Reclaiming your Sovereign Self
Embodying the Sacred Feminine through the Great Mothers of Celtic Myth
Perhaps you already feel it...
You may be exhausted by patterns you thought you had already worked through. You may be carrying the grief and intensity of this moment in history in a heart, body or mind that feels stretched thin. You may have tasted insight, healing, awakening, and still sense that something essential has not yet settled into your bones.
Or perhaps you simply feel called, without quite knowing why.
What draws you here is a longing to feel solid in yourself. To trust your own knowing. To move through your life without bracing, collapsing, or outsourcing your authority.
Reclaiming your Sovereign Self is a deeply experiential retreat for women ready to remember their own center.
Beyond Understanding
Like many women, you are thoughtful, aware, and deeply caring. You understand your history. You may have explored therapy, spiritual practice, or personal growth work.
And still, something feels unsettled.
Not broken.
Not wrong.
Just not fully inhabited.
The truth is that all of us carry inherited conditioning. We carry the subtle and overt imprints of patriarchy. We carry expectations about who we should be and how much we should hold.
Yet insight alone does not guarantee embodiment of a different truth.
You can understand your patterns and still feel unsteady in your own authority.
You can name the conditioning and still not feel fully at home in yourself.
Understanding is not the same as inhabiting.
An Invitation from the Great Mothers
Reclaiming Your Sovereign Self is not a lecture, a goddess workshop, a belief system, or a devotional gathering.
It is an initiatory, experiential retreat rooted in Celtic myth and creative depth practice.
Through guided meditation, movement, music, creative exploration, and shared reflection, you move through distinct aspects of the Sacred Feminine — grounding presence, creative fire, embodied power, and fierce clarity — allowing these qualities to be experienced directly in the body rather than analyzed in the mind.
During our time together, the Great Mothers of this mythic stream — Danu, Brigid, Macha and Morrigan — are engaged not as deities to worship or figures to analyze, but as archetypal currents to encounter. You do not need prior knowledge of mythology. This is lived experience, not academic study.
This work is initiatory in the truest sense: it marks a threshold and supports a shift in how you inhabit yourself. It does not focus on dissecting trauma or unpacking your past in detail. Instead, it creates conditions for integration. As these archetypal aspects are embodied, something reorganizes naturally.
Conditioning loosens.
Old narratives soften.
Inner authority strengthens.
Not because we forced them to change — but because you are more fully inhabiting yourself.
The Mythic Stream
For much of recorded history, women’s spiritual authority and connection to the Sacred Feminine have been diminished or suppressed. Yet in early Celtic tradition, women’s presence, power and sovereignty were woven into the cultural fabric in ways rare in the Western world.
These Celtic goddesses emerge from a worldview in which feminine power was not secondary, but foundational.
This retreat does not attempt to recreate the past. It engages this current as a living reminder of what has always been available within you.
As these qualities take root in the body, a deeper restoration begins — not through ideology, but through lived experience.
The Remembering of Sovereignty
Sovereignty is not dominance or control.
It is a cellular remembering of your own center — the kind that changes how you walk through the world.
It is inner authority that no longer negotiates with fear or performs for approval.
It is the capacity to stay present in complexity without collapsing or hardening.
This is not empowerment language.
It is a shift in identity.
As the Shifts Take Root
This retreat is a threshold space. As you emerge on the other side you begin to experience:
The remembering of your center, and the relief that comes when your body no longer has to brace.
A deeper embodiment of your SoulEssence, as parts of you long held in the background come forward with clarity and strength.
The strengthening of inner authority, as inherited narratives loosen their grip without force.
The grounding of insight into lived experience, where transformation takes root rather than fading.
The capacity to stay rooted in yourself while still caring deeply about the world.
A renewal of creative life force and trust in your own unfolding.
Joining the Circle
This retreat is intentionally capped at 17 participants to preserve intimacy, depth, and the coherence of the Circle.
Where we'll be
Hope Springs Institute provides the perfect container for this transformational weekend. We'll be held by the trees, the quiet, the staff, and the Celtic Great Mothers Circle first called into being here in 2007. This sacred outdoor space — simple, grounded, and intentional — anchors our time together.
