Trauma as Medicine Solstice Retreat
An invitation to explore your relationship with suffering, reclaim your personal power, and discover the medicine within your own life.
What If Your Pain Has Something to Teach You?
We all experience suffering. Grief, abandonment, betrayal, fear, and loss are part of the human experience. Yet so often, our response to these experiences is to turn away, protect ourselves, or search for something that will make the pain disappear.
Over time, these protective patterns can become the very things that keep us disconnected from ourselves, our relationships, and the fullness of life.
Trauma as Medicine invites us to explore a different possibility.
What if healing is not about getting rid of the parts of ourselves that hurt? What if we could learn to be present with our suffering, listen to what it has to teach us, and discover the wisdom that emerges when we stop abandoning ourselves?
Drawing from my book Trauma as Medicine, this six-day retreat brings together Forest Medicine (psilocybin), sacred ceremony, somatic practices, self-inquiry, and community to support you in exploring these questions through direct experience.
This is an opportunity to investigate the stories you carry, the patterns that shape your life, and the ways you have learned to relate to yourself in the presence of difficulty.
You are not coming to be fixed. You are coming to deepen your relationship with yourself and the life you are living.
Our Approach to Healing
At the heart of Trauma as Medicine is the understanding that we cannot always choose what happens to us, but we can begin to take responsibility for how we relate to our experiences.
This does not mean denying the harm we have endured or making ourselves responsible for the actions of others. It means recognizing where we have choice today.
Throughout the retreat, we will explore:
- Our relationship with suffering: Learning to meet grief, fear, anger, and other difficult experiences with presence and curiosity rather than judgment or resistance.
- The patterns of self-abandonment: Recognizing where we disconnect from ourselves, suppress our needs, or reject parts of our humanity.
- Personal responsibility and choice: Investigating the beliefs and patterns that keep us repeating familiar experiences, and discovering where we can begin to respond differently.
- The wisdom of the body: Listening to sensation, emotion, movement, and breath as pathways to understanding our experience.
- Healing in relationship: Exploring what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be witnessed, supported, and connected without needing to hide or perform.
- Integration into everyday life: Bringing the insights of ceremony into our relationships, choices, and the ordinary moments where transformation takes root.
Our work is not about achieving a particular state of consciousness or becoming someone different. It is about cultivating an honest, compassionate, and responsible relationship with who we are.
Forest Medicine and Sacred Ceremony
Forest Medicine (psilocybin) is shared as a ceremonial sacrament, inviting us to explore our consciousness, emotions, beliefs, and relationship with the unseen. Through prayer, intention, and curiosity, we open to experiences that may reveal aspects of ourselves that have remained outside our awareness. The medicine is not here to heal us, but to illuminate what is asking for our attention. Our willingness to be present with what arises is where the deeper work begins.
No one can do this work for you, and you are not expected to do it alone.
Rainbow Serpent Lodge
Our two evening Forest Medicine ceremonies take place within Rainbow Serpent Lodge, a ceremonial practice I received in 2007 through a spiritual transmission from my guide Thoth. Supported by live medicine songs, shamanic prayer, ritual, energetic healing, and tobacco cleansing, the lodge offers a sacred space to explore your relationship with yourself, Spirit, and the medicine. My role is to support and witness your experience with presence, discernment, and compassion, trusting in your own capacity to discover what is meaningful for you.
What We Will Experience Together
Over six days, we will move between ceremony, personal inquiry, embodiment, connection with the land, and spacious opportunities for rest and reflection.
Our practices include:
- Two evening Forest Medicine ceremonies within Rainbow Serpent Lodge
- One small-dose daytime Forest Medicine ceremony
- One Hapé ceremony
- Breathwave conscious connected breathing
- Shamanic journeying and guided self-inquiry
- Integration and sharing circles
- Somatic movement and ecstatic dance
- Fire ceremony and prayer
- Meditation and time in nature
- Partner dyads and reflective journaling
- Mandala creation as an intuitive and oracular practice
- Land-based teachings and opportunities for personal reflection
Each practice offers a different way to explore your inner experience. Some invite movement and expression, others stillness and listening. Together, they support a deeper awareness of how you relate to yourself, others, and the world around you.
Accommodation and nourishing organic meals are included, allowing you to step away from everyday responsibilities and give your attention to the retreat experience.
