An Animist Guide to Wintering Through Ritual and Reflection
Self Paced, with 1st Community Connection Call on December 26th, 2024 ~ January 30th, 2025
REGISTRATION IS OPEN!
Embrace the Wisdom of Winter
“Winter doesn’t ask for productivity. It doesn’t demand resolutions or force forward motion. Winter is a threshold—a doorway into rest, reflection, and the quiet wisdom of the world that exists beneath the surface.”
Join us in re-learning the language of winter: a season that speaks in whispers, in stillness, in the slow unfolding of time. This hybrid course is part self-directed through self-paced lessons and a companion guidebook and part community gathering with connection calls that meet once weekly for six weeks between the threshold of the Winter Solstice and Imbolc.
Together, we’ll honor this sacred pause in the wheel of the year, drawing on animistic practices, guided visualizations, and seasonal rituals to cultivate a deeper relationship with the land, the self, and the spirit of winter itself.
This is an invitation to surrender to the quiet and listen to the lessons waiting in the frost-covered ground, the skeletal branches of trees, the frozen breath of the Cailleach, the ancient goddess of winter.
- Explore winter as a season of rest and reflection
- Connect with nature through animistic practices
- Cultivate personal rituals for peace and grounding
- Prepare for the transition into spring with renewed intention
What You'll Experience
This exploration invites you to reimagine winter not as an interruption but as a sacred season of stillness. Together, we will:
Journey into Winter’s Heart: Through guided visualizations, meet winter as an ally—a spirit of rest and renewal waiting to hold you
Cultivate Seasonal Rituals: We’ll honor the cyclical wisdom of winter with practices that connect you to the land, your body, and the unseen world.
Reconnect with Nature: Discover the animistic relationships alive in every snowflake, bare tree, and patch of frozen earth.
Practice Deep Rest: Allow yourself to slow down and root into winter’s natural rhythms, reclaiming rest as a radical act of care.
This is not about escaping winter but stepping into its depths and emerging transformed.
Investment
WE’RE HAPPY TO OFFER 3 PRICING OPTIONS IN CONSIDERATION OF THOSE WHO ARE IN FINANCIAL NEED.
We kindly ask that you enroll by clicking on which option best meets your current financial experiences.
Generating: For those folks with comfortable financial means to contribute more, we are deeply appreciative of your generosity which assists in making this accessible for those who may otherwise not be able to attend.
Sustaining: This is the actual cost for us to offer this program and sustain what we do. We are grateful if you are able to enroll at this rate.
Supported: We invite folks with leaner financial means to enjoy programs at a reduced cost and are delighted you are here.
If you need a reduction beyond what is provided or a payment plan, please reach out directly to shannon@redearthhealing.org
Stillness Companion Guidebook
Self Directed Lessons
Connection Calls
Details
I am not here to teach you anything new. I’m here to remind you of what your body already knows—what the land you stand on has always been whispering. Winter is not a season of scarcity. It’s a season of abundance: of rest, dreaming, and connection.
Each week, through recorded sessions of storytelling, guided visualizations, and ritual, we’ll step together into the quiet mystery of this season. These are loomed weekly but as we are slowing our rhythm, feel free to move through the material letting your natural cadence nurture your pace. Let the land guide you. Let the snow speak. Winter has been waiting for you. You also have your Companion guide book with insights and reflections to weave your experiences through the season, and finally each Thursday after the solstice we will gather as a community to listen to the stillness, witness the sacred, and tend our community hearthfire. Here is what our time together will look like…
- Week 1
- Week 2
- Week 3
- Week 4
- Week 5
- Week 6
Week 1: Initiation into Wintering
This week, we’ll step into the tender threshold of winter. Wintering is not simply enduring; it’s an art form, a deliberate descent into stillness. Together, we’ll explore animism as a way of being woven into the world, where all things—stones, rivers, and even the frostbite on tree bark—carry stories, spirits, and wisdom.
What We’ll Do:
• Sit in stillness: What does winter ask of your body, your breath, your spirit?
• Begin journaling: What is winter to you? A wound, a refuge, a reckoning?
• Explore: What would it mean to treat this season as a conversation, not an obstacle?
Week 2: Embracing the Stillness of Winter
Winter slows the world down, stretches silence, thickens the weave of mystery.”
Winter asks for patience, for an attunement to the near-invisible rhythms beneath the snow. This week, we’ll apprentice ourselves to the quiet. We’ll listen to the unseen lives of plants and animals in the season of retreat. Stillness is not nothingness; it’s a reservoir of possibility.
What We’ll Do:
• Go outside: What stories does the land tell when most of the voices are muffled by snow?
