About Heart Fire Sanctuary
Vision
We envision a place where all people can come to access the highest quality therapies, medicines, and sacred practices to reconnect with source.
...where all people can learn to cultivate their optimum health, their direct connection to source,
and to access their truest wisdom.
The source of all life is the wellspring of wisdom we must embody.
It’s only through this embodiment can we co-evolve, integrated with Earth.
Mission
Our Mission is to provide a wide range of indoor and outdoor community gathering spaces where highly qualified guides, facilitators, and instructors share their knowledge, wisdom, and practices. Their diverse offerings will have a common focus of environmental coexistence and the improved health and well being of all humans.
We serve as a ceremonial ground for all people who share the vision of a grass roots cultural shift towards sustainability and respect for the Earth and believe all life as sacred.
We offer opportunities for people to gather in ceremonial settings designed for healing our inner lives and relationships with each other and the Earth. We support the use of archaic and contemporary therapeutic modalities led by trained facilitators in group and individual settings. We support the therapeutic interventions of psychedelic medicines to catalyze the effectiveness of transformational /transpersonal healing and re-membering.
Values
We offer equal access to a wide spectrum of transformational experiences and educational opportunities to diverse populations. We actively seek to serve populations that are systematically marginalized both socially and economically.
We respect the uniqueness of each life and the freedom to live out its independant desires with autonomy while also honoring the interdependence of Life systems.
We come together in peace, humility, and respect. We honor our interactions by truthful ‘I’ statements, asking questions rather than asserting assumptions.
We honor our desires and interactions by clearly asking for what we want. Then only consummating that desire after a clearly communicated consent.
About The Sanctuary
The ancestral lands of Heart Fire Sanctuary reside within the traditional lands of the Clackamas Nation, relatives of the Chinook Peoples who speak the Wasco-Wishram dialect. People of water and fire in kinship with “tumtum” (Chinook for heartbeat), the heartbeat of the waterfalls, which give them sustenance for life. This heartbeat, our heart beat, nurtures the vision of my work.
My parents moved into our ranch style house built on an old subdivided broccoli farm owned by Mr. Sipes in 1968. It sits between the towns of Boring and Damascus just outside of Portland, Oregon. At that time we were mostly surrounded by berry fields with a couple of closer neighbors and my old grade school, Damascus Union, just across the field.
Over time new developments have transpired in the adjacent towns, however the land around the Sanctuary has changed little. The berries have been replaced by green house and the sound of traffic is more persistent, but the trees, planted by my mother, have grown tall and the open natural feeling is still strong medicine for the soul.
My sister and I inherited the land along with a few cats and dogs. We decided not to sell the land but to allow the dogs and cats to live out their days here. My sister departed but I decided to stay and gave myself 5 years to see what would develop. If nothing came, then I would sell it.
Shortly after, the idea of a community gathering place came into my life. Actually, when it did, I recognized it from a lot of writing I had done almost 20 years earlier, but shelved it because I didn’t have a place for it to be developed.