The Craft of Council as Ceremony

Guides:

Tracey Forest (KeyTurner) is passionate about helping others step through the doorway into the mystical and the mythical, the sacred and the sublime, the earthy and the erotic, the dark depths and high heights. She is a fearless and compassionate facilitator who has “been to the mountain” and descended into the abyss to lament for the earth, to celebrate the beauty and pain and who knows the rich gifts that lie in the dark to be mined. She stands in the portal, holding a lantern, singing ancient songs, dangling a key, inviting you to step through into the vast landscape of your Soul.

As a threshold midwife and soul initiation guide, KeyTurner is committed to helping people cross from the old world to the yet-to-be-revealed one, with owl wings outstretched across Deep Time, across millennia, born with a broken-open heart, tapped into the magma in the Earth’s core, singing  and making the lament beautiful.

Co-founding Director of Spirit Hollow, Tracey is a shamanic healer and teacher, yoga teacher, soul centric mentor, and singer of soul-stirring songs.  A graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies’ Three-Year Program in Advanced Shamanism, she has been training shamanic healers for 25 years and running transformational immersions and camps for that time as well.  With 30 years of experience guiding others, she has been studying with Bill Plotkin for the last seven years.  She is a Certified Level 1 Wild Mind Nature-Based Underworld Guide with the Animas Valley Institute.  Currently, she is in the second half of the Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program (SAIP) with Plotkin learning the nuances of Soul Initiation Guide and cultivating more tools to assist in the Wholing and Healing of this broken, beautiful world.

Council and Ceremony have been cornerstones in KeyTurner’s guiding and personal journey for her whole adult life. She has used Council with a variety of groups over the years, including kids as young as 7, teens, young adults, women’s circles, shamanic groups, college students, and re-wilding groups of all persuasions. As part of her SAIP training with Animas, KeyTurner did a focus in Depth Council, including trainings and immersions and a Focused Mentorship in the ways of council.

Kimbers Wattendorf (Northstar) has spent her life seeking the mystical cloaked in the mundane, the spiritual concealed within the secular. As a child she had aspirations of joining the priesthood of her Roman Catholic upbringing, but despite her penchant for transubstantiating Ritz crackers and absolving her stuffed animals of their sins, certain accidents of birth in the form of improper plumbing barred that course of action. Thus she embarked on a roundabout journey back to Source that took her from the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows to Zen monasteries, rock shows to gem shows, dive bars to crystalline mountain summits. As T.S. Elliot enjoined, she “never ceased from exploration, and at the end of all her exploring was to arrive where she started and know the place for the first time.”

All her wandering eventually led to Spirit Hollow, where she finally found Here, on the Land, the divinity she had been so desperately seeking Elsewhere, down endless labyrinthine American highways of night. Through the Seeing with the Heart Apprenticeship, under the tutelage of the incredible beings, human and more than human, who steward this sacred place, Northstar finally found her calling and her medicine. Now, as a yogi, a shamanic healer, a daughter of Gaia and a priestess of the Goddess, Northstar is deeply committed to assisting our young ones who are also adrift in the darkness of our times to find their own direction Home.
Her life’s mission is to be a navigator of soul, and she is dedicated to holding space and shining light that lost boys and lost girls of all ages might chart their course back to loving, regenerative relationship with Nature, with Community, with Mystery, and with Self.