Radiant Resilience

We welcome you to this in-person, land-based somatic retreat. Radiant Resilience offers a rare opportunity to slow down, listen deeply, and restore vitality in your body, your work, and your relationships.

• Set an intention, and work together with a small cohort to build new skills in emotional agility, regulation, and connection.
• Under the guidance of Indigenous Elders, learn models of resilience rooted in land and community.
• Daily movement classes from ISMETA-certified Somatic Movement Educators help integrate your learnings and offer new tools to expand your practice or to be shared with your community and/or clientele.
• Explore your own connection to “root systems” in guided experiences in the forested and oceanic landscapes of Salt Spring Island.

Through deep witnessing, embodiment practices, and intentional communication, we create a culture of belonging and mutual support; this fertile soil becomes the source material from which we can foster and cultivate our resilience, and is how we can bring a spirit of resilience back to our families and communities. 

Radiant Resilience is a practice and curriculum designed for people who are committed to deepening their capacity for leadership and community building. We also offer a structured professional development pathway for those interested in certification in Embodied & Land-Based Resilience Practices. Learn more about certification here.

• A week-long retreat on beautiful Salt Spring Island, B.C. We will be working with our bodies in close relationship with the land through teachings in mindful somatic movement, subtle body awareness, and cultural safety.
• Guided ceremonies, rituals and eco-somatic explorations. Movement practices take place in a dome studio on a forested property and within various natural ecosystems across the island. Ceremonies are guided by indigenous Elders who are deeply rooted in their teachings with kindness and respect.
• Experiential Learning taught by Elders. Kathi and Daniel share teachings in cultural safety, a principle that centers the needs and voices of indigenous people. These teachings play an important role in shaping the conversation about our collective interests. During Kathi’s experiential workshop Building Bridges Through Understanding the Village© participants explore their own, personal role in supporting the revival of the values that worked so beautifully in indigenous villages for thousands of years. As a group, we also explore in‐depth the effects of Residential Schools and Canada’s Policy of Assimilation on Indigenous communities.This workshop is geared to solutions rather than recrimination and is a great forum in which to ask questions. With the Elders’ modeling we analyse and respond to power imbalances in society and discuss what actions we can take from a non-blame, non-shame perspective. The workshop invites all participants to become a part of the healing that IS already happening.
• Community. Radiant Resilience is a framework of support that values the journey of each individual as part of a living whole.  Through an intentionally small, intimate cohort, we cultivate trust, shared reflection, and meaningful dialogue. Together, we set intentions and build relationships that extend beyond the retreat, supporting one another in integrating these teachings into our daily lives. As our first inaugural gathering, we are excited to co-create a unique and foundational experience with this initial circle of participants.
• Sound Bath with indigenous healers. Hwiemtun (Coast Salish) and Lekha (Metis) provide a healing space to journey through a variety of frequencies. 
• Daily movement classes led by Somatic Movement Therapists and Educators certified through ISMETA.
• Catered Meals. Farm-to-Table vegetarian and pescatarian meals with fresh, vibrant produce are a way of life on Salt Spring Island. The Welcome Dinner with faculty on Sunday and the Celebration Dinner with faculty on Friday are included in the tuition along with light breakfasts and lunches. Participants are encouraged to share evening meals as desired. 
• Homeopathic doctor on site, offers First Aid support and healing herbal remedies for emotional balance. Human Design readings are available to be scheduled at an additional cost.
• Spaciousness for rest, integration, and unstructured time—we make time for varied opportunities for quiet reflection, hiking, or gathering in smaller groups. 

• On-site lodging with shared kitchen, or private units are available by reservation in advance at additional cost (spots are limited, reservations are first come first serve). Onsite camping is also available with showers, toilets, and a kitchen.

Kathi Camilleri

Kathi Camilleri is a Métis, Cree, and Ojibwa woman, who has coordinated healing programs in the Indigenous Community for over 29 years. She has a Master’s Degree in Leadership Studies, Certificates in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, and training in re-enactment therapy for trauma survivors. Kathi worked with Indigenous Mental Health and has her own consulting business.

