Webinar: Intimacy, Ecstasy, and Power
Intimacy, Ecstasy, and Power
A Free Ceremony & Rites of Passage Training Webinar
Free Webinar with Katie Asmus of The Somatic Nature Therapy Institute and Hāweatea Bryson of Nature Knows.
Ceremony has the power to open us to beauty, connection, deep truth—and heightened energy. With that openness comes vulnerability, and with the role of facilitator comes power, responsibility, and the complex dance between intention, perception, and projection.
In this free webinar, we’ll explore the often-unspoken terrain of what it really means to hold power in ceremonial and therapeutic spaces—how intimacy, ecstasy, and the heightened energy of ritual can amplify dynamics of authority, wounding, and reverence all at once.
Together we’ll reflect on questions like:
✨ What personal needs or vulnerabilities influence how I show up in leadership?
✨ How do I discern between appropriate trust and unconscious projection?
✨ How do I stay open to feedback without collapsing—or inflating?
✨ Where might power or spiritual bypassing be quietly operating in ways I haven’t examined?
We’ll offer frameworks and reflection practices to explore:
The impact of both spiritual bypass and role power in healing spaces - how we can respond and how to stay in integrity
Navigating the tension between humility and confidence as a facilitator
Tending to our own needs for approval, intimacy and control
Whether you’ve led dozens of ceremonies or are still exploring your call to this work, this session will invite you into a deeper conversation around the responsibilities, shadows, and possibilities of leadership in sacred space.
You’ll also learn more about our 9-month Ceremony and Rites of Passage Global Training, and how this container supports facilitators and space-holders to show up with skill, clarity, and deep inner alignment.
This is not about being perfect. It’s about being responsible, relational, and real. We hope you’ll join us in this honest, necessary conversation.
September 16 at 3 pm MST
September 17 at 7am AEST, 9am NZT
About Your Facilitators
With several decades of experience in outdoor education, therapy, and teaching, and rites of passage guiding, Katie Asmus , MA, BMP, LPC, incorporates present-moment awareness, relationship to the natural world, body-mind connection and ceremonial practices to support people in more deeply and compassionately connecting to themselves, others, and the earth.
She believes strongly in the power of spending time in nature as a way to listen deeply inward, and has a long history of creating, practicing, and facilitating personally meaningful culturally relevant ceremonies and rites of passage. Katie also has had a 20-plus-year career working with therapy and coaching clients and teaching wilderness therapy, adventure therapy, ecotherapy, and somatic therapy at a graduate level.
Currently, Katie directs and facilitates rites of passage trainings and experiences, sees therapy and coaching clients, guest teaches, and trains therapists and healers, through The Somatic Nature Therapy Institute. She is known for exclaiming that “Inner work is world peace work.”
Hāweatea Holly Bryson, MA, is an Indigenous Psychotherapist, Family and Nature Quest Guide, Kaimirimiri (Māori healing practitioner) and Trainer. Deeply committed to the resurgence of rites of passage as a vital cultural and therapeutic practice for our times. Her work spans Aotearoa (NZ), Hawai'i Australia, China and the USA where she has supported diverse communities in this over the past 17 years. Her psychotherapy practice is rooted in somatic and relational therapies, traditional Māori healing, and nature-connected life-ways.
Her highlight is the absolute honour of walking alongside individuals, couples and families through the evolving stages of life and relationship over spans of time.
She trains facilitators and therapists in experiential modalities; including nature-based therapy, ecopsychology, decolonising psychotherapy, and Indigenous approaches to listening and guiding. Hāweatea belongs to the mountains Aoraki and Mauna ō Wakea. www.natureknows.co