Release & Rise Retreat

Release & Rise ✨

A one-day New Year passage of honoring what we’re releasing and celebrating what we’re calling in.

As we cross the threshold into 2026, many of us feel both the weight of what the past year asked us to carry and the pull of what the new year is quietly inviting us toward. Release & Rise, held on January 3rd, is a lovingly crafted New Year’s ritual-retreat designed to help you begin the year grounded, clear, and connected — having honored what is complete and awakened what is ready to emerge.

Across six spacious hours (with a restorative break), we move through the full arc of release and renewal — a symbolic and embodied way to start the new year with intention and presence.

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PART ONE — Release

Our morning session mirrors the closing of the old year: a time to honor, witness, and soften around what you have carried. Through grief-tending practices, gentle ceremony, keening, humming, rhythm, and somatic grounding, we’ll create compassionate space for the emotions, stories, and seasons of your life that are asking to be released before stepping into the new year. This isn’t about forcing anything out — it’s about allowing what’s complete to be held, honored, and gently set down.

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PART TWO — Rise

After a restorative break, we turn toward the energy of the new year. With clarity, spaciousness, and rootedness restored, we shift into consciously creating what comes next. Through guided visioning, embodied enactment, group amplification, and sacred play, we will support one another in stepping into the futures our spirits are ready for in 2026. Together, we’ll call in the energies of joy, love, peace, vitality, belonging, abundance — whatever you feel called to rise into as this new chapter begins.

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This retreat is an invitation to:

✨ Release what no longer serves

✨ Feel fully held as you grieve, honor, and lighten your heart

✨ Begin 2026 grounded, present, and clear

✨ Clarify what you are consciously creating next

✨ Embody your vision in supportive community

✨ Celebrate your becoming

You’ll leave this day feeling lighter, clearer, more connected, and awakened to possibility — having honored what’s behind you and stepped into what’s ahead. Release & Rise is a New Year’s passage, a ceremony, a rebirth — and a reminder that you do not have to walk into a new year alone.

📍Event Details

Saturday, January 3, 2026 · 10am - 5pm EST

$77

Limited to 12.

Additional Details:

Registration required. Registration closes 24 hours prior to the event.

The registration fee is non-refundable unless the event is canceled by the facilitator.

Parking Information

Shakti in the Mountains Website

✨ Led by Janna Browning

Janna Browning, MA, PRDT is a seasoned Trauma-Informed Drama Therapist, Expressive Arts Practitioner, Director, and and Co-Founder of Integrative StoryWorks (ISW). She has a private practice at Shakti in the Mountains were she sees individual and families. She received her BFA in Acting from Emerson College in Boston and her MA in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Drama Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

In California, she worked with Armand Volkas in Healing the Wounds of History, which uses expressive arts therapy to bring together groups who share a legacy of historical trauma. Her work with HWH includes groundbreaking projects uniting Armenians and Turks to address the shared legacy of the Armenian Genocide, as well as facilitating dialogue and healing around the historical traumas of Palestinians and Israelis, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the deep racial wounds of the United States.

Janna has also worked with Community Performance International, a company specializing in community building across lines of difference, using the stories of a community in large-scale theatre performances. She helped develop Community Story Performances in towns across the South and created programming for schools. In 2011, she co-founded the StoryTown Program in Jonesborough, TN, which continues to this day.

As a grief practitioner, Janna brings her trauma-informed drama therapy expertise into the realm of community grief-tending—facilitating monthly grief rituals, keening circles, and embodied expressive arts processes to help individuals and communities honor loss, release what can no longer be carried, and make space for renewal. Her grief work draws from ancestral Celtic traditions, trauma-informed expressive arts, and ritual-based collective healing practices.

She is co-founder of Integrative StoryWorks, a company that uses personal stories to heal individual and collective wounds, as well as StoryWander Travel, which offers escorted, story-based small group travel experiences.

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