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Do you want to be a successful Ritual Leader but aren’t really sure how to do it?
There are many secrets to creating successful rituals and infusing them with spiritual magic and heart.
Over the years, many of you have asked us to develop a training program to design successful, transformational rituals for your clients, friends and communities. In response to this, we’re excited to announce our new Certification course to become a successful
Ritual Leader Training
August 24-27, 2023 in Redwood City, CA
Rituals and Celebrations
As a Healing Ritual Facilitator™ you will be able to:
- Structure ritual space so it flows from beginning, middle to the end
- Create effective boundaries so everyone feels safe
- Set intentions and get desired results
- Attend skillfully to the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of rituals
- Learn effective use of altars, props, symbols, music, drumming, nature, the 4 elements and more…
Train to be a skilled Healing Ritual Facilitator™ so you can facilitate powerful rituals for the world today.
Join our Ritual Community and be certified as a Healing Ritual Facilitator™ from Tree of Life Teachings International, our non-profit organization dedicated to Psycho-Spiritual Healing and the Sacred Arts.
We teach you to create powerful rituals and to be a successful, confident practitioner.
The Healing Ritual Facilitator™ course trains you to create and facilitate healing rituals for individuals, couples, families and groups. This includes personalized rituals tailored to individual needs, as well as group rituals centered on a particular theme such as grief, life-cycle celebrations or rites of passage.
Through the creative expressive arts of ritual, psychodrama, chanting, drumming, storytelling and more, you experience these healing techniques firsthand and learn how to use these techniques with others.
This certificate is highly experiential and is designed for health-care professionals, clergy, spiritual directors, chaplains, therapists, group facilitators, life coaches, religious professionals and interested students.
The purpose of Healing Ritual is to create altered states of consciousness to focus personal intention, integrate parts of our personality, make us receptive to healing and call in Spirit to access energy shifts and new perspectives.
After 35 years working together as Ministers, Spiritual Teachers and Ritual Leaders and training with some Master Ritual and Shamanic Practitioners, we’ve created a program to train you to be a successful Healing Ritual Facilitator™.
Why are Healing Rituals so powerful?
Rituals, when created and facilitated with skill and love, can shift energy that has become stuck through individual and collective trauma, family patterns and life circumstances. Therapy and Spiritual Direction help us talk through and process problems, trauma and grief – and yet it is often not enough to really shift the energy needed for true and lasting healing.
Personal and Communal Rituals can shift, change, cleanse and clear the energy around a person, family, group or community in a very short period of time.
For thousands of years people have gathered in community to create rituals of celebration, grief, loss, life cycles, reconciliation, birth, death, marriage, connection to the earth and cosmos and so much more. Our ancestors knew that rituals were crucial to the health and well-being of their people. Rituals keep the energy flowing and heal wounds and hurts when energy gets stuck. Rituals help us flow around the seasons of life and enjoy the rejuvenation that come with rebirth and change.
Mistakes Ritual Leaders make
We know many of you in the helping professions – Ministers, Therapists, Chaplains, Spiritual Guides and Healers – want to lead successful rituals but you aren’t really sure how to do it. There aren’t many manuals out there guiding you step-by-step to create safe, successful, life-altering rituals. And when you don’t really know what you’re doing, things can go wrong.
We’ve been to many rituals where the leader is ineffective, nervous and lacking skills. They laugh, break the sacred space and fail to engage participants.
We know firsthand how things can go wrong in rituals that are not facilitated well. Unskilled Ritual Leaders often ruin a golden opportunity. From these experiences we have identified the 7 biggest mistakes Ritual Leaders make.
Click here for the 7 Biggest Mistakes Ritual Leaders make!
How to be a Successful Ritual Leader
We’ll train you to be a confident, skilled, effective practitioner to lead rituals, rites of passage and life-cycle celebrations. We will show you many secrets to creating successful rituals and techniques to infuse them with spiritual magic and heart.
- A successful Ritual Leader feels confident and open.
- A successful Ritual Leader creates structure AND freedom for spirit to move in the moment.
- A successful Ritual Leader is mindful, aware and flexible.
- A successful Ritual Leader is sensitive to the energy flow and sensitive to the feelings of participants.
