away? Our remarkable bodies are expressing and experiencing energy all the time. Join Lucinda to discuss some philosophy of energy, and to play with and experience the energy of your own body and communal energy. Lucinda teaches a larger course in Energy Play, and this workshop will be an introduction to that class.

Come and play with tools used by energy healers and Reiki practitioners, including cultivating energy, scanning and clearing techniques, working with Chakras, and vibrational healing with rhythm and voice.

This workshop is open to all experience levels, whether you are a Reiki Master or new to energy play. Come and experience this vital life force within us all.

Labyrinth Walk
Open to all throughout the morning
Explore the labyrinth as a meditative tool. There will be a floor labyrinth available before the workshops begin, and during the day, to offer time for meditation, introspection, and personal processing. Walking a labyrinth can be a gentle but physical way of meditating more kinesthetically.

Moving your body as you walk the rungs of this ancient tool can help you work through issues in a way that sitting still would not accomplish. Learn why our ancient ancestors have been carving and building labyrinths for thousands of years by experiencing the power and simplicity of walking a labyrinth.

Sacred Movement
Steve Smith
9:30 am-10:00 am
Before there was dance there was movement, and this freeform pre-conference offering offers participants a chance to explore rhythm and sound as an embodied experience. Allow the deeper parts of yourself to come into expression as you allow your natural rhythm and motion to emerge. Through movement, you can open up the energy within your body, and connect with the sacred.

Begin to shift from "mundane space" into "sacred space" and prepare for the day's work. You may enter and leave, dance, do yoga, meditate, or just listen. Give yourself a chance to dance with yourself, and begin to move together in community.

What is the fire that dances deep within your heart? What movement expresses that? Will you allow your body to move into a place of ecstatic joy? How do you dance with your fire, and with the fires of others within community?

No experience with dance is needed, only a willingness to explore movement.

Stepping Between the Worlds
Steve Smith
7:45 pm
Soft music, movement, and the option to move, sit, or meditate. Begin to shift from "mundane space" into "sacred space" and prepare for the evening session. You may enter and leave, dance, do yoga, meditate, or just listen. Give yourself a chance to dance with yourself, and begin to move together in community.

Ritualizing our Transformation
8:00
Our closing session is an embodied, experiential opportunity to live a myth for an evening. Join us for an experience to lay new patterns in our souls. Part embodied psychology, part magic, this inclusive, participatory session will offer choices and steps for your spiritual journey.

Deep in the heart of winter, we join together in community around the Clan-fire that sustains us through winter's cold. We will work with the triple flames of Brigid - archetype, goddess, and patron saint of Imbolc and Candlemas. Hearth Fire, Heart Fire, and Forge Fire, and the sacred waters of her well.

What does it take to feed the communal Clan-fire, and the fire in your own heart? How do the fires of the forge transform you? Step into the story of an ancient clan. Step into the story of community, of the fire that we tend, and the fire that burns deep within us.
Learn more about this ritual>>
Learn more about Brigid and the mythological themes>>

Dessert, conversation, & community
9:00 pm
Time to talk to new friends, share dessert and warm apple cider within the community we've created this night. Perhaps some drumming and dancing if such festivities arise.

Registration details>>

Register now>>