CIRCLE passages
CIRCLES & RITES OF PASSAGE
fostering natural healing for a sustainable world.
Open House
October 17th 6:30-7:30
CIRCLES are gatherings that help us heal ourselves and our relationships within a circle of safety. Circles are gathered for different people and purposes providing a healing container for deep transformational and transpersonal growth. Whether you are gathered to deepen your relationship with yourself, family, community, or world, circles provide support.
RITES OF PASSAGE (ROP) are circles held in nature with ceremony, story, and ritual, designed to help you take the big steps on your life journey and mark the major initiations from childhood to adulthood and elderhood. At Circle Passages we create inter-generational circles of mentorship that restores relationships between the web of life. We co-create and collaborate to create meaningful experiences that foster deep and lasting change through a restoration of balance.
OUR CIRCLE is made of Heather (PhD in Psychology), Buck (2 MAs in Therapy), and Jordan (certified yoga instructor and youth counsellor. We are excited to announce the newest member of our circle, Mary Gibbons, a medical doctor, educator, and wise woman. Along with help from a licensed nutritionist, grief specialist, suicide expert, rites of passage leader, social worker with expertise in homelessness, honorary native elder, and native expert working with at risk youth, we form a circle designed to help guide our community to find safe passage on the journey of their life.
WE ARE BECOMING A nonprofit !
dedicated to help the world transform one life at a time.
We are partnering with other regional nonprofits to help at-risk youth, homeless, and all people who seek to live lives of wholeness and healing. Please reach out if you are called to join us or donate to our mission.
Upcoming Events
Nature-Based SkillsTime is TBDTumwater
Nature Vision Quest 3 & 5 dayTime is TBDTumwater
Return Home to YourselfTime is TBDOlympia
Nature JournalingTime is TBDCircle Passages
Forest BathingTime is TBDCircle Passages
Creating a Medicine WheelTime is TBDOlympia
Uplifting Eco-ActivismTime is TBDTumwater
Parent and Teen Support CircleTime is TBDOlympia
Personal and Ecological GriefTime is TBDOlympia
Basic Rite of Passage KitTime is TBDonline event
Community CircleTime is TBDOlympia
Wild Healing. Therapy comes from the root to heal
and nature-based therapy is the oldest and original therapy.
Come experience an ancient healing approach that integrates time-tested and evidence-based practices into a path of wholeness for our time. As we come through the last year, now is a perfect time to check in and go deep to mine our experience for gold. What do you want to let go of and leave behind? What will you bring with you? Where are you going to anyway? Circle Passages is designed to help you answer the deep questions that lead you home to yourself.
Do you want a deeper relationship with yourself, family, community and world? If so, this could be your path. To find answers to . . .
CIRCLE passages
in collaboration with 4H, School of Lost Borders, and WSU
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
"LIFE CHANGING"
"Better than I could have imagined," "Deep," "Fun," and "Powerful." "The rite of passage did not simply bring me closure on the past. It brought me a future and a vision forward."
"HEALING"
"The ROP was profound for me . . . regaining harmony, feeling our love for each other and our life, remembering and laughing together. All this has been a joyful transformation."
"TRANSFORMATIVE"
"Transformative. My parents had not talked for decades and we had years of emotional trauma. What occurred far exceeded my expectations...we were able to reclaim family."
Why Nature?
Despite a modern movement away from nature, studies show that nature helps us live happier and healthier lives. Being in nature returns us to natural rhythms, habits, and patterns that feel more comfortable and peaceful. Being in nature (even viewing nature) has been found to reduce feelings of stress, anxiety, anger, and fear, increasing a sense of overall wellbeing. Beyond the emotional and mental health benefits, nature reduces blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and stress hormones.
Drawing upon a long-history of nature-based rites of passage, our approach helps people reconnect to themselves, their lives, and others by connecting their nature to nature. This is about you being natural: you being you. In nature you lose the distractions and get real to gain insight into who you are and what you are called to do. The beauty of nature surrounds us and inspires us.
Are you Called?
Do you feel a desire for more?
Do you feel a call to have fun, make friends, and live a life that is natural, real, and free? Are you called to a deeper relationship with yourself, family, community, and world? Circle Passages offers renewed hope, health, happiness, and gratitude by fostering a love of life based on deep self-acceptance and true self-esteem. Found to reduce everything from anxiety to depression, suicide to addiction, rites of passage guide you to where you want to go. We help you live a life that is wildly authentic: YOURS.