• Observe: The hibernation of animals, the way frost etches windows, the whispers of wind.
• Journal: How can your stillness mimic the stillness of nature, not as emptiness, but as gestation?
Week 3: The Spirit of Place
To truly winter is to fall in love with where you are, as it is, in its frostbitten nakedness.”
Winter is a cartographer, redrawing the map of our lives. The spirit of place—what some call animism—is most vivid in this season. The land becomes a teacher when its vitality is pared back to essentials. This week, we’ll explore the personality of the winter world we inhabit.
What We’ll Do:
• Make a “spirit map” of your local landscape. Include the bare trees, the sharp-angled light, the pathways carved by animals.
• Write a love letter to a winter spirit: the frost that laces your window, the stream that hasn’t yet frozen solid, the shadow of a bird overhead.
• Discuss: How does your land change in winter? How does it change you?
Week 4: Rituals as Conversation
Rituals are the punctuation marks in the run-on sentence of a season. They let us pause and pay attention.”
Winter calls us to ritual, not as performance, but as a way to open channels of reciprocity. This week, we’ll create rituals to honor the spirits of winter—the snow, the cold, the slumbering roots—and to tether ourselves to the earth’s slow exhale.
What We’ll Do:
• Create a winter altar: Collect fallen twigs, frost-touched leaves, stones smoothed by ice.
• Light a candle at dusk and whisper gratitude to the early dark through a gratitude ceremony
• Share: What rituals can tether you to winter’s rhythms rather than resisting them?
Week 5: Animal Companions in the Cold
“In winter, animals become archetypes, their survival strategies maps for our own.”
The bear, the fox, the owl—they are more than themselves. They are metaphors, myths, guides. Winter sharpens their presence. This week, we’ll learn from these beings: their hibernation, their endurance, their play.
What We’ll Do:
• Connect: “What animal is walking beside me this winter?”
• Observe: They have been companioning you throughout your winter cycles. Notice the tracks in the snow, the flit of wings, the gnawed bark on trees.
• Reflect: What animal qualities do you need to borrow this season? Stillness? Fierceness? Quiet resourcefulness?
Week 6: Weaving the Threads
“Wintering is not an end but a beginning disguised as dormancy.”
As the season deepens, we’ll gather the threads of our wintering. Winter teaches that endings are never complete; they are the fertile ground for transformation. This week, we’ll honor what we’ve learned and begin to imagine how these insights will ripple into spring.
What We’ll Do:
• Create an intention bundle: Collect small, meaningful objects—seeds, twigs, feathers—to symbolize what you’re carrying forward.
• Write a reflection: How has winter changed you? How has it softened you?
• Gather: Share your journey with the group. What will you take with you as the light begins its slow return??
This course is not about mastering winter. It’s about letting winter master you, about surrendering to its intelligence, its patience, and its quiet insistence that life—real life—happens in the liminal spaces, in the cold shadows, in the deep, deep rest.
What Past Participants Say
Frequently Asked Questions
No experience needed—this workshop is open to everyone.
All sessions are optional to attend, a time of shared connection. We will record them as many of our shared insights have potent meaning for all.
This course is for all level of dream tenders, those who are avid at recall and working the dream and those who are just beginning to explore their dream time. I believe we live through experiences in our dream time first and then actualize them in waking life and we can dream for our community as well. The only pathway to this is with everyone!
How does lifetime access sound? After enrolling, you have unlimited access to this course for as long as you like – across any and all devices you own.
A full refund is available for up to 30 days after the course begins. If helpful, please reach out as I would like to see if it’s possible to make the course work for you. Of course, you are welcome to the refund as well with no questions asked.
Meet Your Facilitator
Shannon Willis, M.Ed
Shannon is a dedicated animist and ritualist, helping others achieve clarity, connection and rootedness through the exploration of liminal landscapes of the seen and unseen. Through heart-centered ritual aimed at re-establishing balance and personal sovereignty, her work is found at the intersection of dream midwifery, oracular mediumship, ritual and ancestral reverence.
She is the founder of Red Earth Healing, a student of Yoruba culture as an initiate of Ọbàtálá, and Ọ̀ṣun, in the lineage of Olúwo Fálolú Adésànyà Awoyadé from Òdè Rẹ́mọ, a devotee of Nepali shamanism under the tutelage of Bhola Nath Banstola amoung other diverse indigenous paths of her ancestors. She is a certified practitioner, instructor, and the Ritual Director of Programs at Ancestral Medicine.
She lives on the historic lands of the Creek/Muskogee Peoples in Athens, Ga. Her recent and older people of blood and bone hail from the England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, France, West Africa and Cherokee and Kaskaskia/Illini nations.
Looking forward to restful presence with you!