Rose Initiation and Women's Rites of Passage Guide Training

Women’s Initiation + Rites of Passage Guide Training

The Rose Initiation is a Women’s Initiation and Rites of Passage Guide Training for those called to hold thresholds of becoming—first for themselves, and from that place of being initiated, to hold initiations and transformational spaces in their communities.

This immersive experience is both a deep personal initiation and a professional training for women who feel called to receive and guide rites of passage, initiations, and transitional spaces. It is an integral part of the Rites of Passage Guide Training pathway and counts towards our full rites of passage guide certification.

At the center of this initiation is Rose—teacher of beauty with backbone, devotion with discernment, and generous love rooted in impeccable boundaries. Through ritual, embodiment, medicine-making, song, and sisterhood, initiates deepen their capacity to hold powerful, nourishing containers for transformation.

Where we’ll gather 

SunSong Community is a vibrant land project located in Barnardsville, NC (address will be given at registration). The land spans over 20 acres, which includes large vegetable, flower and herb gardens, orchards, forest, a sauna, little ponds for dunking, pole barn for community gatherings and various other structures. We share this land with box turtles, flowers, oak trees, deer and bear and many other beings. The land is south-facing, sunny and beautiful. 

Camping & Accommodations 

On the land, there is a pole barn structure which will be the center of our village. Most people will be camping on the land, underneath the stars and on the Earth. Each person is responsible for bringing their own camping gear. There are a few different indoor sleeping options for people, please inquire if you’re interested. 

Meals

Delicious organic foods will be made by beloved chef queen Mirna McWilliams

Initiation as Training

In the Earth Path Education lineage, initiation and guide training are inseparable.

You will be initiated through the very practices you are learning to one day hold for others. As you are steeped in Rose medicine, ritual, and collective holding, you are simultaneously learning how to:

• Create safety without control

• Hold intimacy with emotional presence

• Work skillfully with boundaries, consent, and containment

• Guide others through change with clarity, care, and grounded leadership

This initiation strengthens both the inner maturity of the guide and the outer skill of facilitation.

Rose Initiation

This is a women’s initiation held in the arms of Rose—a descent into beauty, devotion, and embodied belonging.

We work intimately with Rose—anointing our skin and our sisters with Rose Water and her luminous fragrance, steeping body, heart, and spirit in Rose medicine through daily Rose dieta and embodiment practices. Through flower blessings, crafting rose hydrosol in the copper still, anointing rituals with Rose Water and Aqua Florida, sacred smoke, and song, Rose reveals herself not as symbol, but as living presence—the Divine Mother: tender and fierce, ancient and ever-renewing.

This initiation is sensual and grounded, rooted in the body and the earth. It welcomes pleasure, grief, laughter, tenderness, and power to move freely. Rose teaches through the senses—scent, touch, rhythm, and the way of the open heart.

Voluptuous Earth Medicine & Apothecary Work

We spend our days making Rose medicine with our hands—crushing petals, distilling rose hydrosol, crafting rose candles, and creating agua floridas.

Held at SunSong, a permaculture farm and community devoted to growing organic heirloom roses, this initiation takes place in peak Rose season. Initiates learn Rose medicine as relational medicine—how to listen to the plant, harvest with reverence, and work with Rose in ceremonial and initiatory contexts.

Rose medicine is especially supportive for:

• Heartbreak and grief

• Exhaustion from over-giving

• Wounds around intimacy and trust

• Reclaiming beauty, pleasure, and devotion

• Activating a life of heart-led service

This is medicine for women who have loved deeply, carried much, and are ready to give and receive in beautiful balance.

Thorns, Boundaries & Fierce Grace

Rose does not initiate us into softness alone.

Through ritual, movement, and somatic inquiry, we engage the teaching of the thorn—exploring boundaries as sacred architecture. This work supports embodied learning around consent, self-trust, and energetic containment—essential skills for anyone holding transformational space.

Rose teaches us how to:

• Remain open without leaking

• Protect without armoring

• Say yes with the whole body

• Say no without apology

This is beauty that can hold herself.

Song, Council & Sisterhood

This Rose initiation is communal.

We gather in circle and council—singing, sharing stories, and witnessing one another’s becoming. Song weaves the nervous system into coherence and reminds the body that it belongs—to itself, to the land, and to the village.

This sisterhood is organic, slow, and deeply nourishing—a remembering of women singing while they work, grieve, bless, and initiate one another.

Rose Dieta, Activated Creativity & Devotion

This work is rooted in relationship with Rose as a living teacher.

Through a Rose dieta, we enter an ongoing devotional practice—not about restriction, but about listening. A dieta invites conscious communion with a plant through daily ritual, sensory attunement, prayer, journaling, and creative expression. It supports emotional opening, heart healing, clarity, and devotion grounded in embodiment.

Activated creativity arises naturally from this relationship. Creativity becomes a form of listening—expressed through writing, art, song, movement, and ritual—received rather than forced.

When we speak of the Divine Mother, we are naming a universal presence recognized across cultures: the source of life, compassion, fierce protection, and renewal. In this work, Rose is experienced as a living expression of that presence—tender and thorned, ancient and wise, deeply personal and profoundly alive.

Rose Rosaries: Prayer in the Hands

The word rosary comes from rosarium—a garland of roses.

In this initiation, we revive an ancient way of praying with roses—returning devotion to the hands, the body, and the living plant.

Initiates craft traditional rose rosaries made directly from rose petals.

As the petals are rolled, pressed, and shaped into beads, the natural oils of the rose are activated. Over time, warmth from the body releases their fragrance. Worn over the heart, the beads gently steam with scent—offering Rose medicine through heat, touch, and devotion. This is not metaphor; it is living exchange.