Preparation and Integration
Pre-Retreat Private Intention Setting — 60 minutes via Zoom – booked upon your confirmed registration
An opportunity to explore what is bringing you to this work, clarify your intentions, and prepare for the ceremonial experience.
Post-Retreat Group Integration call — 60 minutes via Zoom – dates TBA
Is This Retreat for You?
You may feel called to this retreat if you recognize patterns in your life that you are ready to explore more deeply, or if you are seeking a different relationship with grief, fear, trauma, or other challenging experiences.
Perhaps you have spent years trying to heal, understand, or overcome something within yourself and are beginning to wonder what might happen if you stopped fighting it.
You may be drawn to sacred ceremony, curious about Forest Medicine, or longing for a more embodied connection with yourself, Spirit, and the natural world.
You do not need to arrive with all the answers, a particular spiritual belief, or a clear understanding of what needs to change.
What matters is your willingness to participate in your own inquiry.
This retreat is not designed as a recreational psychedelic experience or a substitute for clinical mental health care. Participation in Forest Medicine ceremonies requires individual screening, informed consent, and consideration of relevant physical and psychological health risks. Not every practice will be appropriate for every participant.
About Sarah Salter-Kelly
I am a spiritual teacher, ceremonialist, author of Trauma as Medicine, and facilitator with more than 30 years of experience exploring consciousness, healing, and our relationship with Spirit.
My work is rooted in lived experience, including the murder of my mother and the years of grief, forgiveness, and self-inquiry that followed. This journey profoundly changed my understanding of trauma and became the foundation of Trauma as Medicine.
For more than two decades, I have supported individuals and groups through ceremony, spiritual teachings, retreats, and personal inquiry. My work brings together Earth-based spiritual practices, somatic awareness, ceremonial traditions, and a deep commitment to personal responsibility and our shared humanity.
I do not believe it is my role to heal you or tell you who you are. My invitation is to accompany you as you explore your own experience, discover your capacity for healing, and deepen your relationship with life.
👉 Registration opens December 15th
Praise for Trauma as Medicine
“This book provides not only a story of tremendous healing but gifts the reader a thorough roadmap to navigate our own healing and ultimately contribute to the collective wellbeing of our planet.”
— Teresa Callihoo, MBA, Wetaskiwin AB
“Sarah Salter Kelly took the agonizing pain of personal catastrophe and turned it into soul medicine for herself and others.”
— Marianne Williamson“Spent 5 of the most honest, beautiful, uncomfortable, spiritual days in Kaslo at the Sentinel for this workshop. To say it was profound is an understatement. Sarah has managed to take personal trauma and curate this retreat, encouraging others to find their place of peace in it all. I will forever look to sacred medicine for guidance and Sarah has opened that form of healing for me like I didn’t know would be possible. 🩷”Laura – Aug 2025
Testimonials
Kate Hook — Onoway, AB
“Working with Sarah and Trauma as Medicine has been a tremendous gift. Her ability to empower me to heal myself—without reliance on anything outside my own inner truth—has been remarkable.”
Dianna C — Edmonton, AB
“Traumatized is the best word to describe myself when I started working with Sarah. Every teaching was medicine for my soul and body. I learned to love myself and awaken my Spirit after years of trauma.”
Jae Wright — Vernon, BC
“To share our stories in a space with no judgment—only support—was profoundly healing.”
Supporting Sarah in this event:
Aaliyah Hamilton is a relational somatic therapist and ceremonial space holder devoted to creating safe, compassionate spaces for healing, connection, and transformation. Her work is rooted in nervous system awareness, attachment, and the understanding that the body holds deep wisdom for healing when met with presence, care, and relationship. Drawing from years of training in relational somatic therapy, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, Kundalini yoga, and pre- and perinatal healing work, Aaliyah supports people in gently reconnecting with themselves through embodied, trauma-informed care.
Within ceremonial spaces, Aaliyah offers a grounded and heart-centered approach that emphasizes preparation, safety, integration, and relational support. Alongside ceremony work, she offers somatic relational therapy sessions to help clients deepen their integration, process emotional experiences, and restore a greater sense of wholeness, connection, and self-love.
Check out Sarah’s interview with Spiritual Teacher Marianne Williamson
With Marianne Williamson
Waking up Human with Mandy Trapp
Beyond the veil with Tara Kabatoff
Microdosing for Healing with Kayse Garett
I have my reasons with Deandra Dey
I Have My Reasons Podcast | Deandra Dey