Arriving there you can exhale and allow the land itself to support you as you release your burdens. You'll enjoy delicious, locally-sourced meals, inspired lodging, and soul-stirring gathering spaces - all surrounded by the natural beauty of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in southern Ohio.
This land has held this work before. We return to it with care.
What we'll do
Over our days together, you will move through a carefully held initiatory arc rooted in Celtic myth and creative depth practice.
Each day includes guided meditation, embodied practice, creative process, and time in circle. Some sessions unfold in the Celtic Great Mothers Circle itself; others in quiet indoor space. There will be movement, reflection, music, and opportunities to engage symbol and image in ways that speak directly to the body and imagination.
We move at a human pace.
There is depth and there is spaciousness. Structured experiential sessions are balanced with time for walking the land, journaling, resting, and allowing the work to settle.
The arc is steady and intentional, designed to support both depth and nervous system regulation.
Thursday, April 30 - Sunday May 3, 2026
You're invited to arrive after 3pm on Thursday to settle into your room and relax on the land.
We'll gather for dinner together at 6:00pm, followed by opening circle.
We'll conclude by 1:00 on Sunday.
You will also be invited to attend Opening the Circle: A pre-retreat Gathering via Zoom on Sunday, April 19th at 7:30pm. in order get to know each other a bit, lay the groundwork for our time together, and answer any questions you might have.
When we'll do it
What's Included
Your registration fee includes:
Four days and three nights of shared lodging in one of Hope Springs’ uniquely colorful, art-filled rooms
Continental breakfast and hearty lunch and dinner each day, featuring fresh, locally sourced ingredients prepared with care, with coffee, tea, and snacks available throughout
Exclusive use of the Hope Springs property for our retreat group
Guided facilitation through a carefully held initiatory and creative process
Ample unstructured time to walk the labyrinth, hike the trails, sit in Spirit House, soak in the hot tub, or rest in a hammock — whatever calls to you
All creative materials and supplies
Optional Private Room Guarantee (limited to 8):
All rooms are shared. However a limited number of private rooms are available for an additional fee. This option guarantees you will not share a bedroom. Additional private rooms may be available depending on final enrollment and room assignments.
Your Investment
$1100 includes all lodging, meals, materials and facilitation
A $600 non-refundable deposit* reserves your place
$500 balance due by April 10, 2026
Private Room Guarantee: +$100 (limited to 8 spaces)
Payment plans available upon request.
Registration closes April 10 or when we reach capacity.
*Any refund will vary depending on whether your spot can be filled and how close the cancellation is to the retreat. Please review full cancellation terms at registration.
Meet Your Guide
Julie Henderson, MS, LMT has been guiding women through seasons of profound inner and outer change for more than three decades. She began her work in 1994 as a licensed massage and craniosacral therapist, where she witnessed firsthand how mental, emotional, and cultural stress live in the body. Those years shaped her deep respect for the intelligence of the nervous system and the quiet wisdom carried in the cells.
Over time, Julie returned to her academic roots in developmental psychology, deepening her understanding of adult development and women’s lived experience. Today, as a Creative Depth Coach and retreat facilitator, she weaves guided meditation, movement, music, and creative process into deeply experiential spaces where insight can take root in the body and become lived transformation.
After her pilgrimage to Ireland in 2022, Julie entered into apprenticeship with Kate Fitzpatrick of Co. Kerry, who first brought the Celtic Great Mothers material to Hope Springs in 2007. Through mentorship and formal training, she was invited to carry the lineage forward and now holds authorization to steward and facilitate this work with integrity, allowing it to unfold in living relationship with the land and community.
Julie’s work is grounded, intuitive, and relational. She does not position herself as someone who fixes from above, but as one who walks alongside women as they return home to themselves. Again and again, she has witnessed what becomes possible when a woman reconnects with her own center and begins to trust what she knows from the inside out.
Please know this:
You do not need years of inner work to participate.
You do not need to know Celtic mythology or be of Celtic heritage.
What matters is whether you are ready to cross a threshold into deeper embodiment.
This moment in history is asking something of each of us. Ignoring that call does not make it disappear — it simply leaves us bracing against it rather than walking forward with it.
If something in you recognizes this invitation, step into this threshold and join us in the Circle.