REMEMBER YOUR MEDICINE

REMEMBER YOUR MEDICINE

Women's Initiation & Rites of Passage Guide Training

April 6–16, 2027 | Playa San Miguel, Costa Rica

Ten days of initiation, ancestral wisdom, ceremonial arts, and wild beauty between the tropical jungle and the Pacific Ocean.

Remember Your Medicine. Find Your Voice. Weave Your Story. Become the Ceremony and step into your dharma as a Rites of Passage Guide.

There is a medicine that only you can carry.

A song that only your voice can sing.

A story woven through the thresholds of your life—the heartbreaks and revelations, the ancestors and the dreams, the grief and beauty that have shaped your becoming.

What if everything you have lived has been preparing you for the medicine you are here to offer?

We invite you to the wild Pacific coast of Costa Rica for an extraordinary Women's Initiation and Rites of Passage Guide Training.

Held by Mother Ocean, the living jungle, and a circle of powerful women, priestesses, elders, artists, and ceremonial guides, we will journey into the mysteries of remembrance, transformation, and sacred service.

Together, we will reclaim our voices, tend our grief, honor our ancestors, deepen our relationship with the living Earth, and weave our personal myth into the fabric of our dharmic calling.

This is an invitation to be initiated more deeply into your own life while cultivating the wisdom, presence, and ceremonial skills to guide others through life's sacred thresholds.

Your Investment

Early Bird: $3,333 — Save $444!

Available through November 15, 2026

Regular Tuition: $3,777 beginning November 16, 2026

April 6–16, 2027 | Playa San Miguel, Costa Rica

Your all-inclusive investment covers ten extraordinary days of Women's Initiation and Rites of Passage Guide Training, beachfront accommodations, delicious nourishing meals, teachings and ceremonies with our four guides, all excursions and adventures, ceremonial materials, and in-country transportation.

Everything is included except airfare.

Come remember your medicine, deepen your ceremonial wisdom, and cultivate the skills to carry meaningful rites of passage into your community.

Reserve your place by November 15 to receive Early Bird tuition.

The Living Threads of Our Initiation

The Medicine of Your Voice

Heart Voice Foundations, Sacred Song & Liberation

Your voice is an instrument of healing, prayer, truth, and belonging.

Through Heart Voice foundations with living saint Amikaeyla Gaston, sacred song, embodied vocal exploration, and the healing power of sound, we will discover what becomes possible when we give our voices permission to be fully expressed.

We will learn sacred songs, explore the voice as a tool for personal and collective healing, and open ourselves to receiving the songs that wish to emerge through us.

Whether you arrive as a singer or someone who has long held her voice inside, you are welcome.

Your voice is medicine.

Mother Ocean

The Sacred Waters of Grief, Cleansing & Rebirth

Each day, we will return to the ocean.

Mother Ocean will be our teacher, witness, and sacred companion in the alchemy of grief and awakening of true joy.

Swim in the Pacific. Learn to surf if you wish. Greet the sunrise, honor each sunset. Allow the tides to teach you about surrender, transformation, and return.

Here, we remember that water is life, and that we, too, are beings of the tides.

Ancestral Wisdom & Ceremony

The Living Waters, Ancestral Remembrance & the Art of Prayer

We are blessed to gather with four women devoted to the sacred, each carrying her own relationship with ancestral wisdom, ceremony, and the living Earth.

Iya Sangoma, High Priest of Obatala, and Amikaeyla Gaston, Priestess of Oshun, bring the richness of their Yoruba spiritual traditions, ancestral teachings, and devotional practices. Lena Eastes and Alanna Collins, both water priestesses, bring their own ceremonial wisdom and intimate relationship with the healing and transformative power of water.

Together, we will explore animism, ancestral remembrance, offerings, and the living intelligence of the natural world. We will honor the teachings of Yemanjá, Mother of Waters, while deepening our own relationships with Mother Ocean and the waters flowing through all life.

We will be invited to pray with water—the waters of the ocean, the waters of our bodies, the waters of our wombs, and the deep, mysterious waters of our souls.

Through song, prayer, offerings, and ceremony, we will remember water as a living presence, a keeper of memory, a witness to our grief, and a source of cleansing, renewal, and rebirth.

Waters of the World: Becoming a Water Protectress

For those who feel called, we will share Waters of the World, also known as All Waters, a living ceremonial practice carried by many, including our beloved teacher and friend Vox Lumina, and lovingly stewarded through Earth Path Education's rites of passage with young women.

