Soy de Barro: Women’s Initiation & Rites of Passage Guide Training

SOY DE BARRO

I Am of the Clay

A Wild Clay & Elemental Women’s Initiation

+ Rites of Passage Guide Training

Come remember the wisdom of your hands and the land.

AUGUST 19-25, 2027 • MANDALA SPRINGS • WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA (near Asheville)

Clay is a primal teacher; raw and gritty at the same time refined and supple. This sculptable rock dust under our feet is a miracle of a changing, alive creative planet. As are we, being made of the same minerals of the earth shaped into vessels that hold these life giving waters. May we be fortified and flexible to face the obstacles of our times and incite everyday acts of love, beauty, and peacemaking. We form the vessels of our cookpots as our wombs. The wombs of our creation, that will cook up the nourishment physically and spiritually that we offer ourselves, our family, our communities and this precious Earth for decades to come.

Journey with us as we become the earth, harvest from her, and craft our very own clay cook pots to be fired at the end in a culminating ceremony. We will reflect on how we have shaped our lives, repaired our cracks and fed our dreams and visions, as we prepare to surrender our creations to the fire.

Clay cook pots hold a time-honored place at the hearth of folklore and myth. They are snakes coiled in our hands up from the earth, into the shape of a belly to cook up something potent. Cook pots feed family and community, they breathe under heat and take their time, retaining the nutrients of the foods we are cooking. Across the world and throughout time, cultures have cooked in clay and developed their unique flavors and recipes of their land. Building one of your own is like planting a seed in our ancestral memory as humans.

PERHAPS YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS

For something real.

To put your hands into the Earth.

To make a clay cook pot.

To make fire.

To swim beneath waterfalls.

To cook over a fire in clay pots and eat together.

To sing, sauna, tell stories, and sleep close to the Earth.

To savor 5 Appalachian summer days remembering a natural way of being human together.

YOU FEEL CALLED TO THE CLAY.

The smell of wet Earth. Hands covered in clay. The intimacy of pressing your fingers into something ancient and alive.

Maybe you have worked with clay for years. Maybe you have never touched wild clay before.

Maybe you cannot explain why you feel at home when your hands are with the clay.

You just do. It makes sense. You belong here.

For thousands of years, human hands have gathered clay and shaped vessels for water, seeds, food, offerings, hearth, family, and community.

Hands before ours knew this dance.

They knew the intimacy of soil and water. They knew how to coil a vessel slowly into being, how to gather around fire, and the surrender of offering something precious to the flames.

Some part of us remembers.

At Soy de Barro, we follow that ancient thread.

Gather Earth. Add your artistry. Shape a vessel. Offer it to the fire. Bring it home to nourish your life and community.

We gather wild clay and build a strong clay body. We coil cook pots by hand, gather pigments from stone and soil, make fire by friction, cook over flame, swim in wild Appalachian waterfalls, court ceremony, and surrender our vessels in an ancestral pottery firing.

This is a gathering for women who long for skills that matter, beauty, wildness, sisterhood, meaning, and a deeper relationship with the living Earth.

And for those standing at a threshold in their lives:

Come honor and be witnessed in what is changing.

AN INITIATION FOR YOU.

A TRAINING FOR WHAT YOU CARRY HOME.

Soy de Barro is both a women’s initiation and an immersion in the art of guiding rites of passage.

You do not need to be a potter, facilitator, teacher, or guide. You may simply feel called to come.

For women who are mothers, mentors, educators, artists, herbalists, ritualists, guides, community leaders, and Village Aunties, there is another layer to this work:

Come experience initiation from the inside.

Before we accompany others across thresholds, there is something important about crossing them ourselves — about not knowing what the fire will do, waiting, surrendering, being witnessed, and discovering what we carry home.

We need women who know how to listen well, hold boundaries, tend fires, feed people, make beauty, create meaningful ceremony, and accompany others through the passages of a human life.

Because culture is not something we consume.

Culture is something we make together.

For women pursuing Earth Path Education’s Women’s Rites of Passage Guide Certification, Soy de Barro is part of the full certification pathway.

You do not need to be pursuing the full certification to come.

CLAY AS PRIMAL TEACHER

Clay asks us to slow down and listen with our hands.

To learn when to press and when to soften. To work with imperfection. To tend what cracks, surrender what we cannot control, and eventually trust the fire.

As we shape one vessel, we are also tending another:

Ourselves.

What in your life is asking to be reshaped?

What wants water?

What are you ready to place into the fire?

What nourishment are you being called to carry home?

The vessel becomes a reflection of our own becoming.

CLAY AS MEDICINE

Clay has long been used not only to make vessels, but in practices of tending and healing the soul.

There is also something deeply settling about working clay with our hands.

