Becoming the Light
a winter coven & and healing vision quest tracing the venus star path
Monday Evenings for 15 Weeks, December 4th 2026 - March 8th 2027
This mythobiological container is a rite, a ritual and a ceremony, where book club meets science class meets women's circle for a deep psycho-cellular attunement. This winter, we'll gather with like-minded women ready to see and be seen, aligning with the medicine of the season to learn, heal and witness one another through it. Guided by the Venus star, Carly Mountain's Descent and Rising: Women's Stories & the Embodiment of the Inanna Myth, and Anodea Judith's timeless classic Eastern Body, Western Mind, we'll explore the psycho-cellular physiology of descent and rising, and how these underlying energetic systems of our psycho-cellular life.
Together we'll follow how these archetypal maps move through the chakra and organ systems, animating our everyday experience of health and vitality, changing and becoming. This framework is especially useful for those on healing journeys, in deep processes of becoming, and wherever hormones and psyche meet across a woman's lifespan: menarche, pregnancy and postpartum, perimenopause and menopause. These are some of the deepest initiations women pass through, yet we have very few working maps holding them in their totality.
Over 15 weeks, you'll be given tools and frameworks to undertake your own winter vision quest and healing as a rite of passage. You'll be invited into a period of personal dieta to create space to hear and see, held by the group, fasting from addictions, distractions and whatever else is ready for the compost so it can feed spring's creation. Along the way, we'll gather for a group soul retrieval and empowerment journey with guest Ashley Rive ,for a winter solstice ceremony themed Becoming the Light.
This experience is a deepening into your own understory, and a chance to excavate and re-craft personal myths while supporting your female biology. You'll grow more aware of the stories, voices and conditioning you're weaving with, learn to read the oracle of your body, while expanding capacity to hold yourself while courting the mystery. Whether you're moving through a big transition or simply feel the pull of the season, you'll leave with a map to return to throughout your life. It's a template you can share with loved ones and clients as a point of orientation, sense-making and empowerment through life's seasons and initiations. So cozy up with good books and deep conversation, and let yourself be nourished by sisters as we walk each other through the season.
Calling in Women Who
desire harmonization with the medicine of the season for a psycho- cellular attunement
are curious to explore the underlying energetics animating physical symptoms and expressions of health and vitality through time tested lenses
women’s health and healing practitioners looking to add mythopoetic depth to their practice
those endeavoring lifespan hormone transitions, changes
those seeking
the Medicine Bundle
Personalized Dieta Dieta is an invitation to slow down and create space from habitual consumption of food, information, habits, even identities. This slow and steady spaciousness is prerequisite to receiving deeper intelligence. In lieu of communing with a specific plant, we hold the intention to commune with our deepest truth. By fasting from inputs that create noise and pull focus, we call back and direct our life-force energy toward what is truly life-giving. Woven with liver-loving care, your dieta may last anywhere from 10-21 days as you feel called. You’ll meet 1:1 with Sara to craft a personalized protocol, tailored to your unique psycho-cellular landscape.
Female Physiology Literacy: In addition to learning about the biliary tree and procedures relating to the gallbladder flush, we'll explore the functional constellations impacting women's molecules of emotion: histamine, estrogen, cortisol, and how these intersect with epigenetic expression and biochemical processes. Teachings are crafted to be digestible for those without a scientific background, with upper-level depth to satiate seasoned practitioners.
Group Soul Regression; Retrieving the Light: I am honored to welcome Ashley River dear sister, mentor, and medicine woman whose 1:1 and group work has been integral to my journey the last four years.
Soul Regression is a deep and gentle form of trance hypnotherapy designed to take you back to past lifetimes, awakening memories normally dormant in the subconscious/records of your soul. Though you are completely conscious throughout the journey, your mystical mind takes the lead as you are guided into a deeply relaxed state where remembering is effortless, imagination awakens other worlds, and healing possibilities expand. Soul Regressions can assist in activating and remembering dormant gifts, abilities, hidden powers, and skills from other lifetimes, as well as heal lost or fragmented soul parts. It can also heal deeply stored subconscious fears, relational issues, chronic health issues, unhealthy karmic patterns, and more. This modality supports the evolution of a soul, feminine
remembering, and the expansion of self. The lineage of hypnotherapy Ashley originally trained in is Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, pioneered by Dolores Cannon. Since beginning this work, Ashley has offered hundreds of regressions, both 1:1 and in groups, guiding women through the mystery to remember who they truly are.
Village Technology & Ceremonial Arch: Our container is crafted that you may see and be seen and, over the course of six weeks catalyze your desired threshold crossing this spring. Throughout our six weeks, you'll receive ritual prescriptions, somatic practices, and mythopoetic shadow work prompts to guide your journey.
The Flow
While this container is crafted around a particular curriculum and ceremonial arch, it is also held as a living, emergent ecology in service to the medicine desiring to weave its way through our group’s unique constellation as it arises. Every other week on the even numbered weeks, will be a “book club” style week, with guided discussion and sharing of insights from the previous two weeks, allowing you flexibility with your schedule to complete the material. The odd numbered weeks we will have space for more personal sharing circles, teaching, chanelings, exercises and ceremony.
Week One: Building your Cocoon
Introduction to mythobiology and psychosomatics. Building our group agreements and individual containers, and somatic tools.
