A Wheel of the Year Retreat for Samhain: Ceremony, Ritual & Intuitive Yoga in the Mendocino Redwoods
The Wheel is always turning. Most of us just aren't there when it does. We move through the seasons as a backdrop to our schedules — noticing the light changing, feeling the temperature shift, watching the leaves go — but rarely stopping long enough to actually mark the turning, to honor what is completing and open consciously to what is beginning. The Ritual & Renewal: Dark Moon Fall Retreat is an invitation to be present for one of the most powerful thresholds of the year. This four-day Wheel of the Year retreat gathers in the coastal redwoods of Mendocino, California — November 5–8, 2026 — to mark the Samhain cross-quarter with ceremony, intuitive flow yoga, ancestral altar work, ecstatic dance, group reiki, fire ritual, and elemental practice. Led by Rachel Wilkins, it is a retreat designed not just to give you rest but to give you orientation — to help you feel where you are in the larger cycle, and what that means for your inner life. Register here and browse the full Spirit Camp retreat calendar for more upcoming seasonal offerings.
The Wheel of the Year: A Living Framework for Inner and Outer Life
The Wheel of the Year is an eight-spoked calendar of seasonal thresholds that has been used by earth-honoring peoples across many cultures as a framework for aligning inner rhythms with the natural cycles of light and dark. Its eight points include the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and four cross-quarter days — the midpoints between them — each carrying its own ceremonial character, agricultural significance, and quality of inner attention.
The origins of the Wheel's individual festivals are rooted in the pre-Christian Celtic and northern European agricultural traditions, where the rhythms of planting, growing, harvesting, and lying fallow organized both practical life and spiritual practice. These were communities that understood, in a visceral way, that human beings are not separate from the cycles of the natural world — that our inner seasons mirror the outer ones, and that health comes from moving with those cycles rather than against them.
Samhain — the festival at the heart of this retreat — falls at the cross-quarter point between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, typically observed from sunset October 31 through November 1, with an energetic window extending for days on either side. It marks the final harvest, the end of the growing season, and the threshold into the dark half of the year. In the Celtic Wheel, Samhain was the new year — the point at which the old year died, the veils between the living and the spirit world thinned, and the next cycle began in darkness. It is the point on the Wheel of the Year most associated with ancestors, with death and rebirth, with divination and transformation.
In the decades following the mid-twentieth century, the Wheel of the Year was codified as the central liturgical calendar of modern Wicca and neo-paganism, primarily through the work of scholars and practitioners including Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente. Since then, it has spread far beyond any single tradition — adopted by earth-based spirituality communities, secular practitioners of seasonal living, and many who find in its eight stations a meaningful alternative to a calendar organized entirely around productivity and consumption. Today, the practice of marking the Wheel of the Year with ceremony is genuinely global — and genuinely growing. You can explore its history in depth via The Witches' Almanac, one of the longest-running references in earth-based seasonal practice.
What is striking about using the Wheel of the Year as a retreat framework is how well it translates into the structure of a multi-day immersive experience. A retreat that is anchored in a specific seasonal threshold — as this one is — has a coherence that retreats built around generic wellness programming cannot match. The timing itself becomes the teacher.
The Samhain Arc: What the Retreat Holds
The Ritual & Renewal retreat begins Thursday evening with a welcome dinner and an opening ceremony that grounds participants in the land, acknowledges the spirits of the place, honors the season, and sets collective intentions for the days ahead. This is not a formality. It is a genuine beginning — a crossing of the threshold together.
Friday and Saturday mornings are devoted to integrated ritual practice: intuitive flow yoga, pranayama breathwork, ecstatic embodied dance, and somatic meditation woven together as a unified ceremonial practice. The approach is not about achieving a particular physical outcome. It is about using movement and breath and stillness as tools for arriving more fully in the body — making contact with what is alive in this particular season of life.
Afternoons are left largely open — time to walk the redwood trails, rest in the fairy meadow, journal by the fire, or gather in small groups for reflection. Structured afternoon workshops offer guided self-study, Ayurvedic self care practices, and open circle dialogue for those who want continued engagement.
The ancestral altar is one of the defining elements of this Samhain ceremony retreat. Together, participants build a shared altar to honor loved ones who have passed — bringing photographs, mementos, and the stories that hold them alive in memory. Across many world traditions — Día de los Muertos, Celtic Samhain, the Obon festival in Japan — this time of year is recognized as the natural threshold for ancestral remembrance. The retreat uses that timing with full ceremonial intention.
Saturday evening culminates in a fire ceremony at the Magic Meadow: blessing and releasing what needs to go, calling in what belongs to the next cycle, gathered in the dark of Samhain around the living flame. Sunday morning arrives with a renewal meditation — a grounding into the new year of the Wheel — before the closing brunch and the journey home.
Photo of Deer Haven, one of the our many unique cabin spaces. This cabin has three beds. Cabins have between 1 to 8 beds each and provide several different sleeping arrangements for Wheel of the Year Retreat. All cabin spaces are included in redwood ceremony retreat.
Photo of Group Glamping Tents Setup in Sunset Meadow. We have 10 Glamping Structures that can be added with 1to 3 beds each. This can increase bed capacity of campus to 50 guests across 20 unique accommodation spaces.
Walking the Wheel With Rachel Wilkins
Rachel Simone Wilkins has built her entire retreat and ceremonial practice around seasonal and lunar rhythms. The Embodying Shakti retreat series, her monthly Moon Circle gatherings, and this annual Samhain gathering in the Mendocino redwoods are all expressions of the same commitment: to offer genuine ceremonial containers that help participants align their inner lives with the natural cycles they are embedded in.