As we knead, coil, smooth, mend, and shape, the pace changes. We slow down. The hands become occupied, the mind quiets, and things sometimes rise that have been waiting for enough stillness to be felt.

A memory. An emotion. An understanding. A story.

The hands can speak when words are not necessary.

The clay does not ask us to explain ourselves. It simply receives our touch and responds.

Too dry, and it cracks. Too wet, and it cannot hold its form. Push too hard, and it collapses.

Attend to it, and slowly a vessel takes shape.

There is medicine in that kind of attention.

Clay teaches patience, humility, relationship, and the beauty of process.

THE JOURNEY

The making of the vessel is the thread we follow through our days together — woven with clay, water, myth, stars, embodiment, nourishment, ceremony, and sisterhood.

OFFERING CEREMONY + WILD CLAY HARVEST

We begin with relationship.

Before taking from the Earth, we make offerings. We give thanks. We listen.

Together we gather wild clay. You are also invited to bring clay from the lands you call home.

As we meet and mix the clay body, we begin meeting our own bodies as sacred ground.

Before we shape anything, we begin by belonging.

CLAY COOK POT APPRENTICESHIP

Each woman will transform raw clay into a cooking vessel.

Slowly. Intentionally. By hand.

You will learn to process clay, build with coiling techniques, shape and smooth your vessel, work with moisture and cracking, and create a pot designed to cook over flame.

Clay cook pots have lived at the hearth of human culture across time and place.

Let's cook up some potent medicine in these prayerful clay bellies, a revolution of LOVE and belonging.

They feed family and community.

To build one plants a seed in our ancestral memory:

I can make what I need from the Earth beneath my feet.

In an over-industrialized world, making what we need with our own hands can itself become an act of cultural restoration and re-story-ation.

EARTH PIGMENTS + ADORNMENT + PERSONAL MYTH

The Earth is full of color.

We will forage and grind pigments from soil and stone, learning to see the rainbows held within the rocks beneath us.

With these colors, we adorn our bodies.

Through body painting, symbolism, storytelling, and our Story Stone Ceremony, pigment becomes a language of prayer and remembrance.

Adornment becomes devotion.

WATER CEREMONY + WILD WATERFALLS

Held by the beauty of Mandala Springs and the Appalachian mountains in summer, we will journey to wild waterfalls to swim, explore, play, and enter Water Ceremony together.

Water offers purification and clarity.

Water eventually smooths all that is rough.

Water is Life.

May this Initiation be a Hydration for your wild soul!

We will immerse ourselves in cool mountain waters, feel stone beneath our feet and sun on our skin, and give ourselves over to the sheer joy of an Appalachian summer.

Some things need the fire.

Some things need water.

FIRE BY FRICTION + SACRED FIRE TENDING

And we meet Fire.

We will learn to make fire by friction with the bow drill, tend it well and safely, and cook in clay vessels over flame.

Fire has been gathering humans together since the beginning. We come close enough to learn from fire — to feed fire, cook with fire, and eventually entrust our pots into the heart of the fire.

We tend the fire — and allow the fire to tend us.

ANCESTRAL POTTERY FIRING

Finally, the vessel must leave our hands.

Our pots enter an ancestral pottery firing, surrounded by broken shards from previous firings. These pieces create a protective womb around our tender new vessels as they meet the intensity of the fire.

What has broken before can become protection for what is newly being born.

There is something here about our own failures and learning, too.

The broken pieces are not useless. They become part of what protects the new.

And then we have to let go.

We tend the flames and see what emerges.

A vessel may come through whole. It may crack. It may break.

This, too, belongs.

You fire your pot.

You fire your prayer.

You cook your new self into being.

THE WOMAN CARRYING THE POT HOME

Each woman will make her own clay cook pot and carry it through the ancestral firing process.

We tend our vessels with great care, but Fire offers no guarantees.

Whether she carries home a vessel for her hearth or the transformed pieces of what she created, the deeper question is:

Who is the woman carrying it home?

What has she remembered?

What has she laid down?

What has the fire strengthened in her?

What does she now know in her hands, her body, and her bones?

What is she ready to nourish with the life renewed within her?

THE RITES OF PASSAGE GUIDE PATHWAY

For women called to accompany others through meaningful thresholds, Soy de Barro also offers an immersion in:

• foundations of rites of passage and initiation

  
  

• creating safe and meaningful ceremonial space

  
  

• village-model mentorship

  
  

• embodiment and somatic awareness

  
  

• sacred boundaries and the power of yes and no

  
  

• earth-based practices for transformation

  
  

• cultural renewal and meaningful rites of passage

  
  

We believe guides should know initiation from the inside.

Soy de Barro stands fully on its own as a women’s initiation or may become part of your pathway toward Earth Path Education’s Rites of Passage Guide Certification.