Through this practice, we honor the waters of the Earth and remember our intimate connection with the rivers, oceans, springs, rains, and waters that flow through our own bodies.

We will explore what it means to become a Water Protectress—one who listens to the waters, offers prayers of gratitude and healing, and cultivates a lifelong relationship of reciprocity and loving stewardship.

A simple yet profound ceremony that can be carried home, shared across generations, and woven into the rites of passage we create for others.

As we tend the waters, we remember that the waters tend us.

The Changing Woman Ceremony

Threading Your Personal Myth Into Sacred Service

Every woman carries a personal myth.

A living tapestry of love, loss, initiation, resilience, and becoming.

In preparation for our Changing Woman Ceremony, each woman will bring meaningful fabrics from her life and stitch them into a ceremonial patch.

These fabrics become vessels of memory, holding the experiences and thresholds that have shaped her.

Through storytelling and collective witnessing, we will share our personal myths, alchemizing our lived experiences into wisdom and liberation.

Our individual patches will be joined together with safety pins to form one collective Changing Woman Coat, woven from the stories and medicine of every woman in our circle.

Together, we will enter the Changing Woman Ceremony, honoring the mystery of transformation and the sacred threads that connect us.

At the completion of the ceremony, each woman will reclaim her patch and carry it home as the seed of her dharmic service—and the beginning of her own Changing Woman Cloak.

As she goes on to guide rites of passage within her community, the women who come through her ceremonies will wear this growing cloak, becoming part of its living story.

One ceremony becomes a seed. One seed becomes a lineage.

A cloak that grows with every woman it holds.

Living Earth Skills & Adventure

Wild Beauty, Embodied Wisdom & the Joy of Being Alive

The jungle, the estuary, the waterfalls, and the vast Pacific Ocean will become our living ceremonial classroom.

Our days will be rich with exploration, wonder, ceremony, and the joy of learning directly from the natural world.

We will venture into the lush tropical landscape, kayak through the estuary, discover the magic of native bees and their healing honey, and immerse ourselves in the botanical abundance of Costa Rica.

We will work with natural pigments and ceremonial body painting, explore eco-spa rituals and botanical self-care, and deepen our relationship with master healing plants.

We will learn to open fresh coconuts with a machete, swim in the Pacific ocean, and celebrate the extraordinary abundance of mango season—when ripe mangoes fall from the sky.

One of my favorite rituals at Playa San Miguel is eating ripe mangoes in the outdoor shower, beneath an old-growth mango tree. I can let the sweet juice run down my arms and chin, delight in the delicious mess, and rinse off beneath the water. With so many varieties of mangoes growing on the land we steward, mango season becomes one long, glorious tasting party!

At night, we will encounter the mystery of bioluminescence, the light of the living night waters.

This is an initiation into the fullness of life and the full flavor of life's mystery and beauty.

The Medicine of Grief

Grief Tending, Ceremony & Collective Healing

Grief is one of our great initiators.

It opens us to the depth of our love, our longing, and our belonging to one another.

Together, we will explore the sacred art of grief tending, learning to create ceremonial spaces where sorrow can be witnessed, expressed, and transformed.

Through grief ceremonies, song, water, movement, and collective witnessing, we will tend what has been carried silently and invite the healing power of community.

We will learn how to honor our own grief and cultivate the presence, compassion, and ceremonial understanding needed to accompany others through loss and transformation.

The ocean will be our great ally in this work, holding us through the tides of release, cleansing, and rebirth.

Sea Turtle Medicine

Witnessing Birth, Protecting Life & Tending Sacred Thresholds

Our home on Playa San Miguel is situated beside a sea turtle sanctuary, where we will be immersed in the extraordinary life cycles of these ancient ocean beings.

April is a beautiful time to witness sea turtle activity along this coastline.

We will receive opportunities to witness newborn sea turtles emerging from their nests and making their first courageous journey into the Pacific.

In partnership with local conservation steward Uncle Rossi Turtle Man, and following his guidance and conservation protocols, we will participate in the sacred guardianship of these tiny lives—the doulaship of their first passage to the sea.

We may also have the privilege of witnessing a mother sea turtle returning to shore to lay her eggs.

What an extraordinary mirror for our own initiation.

The mysteries of birth, courage, vulnerability, instinct, and becoming unfolding before our eyes.

Specific wildlife encounters depend on nature, and conservation participation follows local sanctuary protocols.

