Women's Rites of Passage Facilitator Training
2025 Dates TBC
Byron Hinterland, NSW Australia
If you have been dreaming of holding women’s circles or rites of passage programmes or would like to deepen your facilitation practice to support the work you are already doing, this 3-day Rites of Passage facilitation training will support you to step into guiding programmes that are transformational for your participants, your work and yourself.
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As the lives of girls and women’s lives are rapidly transforming at a pace that is both beneficial and harmful, healthy women’s rites of passage are needed now more than ever. Because we no longer live in communities with shared experiences and values where rites of passage were an embedded part of our culture, we do need to re-learn the ways to create these ritual spaces with clarity and intention for our modern lives. We might feel a remembrance of this ancient practice, but we still need to re-acquire the skills to hold these spaces creatively and with accountability in 2023.
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I believe it is critical in creating healthy Rites of Passage to identify how social structures and systems (white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity) can undermine the diversity and wellbeing of women's spaces and programmes. When we learn rites of passage skills and facilitation in an intersectional space that reflects and respects the diversity of women and our lived experience, as well as the many ways we know, we can call in our fullest potential individually and collectively.
Only then can we step into guiding programmes that are personally and culturally transformational.
So often our conditioning is to navigate, learn, analyse our work through the lens of the dominant perspective. I also know that many of us have equally had experiences in women's circles or groups that have not felt good or healing, but something else rather murky, and have not been able to name what felt off for us. My pedagogical approach is through an animist, feminist, decolonising, earth-honouring lens.
The methodology of this group training will be:
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1. Learning theory and context of Rites of Passage
2. Self reflection and understanding through Inquiry
3. Ritual practice and Embodiment
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If you are someone whose identity is marginalised by the rules of patriarchal womanhood please know that you are welcome here. My work is based on unlearning the invisible gendered socialisation and cultural constructs that keeps us feeling like we aren’t worthy based on the dominant narrative of the good girl/good woman. I know that gender is a construct, for humans and our other than-human kin gender is fluid and yet I teach and facilitate gendered Rites of Passage programs because I know that reflecting and unlearning this conditioning is our pathway to reclaiming and liberating the mature feminine within us and in our world. I welcome all who identify as women and non-binary folks.
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The core topics in this training are:
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Rites of Passage - Life Cycles, Stages and Transitions
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Facilitation skills from Self Awareness to Presence
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Quest of the Mature Feminine
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Creating the Container: Guidelines, Skills & Capabilities
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Animate Mother: Ancestral and Ecological Allies
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Heeding our Call: Programme Design
Meet The Facilitators
Kamya O'Keeffe
Kamya is a women’s rites of passage facilitator, elder and mentor. She tends the thresholds of life's transitions by creating handmade transformative rites of passages for girls, women, mothers, and elders that acknowledge and celebrate the significant cycles and transitions of our lives from adolescence to healthy young adulthood; from patriarchal feminine to mature feminine; the journey and metamorphosis of matrescence; and the crossing into elderhood.
Each rite of passage is a quest to discover our own calling and a renewed understanding of the gifts we bring to the world, what it means to belong- to ourselves, to our more than human kin, and to the unfolding vision of our lives.
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Kamya has led leadership trainings at the Rites of Passage Institute and is a Motherhood Studies practitioner, Trauma Informed Space holder and certified Youth Mental Health First Aider.
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Gaby McDonald
Gaby is an internationally trained coach and facilitator with over 20 years’ experience in coaching programs, workshop design, leadership skills development, team building, emotional intelligence, women in leadership, culture and strategy alignment, and futures thinking.
Gaby’s work primarily supports individuals at thresholds of transition and change in their career and other areas of meaningfulness in their lives. Her method brings compassion and clarity to the cycles of composting and growth that create the ecosystem of our whole, humbling, and beautiful human experience. Transformation is supported with robust frameworks that ensure insights are experienced as embodied change.
Gaby has held volunteer roles supporting women in STEM in sustainable leadership training, and coaching leaders in NGO’s who support refugees in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Plus 3 guest teachers/ facilitators who will offer bonus sessions online in the weeks following the training weekend.
This training will be held over 3 days in the Byron Hinterland starting at 10 am on Friday and ending at 3 pm on Sunday.
There are non-residential or residential spaces (these are limited) available and so If you are interested please RSVP below. You are also welcome to bring your own camping gear and camp if you wish.
The non-residential fee is: AU$1350.00
A non-residential space includes all meals and refreshments from Friday lunch time to Sunday lunch time.
The residential fee is: $AU1650.00
A residential space includes accomodation plus all meals and refreshments from Friday lunch time to Sunday lunch time.
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If you are interested in joining this training please reach out for more information.
I look forward to seeing you there.
“Like a spring gone underground,
we forget the healing source that we embody:
women among women, telling the stories of our lives.”
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, The Motherline