Description
July 12-15, 2025
Sacred Gardener Farm
Includes all your meals and camping spot
PWYC: 350-475, suggested fee of 420
Additional fee to stay in our shared timberframe house
So what is an offering? An offering is an alchemized form of beauty, or life which is being offered back to life Herself in thankfulness, or the offering is being made as a gift in hope that the ancestors or deities involved will receive our prayers and act on our behalf. As a petition.
In this workshop you will learn how to create and make offerings. With a synergy of skills and knowledge we’ll go through each step of creating incense cones from local plants and resins, offering bowls and beads from local clay and other offerings. This workshop brings together herbalism, pottery, traditional skills, history and spiritual practices.
To make an offering to the unseen (or even the seen) world in this age of technology and digital certainty seems archaic or woo woo to many people. Why would anyone do such a thing?
The first observation I might offer to answer this question is that for most of the people on the planet right now, and for most of the people throughout recorded time and for perhaps a hundred or two hundred thousand years before that, we all made offerings. Do you imagine a thousand generations of people who practiced making offerings were wasting their time, or making it all up? That they did it just because of superstition and offerings don’t work? And that we in our ignorance of the unseen world are somehow right about seeing this as antiquated and useless?
Or maybe you’re a bit more open minded and feel it’s ok because you think that in making offerings there are psychosomatic healing effects. Now we are getting closer to the mark, because indeed such rituals do have a strong balancing and curative effect on the practitioner’s and the participants’ psyches. Now I invite you to step through the looking glass to a deeper truth and admit that these rituals also have a balancing and curative effect on the subject or recipients of the offerings, even at a distance. It’s statistically proven that even nondenominational prayer works miracles when directed to heal. We can bring energy, peace and harmony to people or places by focusing an intense feeling of love and compassion toward them. We can also affect people negatively with our thought projections.
The second point I would make to help folks realize that making an offering isn’t such a far-out thing, is that while our Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Islamic ancestors drew a hard line between their practices and “pagan” rituals, the truth is their religious church services are completely derived from earlier shamanic practices of making offerings. That’s what ‘service’ refers to. You are creating an offering of food, wine, smoke and song and whatever other deliciousness you can conjure to ‘serve’ unseen spirits or gods. So even in western culture it’s still going on but under the guise of religious ceremony. Even completely secular healing modalities, such as a ‘gratitude practice’, are very related. It is not the same because there is no external focus, but its results are often magical, like prayer in bringing to us what we need because the spirits are blessing us for the thankfulness.
One of the first things I teach folks in the Sacred Gardener school is how to make offerings because most of us didn’t grow up with that. Or if we did it was completely tied to the patriarchal deities of the religion it was serving. I start with the question: how can you offer the Earth or Spirit anything, when you were given all those things by them in the first place? That is like a child handing back a present that the parent gave them. Cute but not of much value. So the first question leads to the second which is: what can you add to the value of the offering? You have to mix your intention, care and love into the gift. You have to transform or alchemize the gift Nature already gave you to give it spiritual weight or value.
Some things in nature have already been transformed. Like gems, or honey. In a sense, our work with things like these offerings is in finding them. But most things have to be crafted by us. That’s what gives the offering some of its weight. The more precious and time consuming the offering is, the more spiritual value it has.
So that’s all about the making of the offering. There are three other big parts to an offering. The first is the intensity and focus of our prayer. That intention leads into the second which brings in the outer or physical part of a ritual structure you follow. And last but not least there is the ‘quality’ or ‘purity’ of the original materials from which the offering is made. This is all part of the integrity of the offering.
When I first started making offerings I used stuff I could buy; candles, foods, herbs, incense and things like that. And I’d just make an altar with whatever as long as it looked nice. Then as I became more of an animist about thirty years ago and started focusing on living a ‘bioregional life’ I started to see and experience that making the offering ‘from scratch’ gave the offerings so much more power because of the greater connections and relationships formed through its sourcing and making.
As the material is transformed by its burning during the ritual everything that went into it is released. So while some incense that’s come from India may smell divine, we have no connection to it. No connection to the people that made it, that are essentially slave labour by our standard of life. No connection to the dozen or so plants it’s made from, many of which would be industrially grown, or unsustainably harvested, to the detriment of the native people and the land. And then there’s the cost to the earth in flying the incense from halfway around the world. This, as opposed to our hand picked, handmade incense, where we have a relationship with the herbs which were sustainably and reverently harvested locally. And with every aspect of the process. There’s more power, more spirit in the offering because we know and love this plant specifically. Maybe it healed us as a medicinal herb or we have good memories and associations with it, or we just really love that particular plant or tree, the deeper kinship toward that thing carries weight.
From working with herbal medicines for decades I know the way a herb is harvested directly affects its potency for healing. And so that would also be true for it as an offering. So it matters whether it’s harvested with a two-stroke gas powered hedge clipper, or a tractor, versus by hand. It matters all the way down the process to the final offering. If each stage is done in a sacred manner it lends potency.
And of course the offering bowl or plate like the altar and what you are smudging is also significant. If we are using an Abalone shell, as is the First Nations custom that’s great in one way. But from new age movements hunger for these spiritual tools these shells and White Buffalo Sage are becoming extinct in the wild from over harvesting. So now if you are using these, not only are they not part of your story (you’re just jumping in and appropriating someone else’s practices) but the greed and carelessness of the industry you got your shell and sage from is now part of what you’re offering.
Using a found piece of rock or wood can work. But as I said earlier it is something that was given to you by the Earth (you found) and so it must be elevated by your care and love to be suitable as an offering.
Traditionally people from all over the world have used local clay for making a vessel to hold their offerings. Clay is a magical substance. It’s mythologically associated with creation of life and the formation of humans because it is the closest substance to living matter. Its plasticity and rigidity profoundly relate to our human nature. Clay and the process of making it into a ceramic embraces and dances with all the elements, the Earth, Water, Fire and air.
So in this confluence of elementals we co-create something perfect for enabling the transformation of the physical into the ethereal realm.
