First Moontime Rites of Passage

Facilitator Training Program

Sept 1–4, 2025 • Occidental, CA

Honoring Ceremony Certification & Five-Pointed Star Map

Join a multi-day, in-person training to receive the materials, experience, and tools to lead folks through a ceremonial process honoring the passage from childhood into adolescence. These rites are effective both for adolescents and women wanting to reclaim their first moontime.

This training is for female and nonbinary AFAB folks who can both. hold groups through intensive and personal processes,
AND are comfortable camping in nature without creature comforts (such as showers and flush toilets). If this is YOU, read on! 

  • What You Receive

    • a roadmap and ceremony for adolescent Menarche and retroactive claiming rites of passage.

    • training in how to hold a group through a process of claiming five key points of selfhood, including the pre-group work and culminating ceremony.

    • an overnight ceremony with solo time & sacred fire

    • deepening relationship to the foundations of ceremony

  • This is For You if you....

    • already hold groups or want to.

    • have a basic grounding and experience with nature-based mentorship.

    • are comfortable exploring our female biology.*

    • are comfortable in nature & camping without the creature comforts of home.

    * NOTE: This work is designed for girls, women, and non-binary folk assigned female at birth (AFAB)

  • Course Format

    In-person Retreat
    Sept 1–4, 2025
    Private home in Occidental, CA

    Plus…

    • two virtual group pre-meetings

    • four virtual group post-meetings

    • one 1:1 consultation with Rachel or Sarai

    • camping with communal kitchen access available on-site during the retreat

Reciprocity

sliding scale

Full tuition: $2,800

Supported tuition: $2,200

$3,600 - generosity - I can support someone else’s participation

*Space is limited to 12 participants

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION

$2,000 until May 31st

Your Guides…

Rachel Ruach Golden is a cultural midwife, helping us individually and collectively come back into remembrance and alignment with the earth and spirit around us. She has worked in the ceremonial arts and with rites of passage for the past 20 years, training in wilderness survival skills, deep nature connection, ancestral skills, and cultural regeneration. Through her own Spirit-led, multi-year initiation, Rachel founded and runs the Tree of Life Adulthood Initiation.

Currently, she is raising her three children in the forests of Occidental, California, working with groups and individuals as a spiritual mentor, running earth-based ceremonies, holding first moontime and adulthood initiation rites alongside other ceremonies, while training to be a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

Read about her initiation into initiatory rites here.

Sarai Nicolina is a spiritual counselor & life-coach, guide, mentor, ceremonialist, artist, and earth-lover. She has spent her life dedicated to the weaving of personal and collective transformation and liberation, and supported hundreds of people from youth through adulthood, through transformational experiences that invoke a heart-full connection to self, community, earth, and spirit.

She co-created and directed Wilderness Torah's Rite of Passage program (B'naiture) and then founded the organization Gaia Passages in Berkeley. She spent many years on the ground mentoring youth, developing curriculum, and training mentors.

Currently, she holds women's and all-gender adult retreats and ceremonial group containers for healing and transformation from her landbase in Sebastopol with her sweetie and other amazing collaborators. www.sarainicolina.com