with Trishuwa,
Scott Harshman, David and Lena Welker
September 21 - 26, 2011
May 16 - 21, 2012
September 19 -24, 2012
May 22 - 27, 2013
Location:
Wildcroft Hollow Botanical Sanctuary
and Blue Heron Outdoor School
Amherst County, Virginia
Some of the things that will be covered are:
- BUILDING A LODGE
- CREATING THE FIRE & TENDING THE FIRE
- COLLECTING STONES
- MYTHOLOGY AND LINEAGE
- LEADING CEREMONY
- ASSEMBLING TOOLS NEEDED TO CONDUCT LODGE
- PREPARING YOURSELF EMOTIONALLY & SPIRITUALLY
- CREATING A SAFE LODGE ~ PHYSICALLY, EMOTIONALLY & SPIRITUALLY
- ASSIGNMENTS ~ READING AND EXPERIENTIAL
- BUILDING YOUR OWN LODGE & DOING SOLO LODGES
- DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SPIRITS OF LODGE
- DEVELOPING YOUR MEDICINE BUNDLE
- MORAL & ETHICAL GUIDELINES
 People come to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony for many reasons; curiosity, physical dis-ease, to challenge themselves, to find solace emotionally and spiritual. And, most of all, our brothers and sisters want to be happy, to find comfort and peace. The natural, healthy response to our human condition is to seek happiness, the natural state of wholesomeness. Remembering this drive to find happiness reminds those of us that lead the ceremony to pray for our own happiness, peace of mind and openness heart as well. Giving requires nourishment of ourselves, soul sustenance, mental acuity and spiritual and emotional sensitivity. This training will require self examination of your own emotional and spiritual inner-territory and developing the ability to respond with sensitivity and strength. This requires self awareness, steadfastness and maturity.
The Sweat Lodge is a sacred place to be of service to the wholeness and health of the people that crawl on hands and knees into the lodge to sweat and pray. This training will help you become more skilled in ceremony and deepen your loving relationship to the circle of life while you become a servant to the body and spirit of lodge.
I love lodge and care deeply for all those that participate. If you do too this is the foundation you need to commit to this training. This is a journey of finding your relationship with yourself, the invisible ancestors that abide in the lodge, opening your heart, mind and body to hold the medicine bundle of Sweat Lodge. It is a wonderful journey that never ends. You will be asked to embrace the wisdom of the Ancestors of lodge, and build relationships with the invisible spirits, to engage as relatives the people that participate in lodge. Always remembering we are all related. Each person brings a gift for your life: compost, fertilizer, sunlight, moonlight, water, fire,wind/breath, soil. We are earth, sky and the boundless expanse of the universe. Sweat Lodge holds this wisdom, the wisdom of universal interdependence.
The wisdom of universal interdependence brings peace. Black Elk spoke of this peace as three-fold.
I wish to mention here, that through these rites (Hunkapi: the making of relatives) a three-fold peace (is) established. The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes with the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its Powers, and when they realize that at the center of theUniverse dwells Wakun-tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real Peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace until there is first known that true peace which, as I have often said, is with the souls of men.
~Black Elk
This wise longterm view includes a respect for all people, all life, the seen and unseen, a perspective that acknowledges interdependence, not as an ideal but what is REAL. We need this attitude for healing and for solving everyday problems as well as creating long term solutions. I believe this context is the foundation for the true heart of the sweat lodge ceremony.
We go into the darkness, we seek initiation, in order to know directly how the roots of all beings are tied together: how we are related to al things, how this relationship expresses itself in terms of interdependence, and finally how all phenomena abide within one another. Yes, the roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace.
- Joan Halifax
COST: $575 each program
$600 NON-REFUNDABLE DEPOSIT FOR ALL FOUR PROGRAMS
Pay in Full for a $300 discount ($2000)
for more information:
575-538-5498 • trishuwa@gaianstudies.org
Pay: Foundation for Gaian Studies, Church of Gaia
8 Pioneer Road, Silver City, NM 88061
 TRISHUWAis Ceremonial Director of the Church of Gaia and founding member of Foundation for Gaian Studies. She is an Earth Keeper and Metis of Irish and Cherokee lineage. Her first ceremonial experiences were with the San Juan Pueblo people who live 25 Miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the Rio Grande where she lived as a child. Trishuwa works with the 4 great ceremonies of the Earth—the experiential forms of working with the invisibles of the world—Sweat Lodge, Sacred Pipe, Vision Quest and the Medicine Wheel. She continues to travel and teach internationally each year. Her work has been profiled in The New York Times, on “Good Morning America,” and on “CNN.” She now lives in New Mexico with her partners, Julie McIntyre and Stephen Buhner, author of The Fasting Path, Lost Language of Plants., and The Secret Teaching of Plants.
 SCOT HARSHMAN Ordained Practitioner of the Church of Gaia and Ceremonialist offers rites of passage ceremonies, healing with the Sacred Pipe and Sweat Lodge to his community and has been a Vision Quest guide for six years. He studied with Dhyani Ywahoo, with Stephen Buhner in Sacred Plant Medicine, and Earth ceremony with Trishuwa. He is a Pipe carrier and has combined plant medicine and ceremony as a life path.
 DAVID & LENA WELKER are herbalists who work with edible and medicinal plants, David has been in the outdoor education filed for many years. Blue Heron Outdoor School is dedicated to preserving and disseminating the skills and understanding to live in cooperation with the natural world offering classes in Plant Identification, Cordage and Basketry, Tracking, Firemaking and Toolmaking. Lena is a teacher of Sacred Plant Medicine, a ceremonialist and gifted artist.
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