Tickets here:
https://www.trybooking.com/nz/events/landing/17238?embed
An Invitation to Deep Connection
Join us for a three-day immersion at the stunning Dune Lakes Lodge—a sacred space where body, creativity, and ceremony meet.
Relational Rites is a movement-based, creative, and ceremonial retreat designed to cultivate and celebrate your embodied interconnectedness—with yourself, others, and the living world.
This Journey Will Invite You To:
Come home to your body – Reconnect with your living pulse through guided movement and somatic exploration.
Explore the relational field – Discover the unseen currents that shape connection—how you impact and are impacted by others.
Cross thresholds in your relational self with ritual and ceremony – Honour what’s ending, welcome what’s emerging, and allow what longs to be witnessed.
Create and be created – Express beyond words through movement, sound, and art; open new pathways of connection and insight.
Belong more deeply – Be held in a supportive field where community, creativity, and spirit meet.
What to Expect:
Guided Dance Journeys & Somatic Practices
Relational Movement Explorations
Threshold Rituals & Ceremonies
Creative Expression: Sound, Art, and Movement
Nature-Based Practices & Deep Rest
Circle Sharing & Witnessing
No prior experience needed—just your willingness to move, feel, and open to connection.
Is This For You?
This retreat is for you if you are:
Longing for deeper connection—with yourself, others, and life itself.
Curious about exploring relationships through your body, not just your mind.
Drawn to ceremony, creativity, and embodied transformation.
Ready to honour your own thresholds and the stories of belonging you carry.
Practical Details:
Dates: 23, 24 and 25 January, 2026
Location: Dunes Lake Lodge
Facilitators: Ellie Wilde and Hester Phillips
Tickets:
$575 camping ticket
$675 shared room
$775 private room
Tuition, Accomodation and food* included.
(*from dinner on Friday through to lunch on Sunday BYO breakfasts)
https://www.trybooking.com/nz/events/landing/17238?embed
Come as you are. Bring your heart, your body, your story, and your longing.
We move. We remember. We re-weave the web of connection
Your Facilitators
Hester is passionate about unlocking the creative spirit in others and believes deeply in the power of creativity—especially dance—to support and empower people and communities.
She holds a Master of Arts in Art Therapy and works as a professional Arts Therapist with a thriving private practice. Her clinical focus is supporting clients living with trauma through a wide range of embodied practices rooted in Somatic Psychology.
Hester is also an accredited Open Floor movement meditation teacher and co-founder and director of the Conscious Dance Aotearoa Festival. Since 2005, she has facilitated regular conscious dance classes and workshops as well as workshops and classes focusing on somatic approaches to wellbeing, across both clinical and community settings. In addition, she teaches trauma-sensitive group facilitation and provides supervision for group facilitators.
Inspired by her passion for social justice, Hester explores how collective spaces can foster personal liberation. She holds a degree in Political Science and creates environments that reflect the freedom she longs for in the world.
Beyond her professional life, Hester is a mother and enjoys DJing in her spare time.
www.hester.nz
Ellie is a seasoned International Facilitator and a Somatic Trauma Resolution Coach with more than a decade of experience guiding individuals and groups through transformative processes.
For 10 years, she served as a facilitator with the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA), where she honed her skills for ritual and ceremony, learning to trust in the unseen realm.
In 2020 she moved away from teaching in these high intensity spaces of ISTA , and took time out to re-group and began retraining in somatic trauma resolution. She also went on a journey of deep personal reflection and healing around power, trauma and the nervous system.
She took a break from her events & workshops, and has undergone a significant recalibration over the past five years since her departure from ISTA, evolving into an entirely new way of holding herself and supporting individuals & groups.
Ellie’s approach is deeply rooted in the principles of nervous system care and regenerative healing. As a committed change maker, she is passionately in service to the Great Change unfolding in our world today and because she knows just how much we are in this together her work centres on relationship skills and intimacy, embodiment and sexuality.
Her feminine style of supporting people into liberation weaves embodied practices and processes, music and ritual, to create a transformative and magical spaces for those she guides to become more connected to their own embodied, inherent knowing.
www.ellie-wilde.com
Also check out other Arts events in Waitakere, Workshops in Waitakere, Festivals in Waitakere.
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