"Every positive change--every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness--involves a rite of passage.” Dan Millman
Discover
Discover your nature in nature.
Grow
Grow up in a circle of support.
Find
Find your self and your way.
Claim
Claim your power and purpose.
The trailhead to a transformative journey.
Are you ready to take your next step?
COMMON DREAM
We all desire to be healed and whole, to hold the ones we love and love ourselves. We dream of a life and a world that is safe in which we can be ourselves. Circle Passages is a place to realize these dreams by taking the next step on a transformative journey of self-discovery. We awaken the dreamer.
COMMON VISION
To navigate your life journey requires a vision of where you have been, are, and are going. For this reason, any passage is a vision quest, calling on you to find a new sense of direction and orientation, creating a new map and compass. We help you see into yourself and your future. Then we help honor and create your vision. We help you hold it.
COMMON GROUND
In coming together in circle we step upon common ground and take a step towards creating families, communities, and a world of greater equality where we are all on even ground. Walking a path that has guided and protected people through the ages, we ground our nature in nature and remember that we are a part of nature.
COMMON GROWTH
On your rite of passage you grow up and root deep, rippling out in circles of influence like the growth rings of a tree. Like the forest that supports the tree, we foster independence as interdependence. Our circle reflects the forest as a systemic whole, offering a holistic support network to nurture sustainable growth. We grow within the circle of community.
OUR Difference
rites of passage ARE ANCIENT, But We are DIFFERENT.
ONLINE & ONSITE
We combine on site and online learning for greater flexibility, accessibility and sustainability. Weaving in-person and virtual support, we plant the seeds of transformation amongst the natural beauty of a local Olympia nature center and nurture their growth in a safe online community. In this way, we provide greater access to resources but also greater flexibility, so that you can work with the material as much and when you want. We offer teachings within our circle and the circle of your life, so your growth will take root in your life to grow beyond.
TELL YOUR STORY
Each individual, family, and community has a story that informs their rite of passage and guides their life. So we remember, rediscover, and retell our stories in journals, art, and ceremony. By honoring the stories, we recognize and honor our ancestry and legacy. We believe that in order to move forward into our futures, we need to connect with our past, returning to our roots to understand ourselves. In retelling our story, we reclaim our power for ourselves, our families, and community.
CIRCLES of GROWTH
In circle, individuals, families, and communities come together in a way that is natural. Circles reflect the movement of the seasons and our lives as we map our journey through the day, year, and life cycle. Circles reflect the passage of the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter, providing a container of support and resources. As we grow and ripple out into the world, a circle gives us a model for how to be in relationship. When our children come of age, the circle may shift but it remains a circle. Like a womb, a circle holds us in safety while we grow.
HONOR YOUR VISION
Each rite of passage is designed by the individual as they reflect on who they are to include the unique vision and experience of their process. While a basic structure is provided for the rite of passage, individuals are encouraged to create their own circle and self-generated ritual, including options in terms of where and how the passage takes place. While in the past the rite of passage was determined by culture and gender, we believe that people’s processes are best reflected in ceremonies of their own design in which they claim their power.
Circles include Everyone
A circle is whole because it includes everyone, young and old, black and white, male and female . . . and everything in between. Circles are unbroken, holding diversity within unity in which each part and person is needed as a whole to be whole. They symbolize an equality based on difference not sameness, and we celebrate this difference. Like the circle, we need everyone to be themselves, natural and whole, in order to gift us with their true and full power and presence. With a primary focus on creating uniquely authentic and different, self-generated rites of passage, we embrace and celebrate all people and the differences that make us whole. In order to honor our commitment to the gift of inclusion, we work with different needs to accommodate everyone, striving to reflect an inclusive diversity in our teaching and teachers.
NO ONE IS TURNED AWAY FOR FINANCIAL REASONS. Please enquire.
“Everything the power of the world does is done in circle. The Universe is circles within circles, and everything is one circle, and all the circles are connected to each other. Each family is a circle, and those family circles connect together to make a community, and the community makes its circle where it lives on the Earth.” Black Elk