The Way of Council

The Art of Deep Listening & Sacred Witnessing

At the heart of rites of passage is the capacity to listen deeply, speak authentically, and witness one another with compassion.

Through the Way of Council, we will practice speaking from the heart, listening without judgment, and cultivating the sacred container of authentic community.

Council will be woven throughout our initiation, supporting our personal transformation while offering an essential foundation for those called to guide others.

We will explore how to hold space for truth, vulnerability, silence, and the wisdom that emerges when every voice is welcomed.

Decolonizing Mind & Time

Remembering Another Way of Being

What happens when we release the urgency, productivity, and separation that shape so much of modern life?

What becomes possible when we remember how to live in relationship with the rhythms of the Earth?

Together, we will explore decolonizing our minds and our relationship with time, reclaiming spaciousness, presence, and sacred reciprocity.

Through sunrise yoga, daily ceremony, ocean immersion, shared meals, and time for deep reflection, we will practice another way of being, living in a temple woven out of time as the Tzutijil Mayans teach.

Time rooted in beauty, belonging, and the wisdom of the living world.

The Art of Guiding Rites of Passage

Becoming a Tender of Sacred Thresholds

Woven throughout this personal initiation is a living training in the art of guiding others.

We will explore the foundations of meaningful rites of passage, ceremonial design, sacred witnessing, storytelling, grief tending, energetic awareness, and the responsibilities of holding transformational spaces.

You will experience ceremony from within while learning to recognize the essential elements that make initiation meaningful, ethical, and transformative.

Our training will include:

• The foundations and design of rites of passage with the 8 Shields Model

  
  

• The Way of Council and the art of sacred witnessing

  
  

• Sharing your personal myth

  
  

• The Changing Woman Ceremony and the creation of a living ceremonial cloak seed/patch

  
  

• Grief tending and water ceremonies

  
  

• Heart Voice foundations and Sacred Song Catching

  
  

• Natural pigments, body painting, and botanical ritual arts

  
  

• Working with the elements, ancestral wisdom, and Activating your Earth Path

  
  

• Decolonizing time and cultivating sacred presence

  
  

• Holding safe, meaningful, and transformative ceremonial containers

  
  

Our intention is for each woman to leave with a deeper relationship to her own medicine, practical tools for guiding others, and a growing capacity to bring rites of passage into her family, community, and sacred service.

We gather as women of diverse ancestries, cultures, and lived experiences, each carrying our own stories, songs, traditions, and ways of knowing.

In this multiracial circle, we honor both our differences and our shared humanity, creating space for authentic relationship, deep listening, cultural humility, and the wisdom that emerges when we meet one another with open hearts.

We come not to erase our differences, but to honor them. Not to claim one another's traditions, but to learn in relationship, with reverence for the lineages and wisdom keepers who carry them.

Together, we remember that belonging does not require sameness, and that our differences can enrich the collective medicine of our circle.

Meet Your Guides & Co-Creatrixes

Amikaeyla Gaston

Vocalist | Sound Healer | Cultural Ambassador | Priestess of Oshun

Amikaeyla is an internationally recognized vocalist, speaker, and healing-arts practitioner whose life's work centers on music as medicine and the sonic infrastructure of systems change. As founder and executive director of the International Cultural Arts & Healing Sciences Institute (ICAHSI), she has pioneered programming that addresses the biological foundations of social movements, activist burnout, and collective trauma through neuroscience-informed musical interventions.

Her journey began the hard way — surviving a brutal hate crime that left her hospitalized. Through sound, she found not only healing but a calling to help others reach their own authentic voice and a shared sense of coherence. That transformation shaped her work as an advocate for peace and forgiveness, and her approach that bridges ancient wisdom traditions with contemporary neuroscience.

Through ICAHSI, Amikaeyla has created healing conferences for at-risk women and girls of color, Hope and Healing retreats for women affected by cancer, and concerts and in-home services for terminally ill patients. As a cultural ambassador — in partnership with organizations including UNHCR and the U.S. State Department over fifteen years of cultural exchange — she has worked with communities navigating conflict, displacement, and recovery in many countries, including Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Qatar, and Uruguay: women and girls, refugee families, youth, and elders among them. In the Middle East she worked with Iraqi and Palestinian refugee families, using music to ease the pain and trauma of war. Alongside this humanitarian work, she has brought voice, presence, and collective-coherence practices into universities, conferences, and companies — including the University of California, Berkeley, Disney, and The North Face — helping teams and leaders navigate change, build resilience, and find their way back to one another. She led the docent corps of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco through a year-long program on creating belonging — the kind of sustained institutional work that turns a one-time experience into lasting culture change. Her work has reached communities across five continents, and she counts Bobby McFerrin among her recent collaborators.