She facilitates strategic planning sessions and experiential workshops regarding Canada’s Policy of Assimilation and Colonization with social workers, foster parents, health care workers, church groups, all levels of government, students and educators, and frontline workers in communities across Canada and the U.S.

Daniel Elliot

Daniel Elliott is an artist, cultural worker, and drug and alcohol counselor born into the Stz’uminus People on Vancouver Island. Deeply rooted in his teachings, Dan has dedicated his life to helping others find their way toward balance and wellness. He has shared cultural guidance in settings including the Nanaimo public school system and the Nanaimo Correctional Centre, offering ceremony and cultural grounding to those seeking connection.

Today, he continues to support individuals on their healing journeys, regularly facilitating smudges, sweat lodges, and traditional cooking classes throughout BC. Dan also mentors through Culturally Committed, walking alongside settler people to nurture understanding, unlearning, and meaningful reconciliation. His mentorship is grounded in humility, patience, and relational accountability. A gifted artist, Dan’s work explores themes of healing, resilience, and reconciliation in painting, as a film maker and in his writing. Through his work, and as President of Raven Sky Productions, Dan uplifts teachings that honour ancestral knowledge while fostering growth and understanding across communities.

Dr. Seónagh Kummer

Born in Canada of Irish and Scottish heritage, Seónagh has worked in cultural dance research and performance for 30 years. In Vancouver in the 1990s, she taught workshops in community engagement and worked for the United Native Nations in indigenous self-government while training and performing as a dancer. Seonagh earned her master’s degree at UBC (2000), where she focused on a method of teaching anticolonial education through movement before going to train and perform as a dancer in New York and Massachusetts. She received a Ph.D. in Dance (Temple University, 2009) as a Fisher Center Fellow for her research about Kenyan (Luo) women’s dance as a resistance to colonization, and then worked as a Tenured Professor of Dance in the United States for over 19 years.

Living in both Africa and the United States, Seónagh taught dance as creative practice and cultural identity. After doing advanced training in multiple somatic programs, she became a certified Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator (RSMT/E) and a Dynamic Embodiment Practitioner with Martha Eddy. Seónagh incorporates her approach into the tenets of the Radiant Resilience certification program, wherein models for deep witnessing and embodied communication offer a living, breathing field of mindful movement, somatic social justice, and a homecoming to our root systems of land and body.  

Hwiemtun (Fred Roland)

Born and raised in Khowutzun (the ‘Warm Land’) by a Coast Salish mother and Hawaiian lineage father, Hwiemtun (Fred Roland) received many teachings of his Coast Salish culture. Through spending many years with elders of his territory, Hwiemtun learned the cultural and spiritual traditions of his ancestors.  During the last 20 years, he has journeyed around the world to explore and share ways of being with elders and healers of many indigenous tribes.   

Hwiemtun has devoted his life to creating partnerships internationally, nationally and locally with organizations, youth programs, treatment centers, spiritual groups and tribes.   He conducts presentations, workshops and ceremonies on a regular basis to promote understanding of indigenous ways of knowing. He has built sweat lodges in Germany, Hungary, South America, West Indies, Caribbean, Asia, and throughout Canada.  There are many other things that could be said about Hwiemtun, however, they can only be expressed in person. 

Lekha Michelle Hayes

Lekha, White Turtle Woman, is a Métis woman who has lived in the Quwut’sun territory for the past 15 years. She has had a lifelong passion for music and singing, which include a wide variety of ceremonial songs, devotional songs, and percussive instruments that allow for improvisation and intuition of spirit to flow through her. She has extensive knowledge and training in traditional sweat lodge ceremonies and leads sweat lodges for women. Lekha has also studied the healing arts of Acupressure, Reiki, and Ayurvedic massage, and has worked with First Nations elders in their tradition of clearing and brushing off energy. She has developed a strong sensitivity and intuition of people’s energy fields, and has implemented this into how she works in the sound healing journeys.