Each rosary becomes a vessel of prayer, repetition, and care—continuing to release Rose medicine long after it is formed.

What This Initiation Prepares You For

This initiation is for women called to:

Receive a beautiful Women's Rose Initiation, receiving healing, clarity, guidance and integration.

• Hold rites of passage and initiations

• Guide others through life transitions

• Serve as mentors, aunties, and ceremonial leaders

• Anchor community spaces of transformation

You leave with lived experience of how to hold thresholds—not from theory, from the body and soul.

A Threshold of Service

The Rose Initiation is a remembering.

A remembering of your body as sacred. Of your heart as intelligent. Of your capacity to love fiercely—and wisely.

You will leave steeped in Rose—scented, strengthened, softened in the right places—carrying medicine for yourself and for the thresholds you are called to hold in the world.

An Invitation

If you feel the magnetism, this is your invitation.

Come receive your Rose Initiation. Come be welcomed into a lineage of women who know how to open with discernment, love with boundaries, and serve with integrity.

As you are initiated, you learn how to initiate, as you are held, you learn how to hold.

Rose is Calling us Home.

Lena Eastes

Founding Director, Visionary Leader, Ceremonial Guide

Lena Eastes is devoted to cultural renewal, Earth connection, and sacred rites of passage. With contagious joy and deep empathy, she inspires others to live in alignment with their inner wisdom, the rhythms of nature, and the call of justice and beauty.

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For over 16 years, Lena has led transformational Rites of Passage for girls and women, including Earth Path’s five-day “Growing Goddess” ceremony. As a thresHOLDER, she lovingly officiates life’s major thresholds—birth, motherhood, marriage, self-marriage, and the sacred passage from girlhood into womanhood.

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She is a singer for the Earth, a protector of childhood and human dignity, and a creative artist of community and ceremony. Whether she's playing flute to the sunrise, blessing waters, crafting herbal medicine, or hiding in a bush during a Deer & Coyote game, Lena brings fierce grace, presence, and a wild-hearted devotion to all she touches.

Lena walks as student, teacher, mother, mentor, and friend—with reverence for the plant world, the spirit world, and the deep intelligence of each being she meets.

Maayan Greenheart

Maayan is a mother of two beautiful children, a child of the Earth and a devotee of the Divine Mother. She tends an abundant garden where she lives at SunSong, a land-based community that she helped co-found 6 years ago. She is a ritualist, song carrier, kitchen witch, and loves to create spaces for people to connect deeply to themselves, the Earth and each other.

Maayan is a devoted rose gardener with a reverence for the ancient medicine that they carry. She has found a path of connecting with her ancestors through growing roses and praying the rosary that gives her rooted strength & peace throughout the ever-rolling and tumultuous waves of life. 

Her facilitation style is grounded, connective and personal. She has a genuine curiosity and love for people and values creating spaces that are welcoming, honest, and safe.

Full of aliveness and connected to her emotions, Maayan embodies & inspires celebration of life’s miracles while holding space for the grief that comes with honoring the tragedies of our times. She is here to support our collective healing & the remembering of the sacredness of life.

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​She's human...has good days and bad days, feels all kinds of emotions, and makes mistakes.

​And she's committed to growing, like the rose.

Mirna McWilliam

Mirna McWilliams (she/her) is holistic chef, ritualist, facilitator, space-holder, and musician/song-carrier based in the Appalachian mountains. Through this braided altar of living arts, she is devoted to planting seeds for a life-nourishing culture in all its dimensions. As a natural foods chef of a decade, Mirna’s cooking and teaching style is guided by a love of seeds and stories, inspired by the principles of Nourishing Traditions, TCM, and Ayurveda, and a passion for foraged, homegrown, and bio-regionally appropriate food.  She holds dear a vision that the hearth can be a place where human beings come home to our birthrights of healing, village, and grateful reciprocity with the Earth.

Samantha Carol Stokes

Hi, my name is Samantha Carol Stokes, and I am a proud steward of Rose Thunder Farm in Old Fort, NC with my partner and our two daughters. We have a flock of sheep and a basket willow grove to tend and share. My days are full of good work, and I am blessed! I’ve been making amulets (necklaces, bracelets, womb beads, rosaries) for about 15 years. A couple of years ago, I had a very potent devotional with rose where I learned how to make beads from rose petals. I have made some pretty special talismans from the roses that we planted and tend on the land we live on and love so much. The whole process really fosters a close connection with this ancient Goddess of a plant, the soils, the sun, the rain, the pollinators, and the songs we sing as we work to co-create with the Earth like this. The great web of life sings in harmony through our prayer beads.

A rosary is a garland of roses and a long long time ago, these garlands were offered plentifully to the Great Mother Goddess. On the trees, on standing stones, on the sacred wells flowing life giving waters.....

Rosaries can be a garland of roses that we make our offerings of prayer on over and over again. A circle that just keeps going and never ends, like the Love of our Mother and the Love we have for One another.

I have the pleasure, privilege, and honor of standing as a guide in rosary creation for our cherished circle of women for this gorgeous Rose Priestess Initiation. I will share my ways and wisdom in crafting prayer/power pieces to support you through the process of birthing your own set of prayer beads. We’ll work with gemstone beads and beads made from clay that’s made entirely of rose petals. It’s incredibly special and deepens the bond with this ancient mother of a being. With these beads and how we will weave them onto the cord, we get a long-lasting proverbial hand to hold of this fragrant, loving, wise, and Holy Mother. I so look forward to the beauty we will co-create together and the magic that will unfold as we blossom in our devotions and intimacy with the Great Mother Mystery.