Yearly, June 17 - 23

1st Stage Workshop for Healing

Come to the place where the spirits are real.
Week-long healing pilgrimage at Ancient Spring Retreat Center.

The June pilgrimage is recommended for first-time participants because most of the activities take place at the Ancient Springs Retreat Center. This workshop is for those wishing to enter a deeper spirituality.

This workshop, or pilgrimage, starts with an informal meeting in Sedona between the participants and Jaichima and Rutury. After spending some time catching up or getting to know each other, the group goes to a place that Jaichima and Rutury call the gate or the door, near Sedona's Bell Rock formation. There is a ceremonial request of permission to enter into the pilgrimage. Jaichima and Rutury ask permission from the night, the stars, the wind, the land and all the things that exist. They ask the natural forces to be with the group during the pilgrimage.

The group assembles for a daily morning prayer ceremony. Jaichima and Rutury take the time to treat each individual's needs for cleansing of layers of negative experiences and emotions. They address the individual as well as the helping spirits in this Wixarika medicine treatment. Their use of sage smoke, Mara'akame medicine objects, and extremely gentle laying-on-of-hands is conducted in the cornsilk-soft sounds of their native language. Participants may find themselves moved, in spite of themselves, to weep. These treatments bring incremental release and freedom from layers of spiritual and emotional burdens.

An important part of the June pilgrimage is the Spirit Walk. This experience takes participants into multiple levels of feeling and understanding of themselves and their surroundings. Participants create their own Spirit Masks, which decrease one's ability to depend on sight and increase the ability to sense the world around them aurally, physically, and intuitively. The Spirit Walk is made safe by a tremendous generation of protective and supportive forces that Jaichima and Rutury provide in a way that they and their lineage have done for generations. The Spirit Walk is a safe adaptation of a far more rigorous ceremonial event which strengthens the skills of the Wixarika Mara'akame. The Spirit Walk can serve to illuminate participants' consciousness of their roles in the natural and spirit worlds.

Participants find release and profound peace in the evening drumming ceremony which culminates in a traditional herbal bath to nurture the skin, body and soul. The bath is an infusion of the Center's pure spring waters with fragrant rosemary and traditional Wixarika herbs from the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.

The June pilgrimage also includes individual late night sessions resting in a mint-and-rosemary-lined ceremonial opening dug into the earth at the Retreat Center. As one is helped into the opening, one senses the energy and force of Mother Earth's protection and restoration.

Indios Huichol's pilgrimages are participatory experiences that create profound connections between group members. All meals are communally eaten and prepared by the participants, who purchase, share, and equally divide the cumulative costs of food and drink at the end of the workshops. The group members take part in preparation and cleanup for all activities at the center.

It must be stressed that Doña Jaichima and Don Rutury neither use nor need any mind-altering substances in their healing work with you, and that the use of these are strictly prohibited.