Waymarkers: Iona Pilgrimage

Waymarkers Iona Pilgrimage July 31-August 7, 2023 THIS PROGRAM IS FULL

Email Mary at mary@waymarkers.net if you have questions or would like to be placed on a waitlist if a spot opens up for the 2023 pilgrimage and/or for the 2024 pilgrimage. .

Are you feeling called to trace ancient steps to discover, and remember, your wild and precious life? Do you desire a deeper connection with the divine through our wild and wondrous world? Perhaps you desire a way to mark a transition in your life, a threshold, with meaning and memory.

Make a transformative journey to the wild edges of sea and sky, where the powerful presence of female companionship, revelatory elements, and ancient, spirited stories will awaken in you deep memories and divine inspiration to live forward renewed and reconnected to the primeval sacred text of creation. Our world and earth community needs people more than ever who understand our interconnection, that our soul-life is coupled with the health of the soil and salmon, seasons and sea. This pilgrimage provides an immersive rites of passage experience that will invite this deep wisdom and eco-spiritual awakening. It is a journey that is soul-centric in nature, inviting a posture of profound listening to your inner-journey while you navigate the wild lands of Iona around you. This isn’t a vacation or whimsy trip; this pilgrimage journey is one that will transform you as you are invited into a deep conversation with your soul and the souls of others around you. It will call forth tears and the tender places within that are quietly requesting your attention, your perception, your wonder. This is a journey that will ultimately bring you home.

Join your guides— ecotheologian and spiritual ecologist Mary DeJong, and certified yoga instructor, poet, psychotherapist Sarah Steinke—in pursuing themes related to the archetypal stages of this ancient pilgrimage practice; the recovery of the rich heritage of Celtic spirituality; remembering sacred rewilding practices as engagement with the wild text of creation; and discovering ecospirituality as a way of reading scripture anew. Through these traditions, praxis and lens, you will be invited into a restored communion with the natural world, and a remembered sense that our planet is home to the holy. You will be provided ample time to relentlessly seek and wander through the island's holy history and explore its wildest nooks and crannies while being guided to explore your own wild interior. Here you will rediscover a land of enchantment where wonder, reverence and delight are experienced in a place through the medium of your attentive presence. Here you will be inspired to return home transformed by the prayerful pace of this holy place.

This journey is for the seeker, the questioner, the yearner. It is for those with faith and those with doubts. It is for those who are ready to respond and return to, and be in relationship with, the wild and sacred source of life. While rooted in the Celtic Christian tradition, this pilgrimage is ecumenical by nature and accessible to all who are curious about the Creator; all are welcome to seek the sacred together in our shared cathedral of creation.

Pilgrimage cost includes: communal lodging at a gold-rated Green Tourism facility, plentiful vegetarian meals, unique and historical island tours and hikes, daily beach-front yoga offerings, and transformational, intimate group sessions held in the power of the female circle (this is a women’s only offering). Daily rhythms are created with care and from experience, and include the Iona Abbey's morning and evening prayer times.

https://www.waymarkers.net/iona-pilgrimage