A a Healing Ritual Facilitator™ you are able to:
Facilitated by Megan Wagner and Jim Larkin
We have been working together for 35 years: teaching, training and facilitating rituals for individuals and groups. We trained with Master Ritualists and Shaman Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, Erika Helm and Michael Meade, Martin Prechtel, Robert Bly and Marian Woodman.
We are thrilled you want to train to be a Healing Ritual Facilitator. We need effective ritual Practitioners who can hold, initiate and empower others to live in Mastery and Joy!
2023 Dates: August 24-27 in Redwood City, CA
Requirements for Certification:
1) Participate in 2 intensive weekends– students must be willing to share their own personal process and be willing to participate in the experiential exercises and in the personal and group rituals.
2) Practicum: Facilitate at least 3 rituals between training weekends totaling 12 hours with individuals, couples, families or groups. This includes your prep time.
3) Three reflection papers on your facilitated rituals.
4) Three Private sessions of personal feedback from Megan and Jim.
- Thursday 9:00 – 12:00, 1:30 – 4:30 6 hours
- Friday 9:00 – 12:00, 1:30 – 4:30, 6:30 – 9:30 9 hours
- Saturday 9:00 – 12:00, 1:30 – 4:30, 6:30 – 9:30 9 hours
- Sunday 9:00 – 12:00, 1:30 – 4:30 6 hours
Cost for intensive Ritual Leader Training Weekend = $750 ($950 for Certification)
There are a few more requirements if you want to get Certified:
1) Practicum: Facilitate at least 3 rituals totaling 12 hours with individuals, couples, families or groups. This includes your prep time.
2) Three reflection papers on your facilitated rituals.
3) Three Private sessions of personal feedback from Megan and Jim.
42 hours of training for Certification – 30 hours of class time + 12 hours practicum = 42 hours
Certification Cost = $950 Includes 1 weekend and 3 hours of professional feedback on facilitated rituals
Suggested reading:
- The Sapphire Staff: Walking the Western Mystical Way, by Megan Wagner
- Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, by Malidoma Patrice Some
- Rituals for Everyday Living, by Lorna St. Aubyn
- Global Ritualism: Myth and Magic Around the World, by Denny Sargent
- Rituals for our Times: Celebrating, Healing and Changing our Lives and Our Relationships, by Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts
- The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk
- Sacred Space: Clearing and Enhancing the Energy of your Home, by Denise Linn
Overview of skills and techniques learned on the course:
Statement of purpose:
The purpose of Healing Ritual is to:
- Create altered states of consciousness beneficial for healing
- Focus personal intent and will
- Integrate parts of the personality
- Open the heart and make us receptive to healing
- Call in Spirit to access energy shifts and new perspectives
Assessment skills gained:
Using the 7 Universal Stages of Human Development, we will learn skills to:
- Identify where a person (or couple/family/group) may be on the developmental path
- Assess what kind of ritual a person might need for healing
- Recognize what support they might need after the ritual is over
Ritual skills learned:
- Structuring safe ritual space – setting up and closing down, the flow of beginning, middle & end
- Attending to the physical ritual space and utilizing the environment and the people involved
- Attending to the emotional state of the person and people involved
- Attending to the spiritual aspects of ritual
- Invocations, prayers, supplications
- Working with spirit guides, ancestors, animal energies, deities, archetypal energies
- Setting intention
- Focusing the heart and will (dates, times, explicit desire)
- Writing and artistic exercises
- Sensitivity to the healing process – understanding the energy flow, knowing when to use silence, touch, movement, energetic sound etc.
Expressive Arts techniques learned:
- Psychodrama
- Role playing
- Empty chair technique
- Sculpting
- Circle work
- Storytelling: rehearsed and spontaneous
- Dream Theater
- Altar making
- Art Exercises
- Internal exercises
- Active Imagination
- Guided Meditation
- Journeying with drums
- Creative and effective use of
- Sound – Music, Chanting, Drumming, Rattling
- Elements – earth, water, air, fire
- Props – stones, bones, incense, sage, seeds, plants, colors, fabric, costumes
- Body – movement, body postures, body gestures
- Symbols