Sacred Soul in Unity: A New Year Rite of Passage 2025/2025
Psychedelic-Assisted Group Retreat | December 29, 2025 – January 2, 2026
Developed, Choreographed, and Facilitated by Dr. Regina U. Hess, Visionary Founder/Director, Birthing an Ancient Future – Multidisciplinary Council of Peace-Builders
A Personal Invitation from Dr. Regina U. Hess
Each New Year, I am called to be in service individually, collectively, and planetary, to co-create a Sacred Sanctuary Gathering for a Rite of Passage that transcends time — a spiral journey into the sacred soul in unity with all - as above - so below, with the ancestral lineages, and the future blossoms of relational becoming and the future generations.
From December 29, 2025 to January 2, 2026, in the embrace of a Sacred Land Sanctuary in Northern Portugal, I will once again guide a small circle of courageous souls through the Sacred Soul in Unity - New Year Retreat.
It is a ceremonial initiation. A remembering. A return. A crossing.
We enter the dark womb of winter - to reweave our lives with intention, silence, and sacred ceremony.
We journey with expanded states of consciousness, ancestral wisdom, and the alchemy of inner listening. As an elder guide, I offer you a fire by which to remember your own light.
If your heart whispers yes — come.
Tending Inner Gardens at the Threshold of a New Year
In times of planetary rupture and renewal, how we choose to mark the turning of the year matters. More than celebration, the threshold between years offers a liminal space—a fertile terrain for inner recalibration, collective re-attunement, and heart-centered rites of passage.
The Sacred Soul in Unity – Intimate New Year Retreat is a ceremonial gathering shaped as a spiral journey: inward to the essence, outward to community, and beyond—to the living field of planetary consciousness. This psychedelic-assisted group retreat offers an immersive context to explore expanded states of awareness while rooting deeply in the sacred teachings of the Earth and body.
From Ego to Essence: Awakening Relational Consciousness
At its core, this retreat invites participants to travel through layers of the self, releasing the residues of ego-constructed identity while reclaiming a felt sense of wholeness, presence, and relational integrity.
Working with legal plant sacraments in a safely held ceremonial context, participants experience expanded states of consciousness that open pathways toward healing, remembrance, and insight. These inner journeys are supported by council-based dialogue, body-centered integration, and earth-based ritual—reweaving the fractured threads of personal and collective experience into emergent coherence.
Ceremony as Pedagogy: You Are the Medicine
In transpersonal education and ancestral ceremonial traditions alike, ceremony is not a supplement to learning—it is the learning. Rooted in this understanding, the retreat integrates a ceremonial pedagogy where each experience is a teaching, and each participant a sacred text.
The Retreat Group Weaves a Co-Creation Together
Psychedelic-assisted ceremony as core transpersonal initiatory experience
Sweatlodge (Temazcal) ritual as a sacred container for purification, prayer, and vow renewal into the New year
Sacred Pilgrimage on the Coastal Portuguese Camino de Santiago, including oceanic bathing rites and land-based offerings
Shamanic movement, expressive arts, ancestral sound, and bodywork, co-activating the inner healer and collective wisdom body
These elements are regenerative. Through them, we engage in a slow science of transformation, honoring the ecological, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of psychedelic work.
Shanti Within: The Alchemy of Sacred Union
The Sanskrit term shanti evokes peace—not as passive calm, but as an active alignment with life. In the spirit of Birthing an Ancient Future, the retreat cultivates shanti within through the sacred balancing of the inner feminine and masculine—not as binaries, but as archetypal polarities in creative tension.
Participants are guided to explore their unique balance of giving and receiving, doing and being, movement and stillness, allowing the union of these forces to awaken intimate peace and relational wisdom. The ceremony becomes a living curriculum where healing is not taught—it is embodied.
Sacred Site as Co-Facilitator: Learning with the Land
Held at an ancient Sacred Land Retreat Center in North Portugal, the site itself is an ancestral teacher. The land has been stewarded over generations and serves as a global ceremonial gateway, where medicine carriers from many traditions have convened for healing and transformation.
The physical space is not a backdrop, but a co-facilitator. It invites a reweaving of our relationship to the more-than-human world and a profound reverence for Earth as sacred partner in learning
Integration as Sacred Praxis
The retreat does not end with a ceremony. The work of integration—translating insight into embodied change—is central to the pedagogical arc. Each day includes guided sharing circles, somatic grounding practices, and collective meaning-making processes that help participants root their expanded awareness in sustainable life practices.
In line with ethical psychedelic care, post-retreat integration support is also offered through a network of professional transpersonal therapists and guides.
Peace as Sensuous Embodied Practice: From Inner Development to Global Action
What if healing the self is inseparable from healing the world? What if every step into intimate wholeness contributes to the wider field of planetary peace-building?
This retreat is not simply personal—it is planetary. Each participant becomes a Peace-Builder in Action, cultivating ethical responsibility, reciprocal relationships, and a renewed capacity for sacred activism.
The Sacred Soul in Unity Retreat is one offering within a larger movement of educational, ceremonial, and planetary transformation led by the Birthing an Ancient Future – Multidisciplinary Council of Peace-Builders.
Download the Retreat Guidebook - Enrollment open for Early Bird Prices
For full details—including the ceremonial arc, accommodation, team, ethics, and preparation requirements—download the 2025/26 Retreat Booklet and receive updates.
This is an intimate retreat with limited spaces to ensure deep, personalized support and a coherent ceremonial field.
👉 Download the Booklet and find more Details for the New Year Retreat
https://www.birthinganancientfuture.com/sacred-soul-in-unity-intimate-new-year-shanti-retreat
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