Week Two: The Feminine Vision Quest
Gates of Descent & Rising, the Chakra System
Week Three: Tending Yin Systems
Body as an oracle, metabolic health, seasonal and TCM guidelines for winter nourishment & dieta.
Week Four: Remembering HERSTORY
Gate 1: The crown chakra, mind
Epigenetic inheritence, maternal mitochondrial DNA, and the collective feminine body
Week Five: Winter Solstice Ceremony
Soul retrieval empowerment; Becoming the Light, with guest Ashley River
Week Six: Seeing and Speaking
Gates 2 & 3 Intuition, discernment and reclaiming voice.
Week Seven: Embodying the Voice Womb Axis
Tending the hormone hierarchy and the sacred feminine channel.
Week Eight: The Heart and Solar Plexus
Gates 4 & 5 Awakening through heart and soul
Week Nine: Reclaiming Power
Heart coherence, devotion, breath, and unwinding power-over within and without
Week Ten: Womb and Root
Gates 6 & 7 Sexuality and Sacred Containment
Week 11: The Womb as Oracle
Cyclical wisdom, iron and copper, and healing the mother wound.
Week 12 The Underworld
Meeting Ereshkigal, divine marriage, reclaiming sacred witnessing and rage
Week 13 The Cross of the Rising Phoenix
Liver, hormones and gut, tending good soill; gene keys invitation for individuation
Week 14 The Ascent
The anatomy and physiology of Rebirth; creative vitality in the emerging world
Week 15 Closing
Integration Call, bringing it Forward
Meet Inanna; an Archetypal Motif for the Women's Vision Quest
Long before the Bible, the people of Sumer pressed a story into clay about a goddess who chose to go down. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, goddess of love and war and the Venus star, hears something calling from the underworld and leaves her temples to answer it. It's humanity's oldest recorded stories, and it's one of rebirth.
On the way down, Inanna passes through seven gates. At each one she has to surrender something: her crown, her lapis beads, her breastplate, her royal robe. In the fullness of dark, she arrives naked before her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, and there she dies and hangs on a hook for three days. What transpires in this betwixt and between plaec, and the ingredients for her resurection provides a timeless map for navigating the seasons of our psychocellular life.
The underworld in this story works like a womb. It's the pause between the out-breath and the in-breath, the dark months before the light returns, the place where an old form comes apart so something new can take shape. Many read the myth as the story of Venus herself, the morning and evening star that disappears from the sky and returns.
Modern life has very little room for this. We live inside a linear growth curve that expects every season to look like summer, and the art of tending our own psychic compost has mostly been lost. Women feel the cost in our bodies. A body built on cycles keeps asking for the fertile dark, and when that's denied, we run on depletion instead of juicy creative vitality, the essential marker of a woman's meabolic health. I believe part of the work of this time is destigmatizing winter, giving descent back its dignity and women access to the seat of alchemical power. Reclaiming descent doesn't mean wallowing in life challenges, but reclaiming the feminine capacity to shed, rewild and recreate time and again. This rhythm of dying and rebirthing runs through a woman's psychic life, all the way down to her cells. This is the medicine for our time.
15 nintey minute sessions, alternating two hour live calls blending sharing circles, energy medicine, and focused research based women’s health teachings.
One comprehensive onbaording process (diet, lifestyle, health history) please send any and all lab work you’d like me to take into account when we design your dieta.
One 60 minute call with Sara for personalized guidance and coaching.
A two hour group soul regression with Ashley River
Ritual prescriptions, somatic practices, and mythopoetic shadow work prompts woven throughout our ceremonial arch.
YOu need to be able to hold yourself
The Exchange
$780
early bird pricing through 11/15
a payment plan option is available at checkout.
Meet your Guides
Sara Gensmer is an Integrative Nurse, Multi Modal Healer and Women’s Health and Rites of Passage Coach
Sara Gensmer is an Integrative Nurse, Women's Health practitioner, and Rites of Passage guide whose work lives at the threshold of rigorous functional medicine and the mythopoetic dimensions of women's healing. She specializes in supporting women through early perimenopause, estrogen dominance, and endometriosis, with particular focus on the biliary terrain, copper metabolism, mineral and hormone dynamics.
Three years ago, navigating her own stage four endometriosis diagnosis in early perimenopause, Sara began working with the gallbladder flush as a cornerstone of her own healing, and has since supported dozens of women through the same terrain.
Ashley River is..
Ashley River is a multidisciplinary ceremonial artist, 2x published author, soul midwife, mentor, ritual facilitator, and oracle. She is the Author of Tending to the Sacred and Messages from the Heart of the Divine oracle deck. After attending college for the arts, the death of her Grandmother initiated Ashley onto a path of soul remembering and ancestral healing. She has spent the last 15 years training in and studying medicine lineages, healing modalities, and the oracular arts, from soul/past life regression, ritual facilitation, trance channeling, energy work, divination, plant-spirit herbalism, and more, to cultivate her unique soul's gifts and song. Her work is a devotion to reclaiming the voice, choice, fertile force of the feminine to restore harmony, creativity, and fertility to the earth. Originally from the States, Ashley currently lives nomadically as a daughter and future ancestor of the earth, devoted to answering the voices of the land to bring forward stories, memories, and expressions hidden in soil, root, and stone that are ready to be remembered on earth at this time. She is working on her next book along the way, and writes frequently on her Substack, Navel of the Earth.