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Raised By This Place A Spring Equinox Retreat of Ritual Theater, Play & Ecological Belonging
March 20 - March 22, 2026
Katie Garcia
“I was raised by strawberries, fields of them… it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it." -Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding SweetgrassWhat place raised you?What sounds, smells, textures, and people shaped the way you move through the world — and when did you stop listening to them?This Spring Equinox, at the threshold between darkness and light, we gather at Menla Retreat for Raised By This Place — a three-day immersion that invites you to remember. Not through lecture or sitting meditation alone, but through theater: one of the most ancient spiritual practices we have.A Word From KatieLights dim… I step onto the stage.The stage, for me, has always represented both vulnerability and power, a sacred space for embodied learning and spiritual exploration. Theater found me as a child and changed everything. By seventeen, it had reshaped not just how I moved onstage but how I talked, listened, and walked through the world. For a mind that had always experienced life a little differently, theater was not just an art form. It was a fortress. A compass. A way home.In stillness... I find my core. While theater and spirit start to soar.For in this body. On this earth. I've found my purpose. I've found my worth.That journey led me to Teachers College, Columbia University, where I spent two years studying how children use theater to express spiritual and ecological awareness and confirmed what I had always felt: theater is not only a performance. It is a ritual. Raised By This Place is the retreat I wish had existed when I was searching.What Is This Retreat?Long before theater was performance, it was ritual. From the ceremonial circles of Indigenous traditions to the ecstatic festivals of ancient Greece, human beings have always used the body, voice, movement, imagination, and play to access what words alone cannot reach. This retreat returns theater to those roots.Drawing on the practices of Augusto Boal, Antonin Artaud, Indigenous creation stories, and the wisdom that children carry naturally, we will spend three days using art as a spiritual resource: a way of slowing down, listening deeply, and embodying our relationship to the earth and to each other.The Spring Equinox is a threshold, the moment when darkness and light hold equal weight before the world tips toward warmth. There is no better time to step through a portal. To retrieve what has been dormant. To remember that you, too, are part of the living earth.What We Will Do TogetherWe will walk the forests of Castkills at dawn, moving quietly, collecting what calls to us, a stone, a feather, a particular quality of light, and placing our discoveries in sacred jars that become vessels of memory and gratitude.We will use Augusto Boal's Image Theater to sculpt our bodies into living stories about place, belonging, and what we carry from the people and landscapes that shaped us.We will write Raised By This Place poems, sensory maps of the smells, sounds, tastes, and touches that made us who we are. The grandmother's kitchen. The specific sound of rain on a childhood roof. The feeling of earth under bare feet.And on the final morning, we will weave it all together into a collective ceremony: our jars, our drawings, our theater images, and our poems offered back to each other and to the land.Theater as Ritual — No Experience NeededYou do not need to be an actor. You do not need to perform. What this retreat asks of you is simpler and older than that: a body, a willingness to play, and an openness to approaching the world the way children do — as if everything is new, alive, and worthy of wonder.Play is not frivolous. It is spiritual. Walking in a forest and talking to a tree is how every wisdom tradition in the world has taught human beings to remember their place in the web of life. This retreat gives you permission to do that again.Whether you come as an artist, an educator, a spiritual seeker, someone drawn to shamanism, the sacred feminine, or holistic wellness — or simply someone who has forgotten how to play — this retreat is for you.ScheduleFriday, March 20
ABOUT THE TEACHERs
Katie Garcia
Katie Garcia is an educator, theater artist, and integration specialist in spirituality and the creative arts. She holds a Master's degree in Psychology in Education with a focus on Spirituality, Mind, and Body from Teachers College, Columbia University. Originally from Brazil, s...
MENLA
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