Her recognitions include the U.N. Global Woman Award, the Voss Foundation Emerging Women Leaders Award, and the Hero of Forgiveness Award from the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance. As a jazz vocalist, her album 'Being In Love' has been recognized by NPR as featuring one of the 'purest contemporary voices' in music today.

Iya Sangoma Oluduye

High Priest of Obatala | Elder | Ceremonial Wisdom Keeper

Iya Sangoma is an elder, spiritual guide, and ceremonial wisdom keeper whose work honors ancestral traditions, spiritual transformation, and sacred community.

As a High Priest of Obatala and founder of Kindred of Sangoma, she carries teachings rooted in Yoruba spiritual wisdom, ancestral relationship, and the sacred responsibilities of ceremony.

Her presence brings the depth of elderhood, ancestral remembrance, and the living wisdom of sacred tradition into our initiation.

Lena Eastes

Founder and Director of Earth Path Education | Doula of Transformation | Rites of Passage Guide

For nearly two decades, Lena Eastes has devoted her life to restoring meaningful rites of passage, deep nature connection, and cultural regeneration. A mother, teacher, creatress, herbalist, water priestess, and ceremonial guide, she is a passionate advocate for intergenerational wisdom and community- and Earth-centered ways of living.

As the founder and visionary of Earth Path Education, Lena has guided 1,000 young women through rites of passage over the past 19 years, weaving together earth skills, storytelling, song, flute, embodied ceremony, creative expression, and the wisdom of the living Earth. A spiritual mother to many daughters, she understands initiation as a living relationship that extends beyond ceremony into mentorship, belonging, and the lifelong tending of one another's becoming.

Lena has envisioned and brought to life numerous educational initiatives, including Earth Path Education's Sacred Naturalist School and ten-year arc of nature connection and rites of passage for girls and young women, encompassing Nature Sisters, Growing Goddess, and Moon Mystics. Together, these offerings create pathways of belonging, mentorship, and meaningful initiation through the formative thresholds of girlhood and young womanhood.

Now in the sixth year of offering women's initiations and Rites of Passage Guide Trainings, Lena brings extensive firsthand experience in designing, facilitating, and teaching transformative ceremonial initiations. Beyond guiding her own organization, she has mentored women in establishing their own rites of passage offerings, schools, organizations, and cultural renewal initiatives—helping this work take root in communities beyond her own.

Lena is a grower of cultural topsoil, cultivating the fertile conditions in which community, creativity, intergenerational wisdom, and Earth-centered ways of living can flourish. She is devoted to sharing the simple and effective medicines, earth skills, ceremonial understanding, and relational wisdom that empower others to become tenders of life's thresholds.

A lifelong creatress and Weaver of Rainbows, Lena designs clothing, creates handmade hats and dolls, paints, makes pottery, tends fire,  plays flute, and brings artistry into the ceremonial spaces she holds. Her teaching is infused with imagination, beauty, play, and the joy of creating with our hands and hearts.

Lena also founded and stewards Weaving Rainbows, a Native art gallery and cultural center in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, and continues to work in relationship with Indigenous artists, elders, and cultural wisdom keepers around the world. Through international pilgrimages, cultural exchanges, and immersive educational experiences, she honors the living traditions and relationships that enrich her understanding of cultural regeneration.

At home in the Appalachian Mountains, Lena homeschools her daughter, Naia, weaving herbalism, creativity, nature connection, and seasonal rhythms into their everyday lives.

With lived experience guiding rites of passage, an artist's imagination, and a mother's heart, Lena invites women to remember their unique medicine and cultivate the wisdom, confidence, and ceremonial skills to carry meaningful initiation into their own communities.

Alanna Collins

Medicine Woman | Truth Is One

Alanna is a facilitator of plant medicine ceremonies and has undergone training and initiation from an Umbandaime community where she lived and studied in the Amazon of Acre, Brazil. She has also studied with Davi de Paula, a world renown ‘caboclo’ from the Umbandaime Tradition in Brazil, the Yawanawa tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, and Alonso del Rio, a Peruvian master. She is an official member of the Santo Daime Church in both the U.S.A and Brazil and received her initiation into the lineage in 2017. She has been facilitating ceremonies with grandmother medicine and Kambo in various parts of the U.S. since 2018. She brings groups to the Amazon of Brazil  to participate in the process of harvesting and cooking medicine and facilitates Kambo training programs in both Brazil and the U.S. in partnership with Davi de Paula. 

