The Art of Holding
A 4-week live training with Ariel Szabo & Candace Garland
Monday, Feb 2 at [Time Zone/Time]
Monday, Feb 9 at [Time Zone/Time]
Monday, Feb 29at [Time Zone/Time]
Monday, Mar 2 at [Time Zone/Time]
Calls are 90 min + optional 30 min Q&A (replays available for 3 months)
This isn't another facilitation certification.
This is an invitation into the practice of holding space as devotion rooted in integrity, humility, and continuous self-reflection.
Whether you guide retreats, lead circles, teach workshops, or hold group healing space in any form, this training will support you in doing that work with more presence, precision, and care.
Integrity as Devotion
What does it mean to stay accountable to your lineage, your mentors, and the practices you teach? We'll explore continuous learning, naming what you don't know, and staying devoted to your own practice.
Personal Practice
Your own trauma work, shadow awareness, and nervous system regulation aren't separate from your facilitation, they are your foundation. We'll dive into protection, energetic boundaries, and being in right relationship with ego.Creating the Container
From agreements and co-creation to prep and integration, we'll look at what it means to hold beyond the event itself, and how to bring clarity to your facilitation role.Trauma-Informed Approaches
Understanding how trauma manifests, regulating your own nervous system while holding group space, and offering tools for grounding and choice.Power & Responsibility
Navigating the power dynamics inherent in facilitation while inviting each person into their own sovereignty. Not everyone needs the same thing-attunement is artistry.
What We'll Explore Together
Dismantling Oppression in Space-Holding
Examining hierarchy, perfectionism, and saviorism. De-centering yourself as "the knower." Practicing respect, reciprocity, and giving back, especially in relation to indigenous wisdom.Relational Integrity
Trusting people's process. Addressing conflict directly. Holding accountability within facilitation teams. What goes unspoken will leak into the space.Community & Belonging
Moving from individual to collective healing. Seeing each participant as integral to the whole. Remembering we're part of something greater.Sustainability & Boundaries
Nourishing yourself, managing your energy, and understanding the difference between clear boundaries and emotional withdrawal.Embodied Transmission
Teaching through presence, not performance. Inviting embodiment, not just intellectual understanding. Trusting your intuition, voice, and magic.
What's Included
Four live Zoom calls with Ariel and Candace
w/ meditations, teachings, somatic practices, and Q&A
Group chat for ongoing support and reflection between sessions
Home practices to deepen your embodied learning throughout the training
This training is for facilitators who know that holding space well requires continuous practice, honest self-reflection, and collective accountability. If you're ready to refine your craft and tend to the sacred responsibility of this work, we'd be honored to practice alongside you.
Includes
Four 90 minute zoom calls + optional 30 min for Q&A
Group chat for ongoing support and reflection between sessions
Home practices to deepen your embodied learning throughout the training
We have a few lower cost spaces for BIPOC people who could not otherwise attend this training. Just let us know when emailing to sign-up.
Investment
1 payment of $555
5 payments of $111
Meet Your Facilitators
Candace Garland (she/her)
Candace has learned the art of holding through being held and through holding space for others in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
Her path began in 2018 as a participant at Nimea Kaya, seeking her own healing. Within a year, she was called to serve, and spent the next five years facilitating plant medicine retreats - learning through direct experience what it takes to create containers strong enough to hold grief, trauma, breakthrough, and rebirth.
For seven years, she has trained extensively in plant and animal medicines, completing Master Plant Dietas and studying with Indigenous wisdom keepers who taught her that ceremony is an act of deep reciprocity - with the plants, with the participants, and with the unseen forces that move through healing work. She has held space across plant medicine retreats and ceremonies, women's circles, and 1:1 energy work and tarot sessions.
Her work weaves sacred medicines: Kambo, Cacao, Rapè, and Sananga with sound, movement, energy work, and divination, creating multi-layered containers that meet people exactly where they are. This breadth of experience, combined with her training in indigenous traditions, gives Candace an embodied understanding that holding space requires more than technique, it requires grounded presence, exquisite attunement, and the capacity to remain steady when others cannot.
She creates spaces where sovereignty, truth, and belonging can emerge naturally, because she has done the work to cultivate these qualities in herself. Through her Plant Medicine Women's Retreats in the Sacred Valley and her ongoing service, Candace continues to deepen her capacity to hold complexity and trust the wisdom that moves through bodies when they finally feel safe enough to remember.
Meet Your Facilitators
Ariel Szabo (she/her)
Ariel has spent two decades learning what it takes to hold the complexity of another person's transformation - through her own healing, through studying with plants and human teachers, and through creating containers where people's most vulnerable parts can safely emerge.
A survivor of sexual abuse and trafficking, Ariel knows intimately what it means to be held poorly - and what becomes possible when someone is held well. Her journey from dissociation into embodied aliveness required learning to attune to her own nervous system with precision and to rebuild her capacity for integrity from the inside out.
For five years, she has studied with the plants through Master Plant Dietas, learning directly from Indigenous wisdom keepers how ceremony, reciprocity, and deep listening create the conditions for transformation. Alongside this, she has devoted herself to understanding how to work with erotic energy as a force for healing - studying the sacred arts of sexual awakening, consent, and the wisdom that lives in pleasure.
She has held space across diverse settings: plant medicine retreats and ceremonies, sacred sexuality retreats, workshops on consent and touch in psychedelic spaces, grief circles, women's circles, facilitator support groups, and 1:1 and couples somatic intimacy sessions.
This breadth of experience, combined with her training in somatic sex education, sexological bodywork, and psychedelic therapy, gives Ariel an uncommon ability to sense what's happening beneath the words - in the body, in the nervous system, in the field between people. She understands that holding space is an embodied skill requiring deep resourcing, exquisite attunement, and unwavering commitment to consent and integrity.
She now teaches others to cultivate this same quality of presence.
Love Notes