Ceremony Support & Sitting
Grounded, compassionate, emotionally intelligent and spiritually mature guides and sitters are needed at this time on Earth. They are needed at this moment at Rootstock. Humanity’s desire to heal and expand with the help of the plant teachers is growing and many heart-centered people are heeding the call to help.
Beana is a self-certified guide - not a doctor or therapist - and she came to this work via a spirilic and unpredictable path. She was called to hold radically honest, healing space in an effort to love our world the only way she knew how, and to do so in community with the land she stewards and the mushroom teachers. She is not an indigenous medicine keeper but has navigated her own path to this sacred work and that lineage-creation is fundamental to her practice.
Her practice was born in 2018 and, since then she has guided hundreds of journeys and cultivated a simple and deeply impactful format for creating containers for transformation with plant medicine.
Feeling called to get involved with the psychedelic renaissance?
Wonderful. There are two paths to getting some hands-on experience but before we share them with you, consider the following very carefully:
This work is illegal and there are no loopholes to avoid that. We accept the risk of holding this sacred, healing space as our service and it is *essential* that anybody choosing to support this work at Rootstock must as well. If some tiny voice in you holds fear for your license, your wellbeing, your security... then this path is not something you are prepared to walk yet. Participants might bring their fear or worry or anxiety to the session but the space holders must maintain an authentic and unified field of trust, love and safety. 100%.
There is a difference between Guides, Sitters, and Assistants. The Guide (Beana) is responsible for establishing the container, preparing the participants, working as the primary person connecting with participants, and serving as the primary decision maker and leader of the retreat. A Sitter is a support person that is primarily holding space for the Guide, in service to the container and its participants. Assistants provide operational support for the retreat (cooking/dishes/hot tubs/outhouses/etc) and do not join in the ceremony portion of the retreat, but rather hold space for the Guide and the Sitters. The Guide, Sitters and Support all work together to co-create a deeply safe, nurturing, and comfortable space for folks on retreat. Sitters and Assistants are not ‘on retreat’ when they are here in service and they refrain from mingling with and engaging the participants. It’s a humble service role and the hours are long and the work is hard. Though they benefit from the transformational work that’s happening in the container they’re helping produce, they are expected to stay professional and maintain the integrity of the format, focusing on ensuring the Guide is supported so that she may stay present with the group as much as possible.
You must have at least one experience of a medicine retreat with Rootstock before being eligible to support retreats or join the apprenticeship. This is non-negotiable. Your understanding of Beana, Rootstock, and her practice is as essential as her understanding of your relationship to and experience with the medicine. We are open to subsidizing the cost and prioritizing registration for folks that are serious about wanting to move along this medicine path. If you’d like to book a retreat, schedule a free consult to connect and begin that process.
If all three criteria above are met and you are still interested to pursue this path, next we’d like for you to consider some *essential* qualities that a Sitter needs to bring into every moment of every ceremony at Rootstock. Support staff agree to bringing:
Emotional & spiritual maturity
Love and desire to serve humanity
Humility
Compassion & Open-heartedness
Attentive presence
Endurance (these can be very intense, exhausting experiences)
Comfort with ambiguity
Curiosity
Sense of humor
Healthy boundaries
Calm demeanor
Generosity of spirit
Sobriety (no substance use during service)
Openness to feedback
Strong work ethic & desire to help
Ok. So you have journeyed with Beana and you have the foundation and desire to serve. Here is the medicine path at Rootstock:
Selfless Service - Serving a minimum of 4 retreats is necessary to be eligible for the Guideship Apprenticeship or to be contracted to work at Rootstock as a Sitter or Assistant for future retreats. The service is demanding and will require all of the qualities outlined above and an underlying devotion to the hard work of healing. The nitty gritty work that goes into creating a transformational container at Rootstock can be hard, boring, physical, and mundane and it’s a necessary part of understanding our practice and why it’s so consistently impactful. In exchange for your energy and careful effort, you will have access to a reputable and experienced guide, a full schedule of medicine work, a one-of-a-kind facility, and viscerally close contact with what it is to share medicine and hold space. Committing to the dates you work is critical to ensure a safe ratio of support and basic training will be provided prior to and during your arrival to Rootstock.
Guideship Apprenticeship - Only 2 spaces will be available for 2023 and the personal experience and 4 volunteer sessions are prerequisites to be considered to apply. This is an incredible opportunity for folks on the medicine path who are wanting to grow their confidence, skills, and format or for folks that are already licensed practitioners that want to balance their skills with holding space in non-clinical, therapeutic settings. The program will span 18 months; the first 12 will consist of support and participation for a minimum of 10 medicine retreats and the last 6 months will focus on Guideship practice here at Rootstock. Quarterly coaching calls, recommended reading, and core curriculum around preparation, set, setting, dosage, sourcing, integration, intake, ethics, ethos, and marketing will also punctuate the program so folks arrive to the Guideship portion ready to hold space with and without supervision. The cost of this program is $6666 and will include 3 - 90-min coaching sessions following completion to support navigation into private practice. Applications will open in the fall of 2022 but feel free to schedule a call to learn more if you’re interested.