Her training is both broad and deep. She holds a 200-hour certification from the White Lotus Foundation (2011), a 500-hour Prana Vinyasa certification completed under Shiva Rea, a 300-hour advanced training with Jason Crandell focused on yoga philosophy and somatic alignment, Shamanic Reiki I, II, and Masters certifications, and a Kalaripayattu initiation in Kerala, India. She carries all of this into a teaching approach that is earthy, embodied, and unmistakably genuine — not a polished presentation but a living practice offered from someone who is still walking the path.
Her personal relationship with the Mendocino redwoods runs deep and is one of the reasons this retreat exists at all. She has returned to this land during times of grief, transition, and new beginning — and found that it consistently delivers what it promises: a quality of grounding and renewal that is rare and real. For a Wheel of the Year retreat centered on the Samhain threshold, there is no more appropriate guide than someone who has genuinely marked this turning herself, year after year, in this exact forest.
A Forest Sanctuary That Lives the Wheel
Spirit Camp is not incidentally set in the redwood forest. It is built around it. The 27 acres of second-growth redwood forest that surround the property create a living ceremonial ground — one that changes with every season, that holds its own rhythms of growth and decay, that models in its own ecology the cycles the retreat asks participants to work with.
In November, the forest is at its most atmospherically potent. The canopy has thinned. The light that reaches the forest floor is low and amber. The nights are long and genuinely dark. The coastal fog moves in from the Pacific with authority. This is not a neutral backdrop. It is an active participant in the ceremonial process.
The Sanctuary — Spirit Camp's signature gathering space, designed by architect Paul Tay with a copper roof, central skylight, and soaring south-facing windows — provides a warm, luminous container for morning practice and evening ceremony. The Magic Meadow fire pits open to the sky for the Saturday evening fire ceremony. The Redwood Lodge anchors communal life and meals. The private cabins — oak floors, redwood furnishings, linen duvets, and cozy heaters — provide genuine rest between deep days.
Spirit Camp is sober, substance-free, queer-owned, and body-positive — and these values are not peripheral features. They are the foundation of the kind of safety and depth that ceremonial retreat work requires.
A Seasonal Retreat in One of Northern California's Most Magical Landscapes
Spirit Camp is located in Mendocino County on the Northern California coast — approximately two to three hours North of San Francisco and North of the Bay Area, accessible from SFO, OAK, and Santa Rosa airports. The town of Mendocino is twelve minutes away; the Pacific Ocean is less than a mile. The drive north through Sonoma and Marin counties is itself transitional — the noise of the city quieting mile by mile until the redwood corridor arrives and something deeper takes over.
Mendocino in November is one of the most elemental landscapes imaginable for a Wheel of the Year retreat. The season is palpable here in a way it rarely is in cities — the shortening days, the coastal wind, the forest's particular golden autumn quality of light. Participants from the Bay Area, Sacramento, the Central Valley, and the broader West Coast find that the distance and the landscape together create exactly the conditions needed to actually feel the threshold they have come to honor.
See what else is coming up at Spirit Camp at spirit.camp/retreats.
Two Places to Explore in Mendocino County
Van Damme State Park
Van Damme State Park, just south of the town of Mendocino, is home to one of the most unusual ecosystems on the California coast — the Pygmy Forest, where ancient, centuries-old cypress and pine trees grow to only knee height due to the unique soil chemistry of the coastal terrace. A hike through the Pygmy Forest is both ecologically remarkable and unexpectedly moving: a reminder that extraordinary life can take forms we would not predict, that smallness and age are not contradictions, that the forest has its own logic that defies ordinary expectation. The park also offers forested trails descending to a sheltered beach at Van Damme Cove — a full arc of landscape, from ancient forest to open sea.
Mendocino Farmers Market (Fort Bragg)
The Mendocino Farmers Market in Fort Bragg, running seasonally through the fall, gathers local producers, farmers, and artisans in a lively, community-centered market that reflects the agricultural richness of Mendocino County. For retreat participants extending their stay by a day, the market offers a grounding, pleasurable way to connect with the local food culture that Spirit Camp's kitchen already draws from. Fresh seasonal produce, handmade goods, locally grown flowers, and the easy warmth of a small-town market make this a fitting complement to a retreat built around honoring the harvest season.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to identify as pagan, Wiccan, or earth-based to participate in this Wheel of the Year retreat?
Not at all. The retreat draws on seasonal and pagan ceremonial traditions, but it is open to anyone who feels resonance with cycles, threshold-marking, and inner transformation — regardless of their spiritual background or identification. An open curiosity is the only prerequisite.What does all-inclusive mean for this retreat?
All-inclusive pricing starts at $1,080 and covers three nights of private cabin lodging, all meals from Thursday welcome dinner through Sunday closing brunch, and all retreat programming. A $500 non-refundable deposit secures your place. Payment plans are available with a $50 plan fee added to the total.How intimate is this retreat? What is the group size?
Spirit Camp's Sanctuary holds up to 25 people in a ceremonial circle — this is a deliberately small and intimate gathering, not a large group event. The intimacy is part of the design: real ceremonial work requires genuine safety, and genuine safety requires a held, bounded community.
The Wheel Is Turning. Be There When It Does.
The Samhain threshold comes once a year. This particular convergence of Dark Moon, redwood forest, and held ceremonial container — guided by Rachel Wilkins — is rarer still. If something in you is ready to mark this turning consciously, to step across the threshold of the Wheel of the Year with intention and community, this retreat is the place to do it.
Reserve your spot in the Ritual & Renewal: Dark Moon Fall Retreat →
TOPICS:
Wheel of the Year Retreat, Samhain ceremony retreat, seasonal ritual retreat, pagan seasonal retreat California, wheel of the year ceremony, dark moon retreat, fall equinox retreat California, earth cycle retreat
