We begin with the ground itself, orienting to ritual as relationship rather than technique, and learning how to open a field with clarity and consent. The field is not elsewhere. It is the air moving through your room, the specific weight of this season, the intelligence of what grows and decays within reach of your body. Attention is given to the spirits of place, to the specific intelligences of land, water, and weather that shape the conditions of any ritual encounter. You will cultivate ritual perception, learning how to sense presence, track subtle shifts, and recognize when contact is being made. Foundational practices for opening and closing space are introduced so that each act of engagement is held within a container that can be completed with care.

This gathering turns toward lineage and guidance, exploring the distinction between the ancestral dead and elevated ancestors who have become steady and resourced in their support. Mycelial kinship does not move in straight lines. Neither does ancestral or your helping spirits support. We will work with practices that invite right relationship with the ancestors of blood and bone, kith and kin, and spiritual affinity, while also learning how to approach helping spirits with discernment and respect through creating altars that hold ritual intention and feeding the earth with ceremonial offerings. The focus remains on cultivating clarity in perception so that connection is grounded, reciprocal, and rooted in genuine contact. You will begin to understand how different forms of support arrive and how to remain oriented within them.

Here we deepen into the ethics of engagement, developing skills for boundaries and protection that arise from relationship. To be ecologically embodied is to know that not everything that enters belongs, and not everything that leaves was ready to go. You will learn how to tend your own field, how to recognize what belongs and what does not, and how to respond when something feels misaligned. Practices for strengthening discernment are woven throughout, alongside methods for maintaining integrity within ritual space so that what is invited is held with coherence. This session builds the capacity to remain both open and resourced.

Our final gathering moves into the wider field of collective memory, making space for rituals of grief and reconciliation. The ecosystems we inhabit have been shaped by anthropogenic harm, by colonial fracture, by the long severing of peoples from land and from one another. These wounds are not metaphor. They live in soil and in body, in lineage and in water. We will work with practices that acknowledge the accumulated wounds of collective amnesia, among them colonial violence, male supremacy, racism, religious dominance, the erasure of those whose bodies capitalism deemed expendable, and the deep severance from earth that modernity required. These are not only historical injuries; they continue to move through relationship, through land, through lineage. We approach this terrain with humility and care. Within an animistic framework, nothing is truly separate or forgotten, and ritual becomes a way of witnessing, responding, and where possible, repairing. The intensive closes with a guided process of weaving your own ritual form, integrating the principles and practices into something that can continue to live and evolve beyond our time together.