Something Ancient I Remembered: Testimonial from Fall Harvest Retreat

Fall Harvest Retreat | October 1–4 | Boulder Canyon Retreat Center

There is a moment each autumn when the mountain begins to let go. The aspens turn brilliant gold, the air grows crisp, and the leaves that have spent an entire season gathering sunlight begin their descent toward the earth. There is no struggle in their falling, no clinging to what has been.

The trees do not resist the changing season. They release what they can no longer carry, trusting that beneath the coming stillness, life is already preparing to begin again. What if we, too, could learn to let go with such grace?

First and foremost, Shane is not a guide. The word that kept coming to me throughout the weekend was shaman.

I use that word very carefully because in the Western psychedelic world, we are rightly taught to be cautious with a title that belongs to traditions and lineages far older than our own. I have experienced shamanic work with Shipibo medicine keepers in the Amazon jungle and with the Mazatec while working with sacred mushrooms in Mexico. What has always distinguished those experiences for me is that healing is not limited to the psychological. Spirit, energy, the land, the ancestors, the body, and the unseen world are all part of the conversation. 

Most guides I have worked with in the West understandably come through a more therapeutic lens, drawing on modalities such as Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, and somatic therapy. What makes Shane so special is the enormous toolbelt of resources he draws from. He incorporates these Western modalities while also paying attention to dimensions of healing that cannot always be neatly explained or intellectualized.

Perhaps that is what made the weekend so powerful for me, for we were continually being invited out of our heads and back into relationship—with our bodies, with the earth, with one another, and with something larger than ourselves.

This became especially clear during the ceremonies themselves, for the container Shane and his two assistants created was among the strongest I have ever experienced. There was an unmistakable feeling in the room that said: Whatever arises here can be held. I have heard facilitators say versions of those words many times before, but this was one of the rare times my body actually believed them.

In many group ceremonial settings, we are encouraged to stay on our mats, remain relatively quiet, and contain our process so we do not disturb those around us. Here, there was permission for the body to speak, move, cry, shake, make sound, or express anger. If someone's process became especially big, there was another space where they could be supported more fully rather than being asked to shut themselves down.

The freedom of that expression was only possible because the container underneath it was so strong. Shane’s two female assistants carried an extraordinary steadiness, and their presence communicated something beyond words: You do not have to manage this alone. We are here.

There were moments when Shane would come over and work directly with me, where he held me as I allowed myself to fully lean into him. Something about that seemingly simple gesture opened a much deeper realization. I saw how little I had trusted the masculine to truly hold me, and how much my own masculine energy had compensated for that by working overtime—managing, organizing, protecting, pushing, and making sure everything stayed together. No wonder I felt utterly exhausted.

I think Shane has a particular gift for supporting women in this work because he can remain grounded in the presence of the full spectrum of feminine expression. There was room not only for softness and vulnerability, but for grief, anger, power, rage, wildness, and everything that has been taught to make itself smaller in order to remain acceptable. I never felt that I needed to edit myself in order to be held or loved. 

This relationship with the body extended far beyond ceremony. Throughout the retreat, Shane continually brought us back into embodiment. We walked the land. We stretched and breathed together in the mornings. We made sound and moved emotion through our bodies. He even taught us how to practice forms of bodywork on one another—something simple and tangible that we could bring home to our partners, families, and communities.

I loved this because there was something quietly radical about it. Instead of positioning healing as something that only an expert can give us, Shane was teaching us how to care for one another. It reminded me of the old wisdom of teaching someone to fish. What might happen if healing knowledge began moving through families and communities again? What if tending to one another was something we remembered how to do?

My own body became an unexpected teacher during the retreat when I suddenly became quite sick. From the moment I arrived, Shane and his wonderful staff had already made Boulder Canyon Retreat feel like family, but becoming ill allowed me to experience the depth of that care firsthand. Shane immediately pulled out what seemed like a small library of textbooks and began trying to understand what was happening, helping adjust my food and making sure my body had what it needed.

He also invited me into a different kind of listening. Rather than treating my illness only as an inconvenience to fix, he asked me to become curious about what my body might be trying to communicate to me. That question changed everything for me. 

There was something underneath the physical symptoms that I might otherwise have missed entirely. It became another reminder that our bodies are always speaking through sensation, contraction, fatigue, pleasure, pain, and intuition. Sometimes they whisper for years, and when we don’t listen, they begin to shout.

The land also became another beautiful teacher. One of the most beautiful moments of the retreat came when we gathered as a community for a sacred grief ritual. Shane invited us to walk outside and find something on the land that somehow reflected our grief. A stone. A branch. A fallen leaf. Something weathered, broken, beautiful, or returning to the earth. Ordinary objects quickly became mirrors for our inner landscapes.

It reminded me of something I have known intellectually for years but had somehow forgotten in my bones: we are not separate from nature. We are nature. The same cycles moving through the forest are moving through us—birth and death, holding and releasing, decay and regeneration, grief and renewal. 

When we returned and created ritual together, something else shifted. Our grief was no longer private, but was placed into a larger field where it could be witnessed by the land and by one another. As people shared their stories, I continually heard pieces of myself reflected through someone else's life. 

Perhaps one of the most moving moments was witnessing Shane’s own tears as we sat in circle and he shared stories of his own personal grief. There was no performance of the all-knowing healer and no attempt to stand above the human experience. He was walking through it right alongside us.

There were tears during this retreat. Some screams and stories broke my heart wide open. However, there was also tremendous laughter, hugs, and moments of deep tenderness and joy. We had gathered around the theme of grief, yet grief kept leading us back to love, for they are two sides of the same coin. We grieve because we have loved so deeply. 

The greatest gift of the weekend was not something new that I learned, but something ancient that I remembered. I remembered that I belong to the land, and that my relationship with the natural world is not ornamental to my spiritual life, but foundational to it. I remembered that my body carries an intelligence my mind cannot always access. I remembered that healing is not always about understanding. Sometimes it happens through movement, breath, sound, touch, ritual, tears, laughter, and bare feet on the earth.

Perhaps most importantly, I remembered that I am not an island. None of us are. We are built for relationship. We are built to witness and be witnessed, to hold and be held. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that strength meant carrying our lives alone. 

I came to the Fall Harvest Retreat expecting to deepen my own healing. I also left with a new reference point for what ceremonial leadership can look like when psychological skill, embodiment, ritual, land, spirit, and community are allowed to belong in the same room. After years of working in this field, it takes a lot to fundamentally expand my understanding of what this work can be. Shane did that for me, and for that I am deeply grateful.