YOUR GUIDES

HOSANNA WHITE

I am a descendent of early English settlers, Scottish and Irish immigrants, currently living on Kalapuya territory in the foothills of the Coast Range in Western Oregon.

I am an educator, artist, pigment forager, amateur geologist, wild clay potter, and land tender. I blend bio-regional history and land stewardship into my earth pigment arts practice and place based pottery. These crafts have sparked a passion for clay chemistry and deepened my sense of belonging and responsibility to the land.

I have always been drawn to all things local, ecologically wise, and pre-industrial for meeting my everyday needs. I believe that the land, the animals, and waters have never forgotten what so many of us humans have forgotten. I want to remember, so I am listening to them and practicing the ways of living that help me shed the expectations and objectifications that I learned within a consumer culture.

It is a subversive act in an over industrialized society to cultivate and make the things we need with our hands. It is one way I remain grounded and am fighting for a regenerative future that honors life.

I am not conventionally educated; classroom learning never worked for me. I like learning directly on the land, from the teachers who are living what they teach, and developing my understanding slowly through practice. My attitude towards learning, along with exceptional mentors, has given my a unique way of teaching and designing immersive learning experiences.

While, I have identified as an artist most of my life, to go deeper on this path of paint making and pottery, it was essential for me to begin learning the language of the rocks and soils.

I have spent the last 12 years studying the geology of my home in the Southern Willamette Valley through observation, experimentation, and research. Like getting to know a new friend, I am building a relationship with the land through my creative process.

These conversations are so rich. I am learning how to feel and hear the land through sculpting with their clays, blending, testing and transforming them at different temps. I make offerings and amends, grieving and singing, asking questions and receiving feedback. I watch how iron moves through the strata, reading the biography of the earth and how a place heals from disturbance. Sometimes I can sense how time might feel from the minerals point of view.

Relationship with our materials restores the continuity that our creative practices crave. When we cultivate, tend, and process our materials from the source, we understand that our crafts are inherently dependent upon the gifts of the living earth.

LENA EASTES

Rites of Passage Guide • Village Auntie

Founder & Director of Earth Path Education

Lena Eastes is the founder and director of Earth Path Education, devoted to rites of passage, cultural renewal, deep nature connection, and mentoring the next generation of leaders and caretakers of community and Earth.

For 19 years, Lena has guided girls, young women, women, youth, and families through experiences rooted in ceremony, storytelling, expressive arts, earth skills, herbalism, and deep nature connection.

Her work centers on restoring meaningful rites of passage that help people step more fully into their gifts, their voice, and their role within the village of all of life.

Lena weaves ceremonial arts, embodiment, mentorship, and relationship with the living Earth to create spaces of belonging and transformation.

Soy de Barro is one expression of this larger vision — remembering the wisdom within us and saying yes to our role as carriers of culture, care, and ceremony.

BUILDING CULTURAL TOPSOIL

We are making pottery in the way humans have for thousands of years.

Gathering clay from the Earth. Mixing it with water. Shaping vessels with our hands. Tending fire. Making something beautiful and useful that can nourish our people.

And within these old human practices, we are also asking:

Who tends the fires?

Who feeds the people?

Who remembers the stories?

Who accompanies someone across a threshold?

Who makes beauty?

Who gathers the women?

Who tends the village?

These capacities still live in us.

We are making pottery.

We are practicing culture.

We are building cultural topsoil.

YOUR INVESTMENT

EARLY BIRD — $1,111

Register by November 1, 2026

FULL TUITION — $1,400

Beginning November 2

Your tuition includes:

• the complete Soy de Barro women’s initiation + training immersion

  
  

• all wild-clay pottery instruction

  
  

• clay, pigments, firing, and materials

  
  

• rites of passage teachings and ceremonies

  
  

• nourishing meals throughout the gathering

  
  

• camping

  
  

• sauna

  
  

• Water Ceremony + waterfall pilgrimages

  
  

• all instruction and materials to create your clay cook pot and carry it through the ancestral firing process

  
  

Camping • Food • Sauna • All Materials Included

No previous pottery experience is needed.

Space is intentionally limited to preserve the intimacy of the circle and the depth of hands-on apprenticeship.

COME TO THE MOUNTAINS

Come for the clay, the wild water and fire.

Come to learn skills your hands will remember.

Come for sisterhood, beauty, good food, ceremony, and long summer days in the mountains.

Come because you are standing at a threshold.

Or simply because something about this makes your whole body say yes.

You do not need to know exactly why.

Sometimes the call comes before the explanation.

Put your hands into the Earth.

Hydrate your wild soul.

Make the vessel.

Meet the fire.

Remember what you belong to.

SOY DE BARRO

I Am of the Clay