HEALING RETREAT
For Survivors of ChildhoodSexual Trauma
August 22 - 25, 2024
Bainbridge Island, WA
Application Deadline: May 1, 2024
Now is the time for survivors to unite and together free ourselves from the effects of trauma on our bodies, hearts, minds and spirits. This Healing Retreat offers a ceremonial container for a small group of participants to honor, grieve and celebrate the trials and triumphs in the journey of healing from childhood sexual abuse. Created for survivors by survivors, we use a holistic approach to unravel the pervasiveness of isolation, silence and shame, and to weave together our collective stories while being witness to one another’s individual experience.
This retreat uses a variety of modalities to explore how childhood experiences are held in the different aspects of self and offers opportunities for release, clearing and healing through talking circles, somatic practice, movement, visualization, singing, a grief ritual, and quiet integration time.
The Healing Retreat is for adult survivors of childhood sexual trauma, defined as any sexual violation experienced by someone under the age of 18. More information about what defines child sexual abuse from the organization Generation Five.
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The Healing Retreat is open to participants of all gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations.
This retreat is intended for those who have already begun their healing journey and are seeking more support by working with others within a sacred circle.
*We use the term survivor, and acknowledge that this may not be the term all folks who have experienced sexual trauma may use to describe themselves.
Who is it for?
The Healing Retreat is held outdoors at Sacred Groves, a ten acre forest sanctuary on Bainbridge Island, WA, located on traditional territories of the Suquamish Tribe and Coast Salish Peoples. Participants will bring their own equipment to camp in the forest grove and all gathering spaces are held outdoors.
Retreat Location
Sacred Groves is a rustic eco-retreat located on Bainbridge Island which is approximately a 30-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. The grounds at Sacred Groves include mostly flat, unpaved forested paths and grass. Retreat accommodations include camping in a forested area with composting toilets nearby and access to a shower with hot water. No electricity is provided. There are a limited number of indoor sleeping options that are accessed by stairs. Please be in contact with accessibility needs.
Accessibility Info
Fees:
The cost for the Healing Retreat is a sliding scale. This price includes camping for 3 nights in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and nourishing organic meals from dinner Thursday through Sunday brunch. If you are interested in a scholarship, please inquire by indicating this on your application.
Please note that there is a $50 application fee that gets applied to your fees for the retreat.
No one is turned away due to lack of funds.​
Actual Rate: $900 - $1100
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Sustaining Rate: $1100 - $1400
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Pay it Forward: $1400+​
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Full and Partial Scholarships Available
Sign up here to be informed of the next Healing Retreat.
Can’t attend, but would like to make a donation to support scholarships?
Testimonial
"I was fortunate enough to attend this retreat in person this past January. I was so excited to find this on my feed that they are offering an online course to help aid healing for survivors of CHILDHOOD SEXUAL TRUAMA. I went in completely blind and scared but what it offered was a SAFE CONTAINER to find self love, healing, and a community of others who are just like me. Please share this, C-PTSD is a life long battle, and it is about time we come together out of darkness to heal. I have no shame about my history, my life, I only wish to reach others who need help. "
- Alicia, Past Retreat Participant
Facilitators
Marisa Withey Byrne
Marisa, or Sasa, (she/her) devotes herself to the transformative, humbling work of uplifting sacred sexual wholeness. As a “light-bearer,” she is dedicated to easing the isolation and suffering of survivors of sexual trauma, supporting people– especially youth– to develop and sustain healthy and holistic relationships with their sexuality, and to educate and hold healing space for those who have caused sexual harm. As an incest survivor, Sasa has found healing through focusing on familial, global, and self-restoration. Her offerings reflect her experience as an advocate, sex educator, council carrier, ceremonialist and rite of passage facilitator. Her Bolivian/ Spanish and Irish/German ancestry, deep connection to Pachamama, belief in the revolutionary power of love, and practice of restorative and transformative justice shape how Sasa shows up to her work and to the world.
Kari Stettler
Kari Stettler, SEP (she/her), supports people feeling at home in their human body, free and spirited, interconnected in the web of life. At its core, her work is in service to healing relations with self, others, our communities and the greater Earth body that sustains us. As a rites of passage ceremonialist, she co-guides an intensive two-year nature based initiation process into adulthood for young women. Kari has been mentored by deep ecologist and eco-philosopher, Joanna Macy, since 2005 and has been a facilitator of grief rituals and group work for personal and collective transformation since 2007. As a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, she works with individuals and groups to support trauma resolution and nervous system health education. Kari lives a land-based life in Sebastopol, California, where she grows food and medicine for her community and tends bees and chickens. www.somaticresiliency.com
Katie Spataro, CSB
Katie Spataro (she/her) is a certified Somatic Sex Educator, Holistic Pelvic Care provider and full spectrum doula residing on the unceded lands of the Duwamish people otherwise known as Seattle. Katie studies and practices at the intersections of birth work and sex work, drawing upon the embodied wisdom of these two lineages to support healing of the personal and collective cultural body. Katie blends various modalities of somatic practice, bodywork and skilled coaching in her private practice, and facilitates classes on sexual and reproductive wellness, embodied consent, grief and loss, pregnancy and birth, and erotic education through a trauma-informed and healing-centered lens. www.sacredwombservices.com
Jay Wade​
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Jay Wade (he/they) is of Italian, Irish and English ancestry and grew up in the Great Lakes region on the stolen lands of the Mississauga’s of the Credit, Haudenosaunee, Huron and Wendat people. Jay has facilitated programs exploring masculinity, sexuality, gender, sustainable living and nature connection. He is a Certified Sex Educator and a Somatic Coach, and is honored to work with clients who are choosing to explore their relationship to their body, their pleasure and their connections to others. Jay values the importance of ceremony and his interconnection to the non-human world and looks to each in his aspiration to becoming a deeper practitioner of grief and love.
History
The Healing Retreat was born out of a need...
Walking the path of survivorship for over 20 years, I found grief and isolation to be huge and multi-layered aspects of my personal healing work. For years I searched for holistic healing offerings specific to sexual trauma and found nothing. After a three day solo fast in September 2017, arose the specific desire for a grief ceremony with fellow survivors. A month later, and a week before the #metoo movement re-emerged, I put out a call to ceremonialists familiar with grief rituals, seeking to co-create a container for a survivor specific grief ceremony. This request was met with abundant support from which a team was formed- Thérèse Chavet and Tere Carranza of Sacred Groves, Katie Spataro, and myself - from which the Healing Retreat was born. We met in the prayer, imagining and creation of a container for transformative healing and release. And in January 2018 at Sacred Groves, my fellow participants and I found connection and affirmation in honoring our wholeness -
our gifts, our trauma and our courage to heal - together.
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After witnessing such profound affects from the first retreat, we were dedicated to its continuation. Since 2018, the team has grown to include Kari Stettler and Jay Wade. For our future, my hope is that this retreat finds its way to be an ally in the healing for survivors in many places, morphing and changing to meet each community's needs. If you feel the call to bring the Healing Retreat to your community, reach out here (email).