Honoring Change:
Ceremony, Ritual, and Rites of Passage

A 5-Day In-Person Certificate Program for Counselors and Healers

Help Your Clients Navigate Change and Experience Transformation

Are you longing to weave greater connection with the Earth, humans, and that which is beyond us into your healing work in the world?

If so, Honoring Change can support you. This five-day, highly experiential outdoor training is for therapists and healers who want to incorporate personally meaningful and culturally relevant ceremony and ritual into their therapeutic work with clients. 

Throughout history, cultures have developed ceremonies to mark major life transitions and to help people integrate the psycho-spiritual shifts that accompany change. In our increasingly mechanized, computerized, fast-paced modern world, many of us have lost our traditional ways of ceremony and ritual. Instead, we learn myriad methods to numb our pain and to avoid the feelings accompanying change. In this training, we’ll explore personally meaningful and culturally relevant processes and practices for creating experiences that honor the complexity of life change. 

You’ll leave feeling more knowledgeable in and confident creating and facilitating ceremonies and rites of passage that are relevant and meaningful for your clients. 

Who This Training is For

This training is for counselors, coaches, educators and healers who want to deepen their relationship with creating and facilitating ceremony and ritual practices — both as a participant and facilitator. If you long to incorporate connection with nature, community, and spirit into your work and personal life, this training can nurture that desire. You will learn and experience creating and facilitating ceremonies and rites of passage that are  personally meaningful and culturally relevant for you and your clients. We’ll look at cultural appropriateness, and how to support clients as they acknowledge and honor the significance of life transitions in unique and personalized ways.

lit candle next to puddle showing reflection of sky and trees above

What You’ll Get From This Training

  • An understand of the arch of life through a rites of passage model

  • An ability to recognize and explore the transitions and inherent opportunities and challenges within that arch

  • Skills to craft and facilitate personally meaningful, culturally relevant, therapeutic ceremony and ritual in support of clients’ life transitions

  • The opportunity to co-create and embark on an overnight ceremonial wilderness solo to honor your own life transitions and unfoldings in a personally meaningful way

  • Experiences in nature, silence, and solitude that can be powerful doorways into deeper listening and personal alignment

  • Considerations for how to responsibly partner with the Earth and unseen allies in practicing and facilitating ceremony

  • Skills to support clients for integrating learnings and experiences from their ceremonies and rituals into daily life

“love the questions themselves… Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Training Outline

Day 1: Welcome, creating intentional space, orienting to the land, ourselves, each other and the material, exploring personal relationship with ceremony and ritual, cultural appropriateness vs. appropriation

Day 2: Create personally meaningful, culturally relevant ceremony and ritual, tracking and mirroring, prep for solo time

Day 3: Day-long personal solo on the land

Day 4: Personal incorporation of solo ceremony, integration, council of mirrors

Day 5: Continue with incorporation, applications of ceremony and ritual into your work, right use of power, next steps

What People are Saying About Honoring Change

  • "I liked the balance between sitting and movement, between teaching and experiential work, and between personal reflection and sharing."

    Kelly Barrett

  • “This training has given me direct personal experience with crafting my own rituals and ceremonies. It will help me continue to do so in my life, with family and friends, and with clients. Also, it has been a deeply healing journey and process and I feel so ready for the next chapter!”

    Sandhya Tillotson

  • “I've gained a greater depth of understanding of ceremony, rituals, and rites of passages. I've experienced deep inner healing through the experience I've had this week. I believe this will greatly enrich my work with clients.”

    Nissi Braverlly

About the Course Creator and Your Facilitator

Katie Asmus stands in field banging drum and looking upwards

With several decades of experience in outdoor education, therapy,  and teaching, and rites of passage guiding, Katie Asmus , MA, BMP, LPC, incorporates present-moment awareness, relationship to the natural world, body-mind connection and ceremonial practices to support people in more deeply and compassionately connecting to themselves, others, and the earth. 

She believes strongly in the power of spending time in nature as a way to listen deeply inward, and has a long history of creating, practicing, and facilitating personally meaningful culturally relevant ceremonies and rites of passage.  Katie also has had a 20-plus-year career working with therapy and coaching clients and teaching wilderness therapy, adventure therapy, ecotherapy, and somatic therapy at a graduate level. 

Currently, Katie directs and facilitates rites of passage trainings and experiences, sees therapy and coaching clients, guest teaches, and trains therapists and healers, through The Somatic Nature Therapy Institute. She is known for exclaiming that “Inner work is world peace work.”

Training Details

  • Will be offered summer of 2025.

  • In the mountains 45 min northwest of Boulder, on private land (at 9,200 feet)

  • to be determined

  • Ceremony and Rites of Passage Global Training is recommended, but not required.

  • Camping is included in the cost of the training. We will provide nutritious dinners but participants will need to bring their own breakfasts, dinners and extra snacks.

    Please let us know if you would like to rent any camping gear from us.

 

Apply for Honoring Change

To apply, click the link below to fill out an application and share your goals for attending the training. We’ll review your application and schedule a time to talk with you, share more about the program, answer any questions you have, and collaboratively determine if it is the right fit for you. From there, we will send you enrollment and payment details. 

 

For questions or if you’d like more information, please contact us.

Learn more about all of our Ceremony and Rites of Passage trainings for counselors, coaches, educators, and healers.