The World Needs Your Sturdiness

What This Is

• Rise Up Rooted is an initiatory retreat for people ready to live into a more meaningful adulthood

• When: Friday, August 22nd - Sunday, August 24th, 2025

• Where: TBD. Somewhere wild within two hours of Portland.

• Cost: $450 - 600 sliding scale, with payment plans available as well as the possibility of a work trade

We all have ancestors who came of age through community ritual. These rituals marked important transitions in one’s life and included rites of passage that allowed a child to become an adult. 

Today, many of us only experience shells of these ancient rituals: things like graduation ceremonies, weddings, or baby showers. These gatherings, while they may be special, hardly show us who we are and what role we’re meant to step into in our community.

Rise Up Rooted is a rite of passage program for adults ready to step into a more meaningful adulthood.

Our world desperately needs sturdier adults—people who can be with things as they are, who know themselves, know how to resource themselves, and know how to care deeply for others.

What This Offers You

Through a two and a half days of land-based workshops and a culminating vigil, you’ll be given the space and support to:

• Find deep renewal alongside the land

• Receive new information about the gifts you came into this life with and how they want to be expressed right now

• Step into your role as a mature, sovereign adult member of your community

• Become part of our larger work of re-villaging the human and more-than-human community

Who We Are

We are Heather Dorfman, Megan Hayne, and Megan Leatherman, and we’ve come together to create rites of passage programs and ceremonies that not only serve our human community but that serve the land as well. 

In our work as anti-capitalist guides, circle holders, and community tenders, we have seen a deep need for intentional ritual and cross-generational flourishing.

Our larger vision is to cultivate a felt sense of the village again, in all of its richness and complexity. We hope to bring young and old together in common purpose, and to stitch the human village back into the rhythms of the seasons and the wisdom of the land. Rise Up Rooted is our first step toward this endeavor.

Heather Dorfman, LMSW (she/her) is the founder of Rose and Cedar Forest Therapy. Heather guides groups and individuals in the practice of Forest Therapy; offers Grief Care; provides organizational consulting, training, and retreats; and is also an adjunct professor of social work. In all of these realms, Heather is co-creating a world of justice and liberation for all beings. You can learn more about Heather’s work at roseandcedarforesttherapy.com. 

Megan Hayne (she/her), is a shepherd’s daughter, mother, body worker, and menstrual circle facilitator. She is also an authorized Kum Nye (Tibetan Yoga) instructor, Licensed Massage Therapist, and holds a Bachelor of Health Science Degree. Megan is presently studying ritual with Old School Nate. You can learn more about Megan’s work at moonschoolcircle.com.

Megan Leatherman (she/her) is an anti-capitalist educator and vocational guide. She’s the author of Winter at Work and the host of the podcast, A Wild New Work. Megan has led seasonal, land-based workshops and classes for the last five years and has worked with clients through major transitions in their working lives for the last nine years. You can learn more about Megan here, at awildnewwork.com.

About the Workshop Series

This initiatory retreat will include rituals for connecting with and learning from the land, reflection and discussion, community-building, creative exercises, and more. Our intention is for your experience to include many potent spaces in which you can deepen your roots to this place we live in, draw up the resources you most need, and share more of your giftedness with the ecosystem(s) around you—human and more-than-human.

The primary workshops we’ll move through during our time together include:

• We Are the Nesting Seed: the power of welcoming yourself and your seed-knowing.

• We Open Into What We Are: what are the gifts you carry to share with the village?

• We Yearn for What Feeds Us: the wisdom of your longings and how to follow them.

• We Are the Sturdy Ones: stepping into the role of a Mother Tree.

New in 2025: Co-Creating a Space for Youth

It has always been our intention for this work to be about creating village, and so this year our Rise Up Rooted retreat will include additional material around how we can step into a sturdiness that can materially benefit young people right now.

We will be inviting Rise Up Rooted alumni and new initiates to help us co-create a container for the saplings: our young people who need support through their own unique rites of passage so that they can better meet the challenges of these times. Our offering for youth will begin with an event on Sunday, September 21st, on Oak Island outside of Portland.

If you have a longing for village and seek to serve in a deep way, we welcome your gifts to be part of this next phase of our work.

Registration

• Registration will open on Thursday, March 20th

• We aim to make this work available to all who are called to it, and you can find our pricing tiers and the payment plan options below. If the cost is still a barrier to you, please contact us about a work-trade over the weekend or another arrangement that makes your attendance feasible.

• Reduced rate for financial access: $450 (you can pay in full or in 3 monthly payments of $150)

• True cost of retreat: $525 (you can pay in full or in 3 monthly payments of $175)

• Pay it forward (support reduced rate spots): $600 (you can pay in full or in 3 monthly payments of $200)

A Word About Land Connection

We approach this work and the land we will be working on carefully and with great humility, holding space for the truth that the Indigenous peoples who tended these lands were forcibly removed and/or decimated through diseases brought by settlers. As we move through these gatherings, we will ask for permission from the land to be there, bring offerings, tread lightly, and seek to repair some of the damage wrought by civilization and colonization in this area.

Questions You May Have

• Cancellations/refunds: A full refund is available if you cancel your registration 48 hours or more before our gathering. After that, since it’s likely we won’t be able to fill your spot and will have already purchased materials, you are eligible for a 50% refund. If you attend a gathering and are for some reason unhappy with how it went and request your funds back, we’re happy to discuss that with you (this has never happened, but it’s here for clarity!).

• Accessibility: These gatherings will be held outdoors and require some walking (up to .5 miles) on uneven terrain. A private toilet will be provided, and participants will be asked to bring chairs to sit in. We’ll provide coverage for sun and rain at our site. If you have specific questions or needs, please contact us and we will do our best to accommodate them.

• Carpooling: If you need or desire assistance getting to the areas where we’ll be meeting, please contact us and we can try to help coordinate carpooling.