Trainings, Intensives, Immersions & Events
Upcoming Sandplay Events
This is the place to find everything Ruth is currently offering beyond individual sessions — consultation groups, intensives, and trainings, gathered in one place as they're scheduled. Expand any listing below for dates, format, and how to register. Come back often as new offerings are added throughout the year!
Continuing Education for Clinicians
July 2027
20 NBCC-approved CE hours
One small cohort
Facilitated by Kris Silvestry & Ruth Castellano
Sponsored by Peace of Mind Yoga, Counselling & Wellness Center
Alaska Cruise: The Sustainable Clinician
The Landscapes We Inhabit: Body, Psyche, and the Living World
Sails Sunday, July 25, 2027 from Seattle · $997 early bird through December 3
You did not become a therapist to run on empty.
But here you are. You hold the hardest stories anyone carries. You stay regulated so your clients can borrow your calm. You track someone else's nervous system all day, and by evening you can barely feel your own. You tell your clients rest isn't laziness, and then you skip lunch to answer one more email.
That's not a character flaw. It's an occupational injury. Vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue and burnout are what happen to good clinicians who do this work well and were never taught how to recover from it. Too many gifted therapists leave the field, not because they stopped caring, but because nobody taught them to care for themselves with the same skill they give everyone else.
You deserve better than that. And there's a way through, grounded in the same somatic science you already trust.
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Our exploration will follow a three-part movement:
Witnessing the outer landscape > Embodying the experience > Entering the inner symbolic landscape.
Rather than interpreting the landscape, we will practice listening to it—and listening for what it awakens within us.
Learning Objectives:
Describe the relationship between the outer landscape and the inner psychological landscape through a Jungian, symbolic, and Sandplay-informed perspective.
Identify archetypal qualities within the Alaskan landscape- including glacier, mountain, water, wilderness, shoreline, vastness, and wildness— and explore the psychological material they may evoke without imposing fixed interpretations.
Understanding liminality as a psychologically potent space, particularly at boundaries between conscious/unconscious, known/unknown, inner/outer, and body/psyche.
Recognize the sand tray as a contained landscape through which aspects of inner terrain can emerge symbolically.
Integrate somatic awareness with symbolic and imaginal experience, moving from sensory encounter to bodily response to psychological meaning.
Apply landscape-based experiential practices to clinical work, while maintaining respect for each client’s individual associations and symbolic process.
Consultation Group
January - June 2027
only 2 spaces available!
Fall/Winter Consultation Group
Dates: January - June 2027
A collaborative, teaching-led consultation group for clinicians actively practicing sandplay, rooted in the tradition developed by Dora Kalff. Over six months, participants deepen clinical insight through case presentation and group exploration of Jungian theory, archetypes, symbol and story, co-transference, and the therapeutic container as it unfolds in work with adults and children.
Each participant presents a case, supported by an individual prep consultation beforehand. The group format offers a rare depth of learning — both through presenting one's own work and through witnessing peers' material — and many participants form lasting professional connections. CE credits toward STA/ISST certification.
Intensive
June 2027
In-Person
Registration filling fast!
Mapping the Shift from Chaos to Calm
Dates: June 22 - 25, 2027
Location: Montserrat Retreat Center
600 N Shady Shores Drive, Lake Dallas, TX
This small group intensive immerses participants fully in the realm of sandplay through case studies, didactic materials, and rich experiential work.
Experiential activities may include clay, paint, music, meditation, yoga, journaling, collage, and dance and body movement drawing on the work of Marion Woodman. Case studies span adult and child work, deepening knowledge of sandplay processes, Jungian concepts, and Eastern elements of silence and presence.
Trainers will teach on tracking themes, holding a free and protected space, co-transference, Shadow, and the expression of Individuation as it appears in the sandtray.
Questions? Ideas?
Reach out to ask a question or share ideas for other events you’d like to see.