Alanna is a unique practitioner with her formal background as a psychiatric registered nurse, and has experience working in hospitals and treatment centers for people with addiction and mental health issues. In her private practice she offers Kambo as an alternative therapy for people transitioning off pharmaceutical medications. Alanna holds a sacred container with music and is a professional multi-instrumental musician/composer.

Above and beyond all, Alanna is a devotee of Amma Sri Karunamayi and Sadhguru and has been receiving their traditional yogic initiations into sadhana over the years.  

A Life-Giving Rhythm

Ten Days Between Jungle & Sea

Imagine waking to the sound of the Pacific Ocean.

The morning light filtering through the tropical trees. Fresh fruit, nourishing meals, and the gentle invitation to begin another day in beauty.

Our days will unfold in rhythm with the living Earth—woven with song, ceremony, council, adventure, creativity, and time to simply be.

There will be moments of profound transformation and moments of irresistible laughter. Stories shared over meals, spontaneous songs, barefoot dancing, ocean swims, and the sweetness of women coming alive together.

We will make room for both the unexpected and the extraordinary. For wonder, rest, discovery, and the kind of magic that emerges when we release our hurried relationship with time.

There will be space to grieve, to celebrate, to play, to create, and to savor the extraordinary gift of being alive.

This is an initiation into the fullness of life.

Who Is This Initiation For?

This journey is for women who feel called to deepen their relationship with their own medicine, honor the thresholds of their lives, and cultivate the wisdom to guide others.

You may be a mother, mentor, educator, artist, healer, ceremonial guide, community leader, or woman standing at a significant threshold in your own life.

You may already be guiding rites of passage or simply feel the first stirring of that calling.

You do not need to arrive with all the answers.

Only a willingness to listen, to be witnessed, to grow, and to enter into sacred relationship with yourself, the Earth, and the women gathered beside you.

Your Journey Includes

Initiation, Ceremony & Guide Training

• Ten days of immersive Women's Initiation and Rites of Passage Guide Training

• Teachings and mentorship with four extraordinary women, elders, artists, and ceremonial guides

• Heart Voice foundations, sacred song, and song catching

• The Changing Woman Ceremony and creation of your ceremonial patch

• Grief tending, water ceremonies, and ancestral wisdom

• The Way of Council, ceremonial arts, and rites of passage facilitation

• Waters of the World and the invitation to become a Water Protectress

Living Earth Adventures & Creative Arts

• Daily connection with Mother Ocean, sunrise yoga, and optional surfing

• Sea turtle conservation experiences and opportunities for hatchling guardianship

• Sea kayaking through the tropical estuary and a waterfall adventure

• Encounters with bioluminescence and the magic of native stingless bees

• Natural pigments, ceremonial body painting, and botanical self-care

• Master healing plant teachings and Earth-based skills

  
  

  Nourishment, Beauty & Belonging

  Meet Our Chef King, Danen Johnson

  Nourishment is an essential part of our initiation, and we are delighted to have Danen Johnson tending our table.

  With a love for beautiful food, fresh local ingredients, and the abundance of Costa Rica, Danen will lovingly prepare delicious, nourishing meals throughout our ten days together.

  As Lena's beloved, Danen brings a warm, grounded masculine presence to our gathering, supporting the women of our circle through the simple yet profound art of feeding and caring for others.

  Expect vibrant tropical flavors, beautiful shared meals, and plenty of love served around the table.

Beachside accommodations nestled between jungle and sea

Here's our Villa right on the Beach and Right Next Door to the Turtle Sanctuary

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  Fresh, nourishing meals prepared with love by our Chef King, Danen Johnson

• Tropical fruits, fresh coconuts, and the abundance of mango season

• In-country transportation associated with our journey

• Spaciousness for rest, reflection, laughter, creativity, and deep connection with the women of our circle

  
  

Ten days to remember your medicine, deepen your relationship with the living Earth, and cultivate the wisdom and skills to guide others through life's meaningful thresholds.

The Invitation

There is a medicine that only you can carry.

A story only you can tell.

A song only you can sing.

And a world longing for women who remember how to tend the sacred thresholds of life.

Come to the ocean.

Bring your stories, your grief, your gifts, and your longing.

Come remember your medicine.

April 6–16, 2027

Playa San Miguel, Costa Rica

An offering of Earth Path Education.