6-Night Imbolc Retreat in Hawai’i
The Quickening Hearth Where Fire Becomes Forest
with Elle Saunders
January 31-February 7, 2027
BIG ISLAND, HAWAII
This retreat invites you into a sacred sabbatical guided by three ancient teachers:
Myth, Land, and Body.
We come at Imbolc, the late winter portal when the seed quickens inside its shell and the ground begins to remember warmth. We come to ask the old question in a new season:
What is your ember, and what does it need to stay alive?
We will carry our winters across an ocean to the youngest land on earth, where Pele has been burning in the deep belly of the mountain since before memory began. Through Brigid's symbols of the flame, the well, and the blackbird, we find the ember that is never truly gone.
Together we put down what is finished, relight what was extinguished, and welcome the small fragile thing that is just beginning to sing. We come to the fire island not to be forged dramatically, but to be warmed gently back into ourselves, swimming in deep blue water, resting beneath lush green canopy, held by volcanic earth. Pele meets us exactly as we need her: fierce when we need power returned to us, soft when we need permission to rest.
WHO IS THIS ExPERIENCE FOR?
This special sabbatical week is for you if…
You can feel something stirring but haven't had the space to listen yet
You've been tending everyone else's fire and your own needs attention
You're ready to sort out what deserves your energy this year and release what doesn't
You want to know what it feels like to tend your own flame with real devotion
WHAT WILL IT FEEL LIKE?
Imagine yourself slowing down to be immersed in nature… resting, daydreaming and stargazing for a week or even longer. Give yourself permission to shift from “doing” to “being”. Bring silence to your planning mind and allow your intuitive spirit to guide you back home to yourself. Sleep in an intentionally designed space for deep, restorative rest. Play, create, and vision whenever the inspiration strikes.
Receive targeted guidance from our masterful team of space holders who can help bring greater awareness to an area of your life you’d like to revitalize. Together, we will bring sacred ritual into your daily routine through our toolkit of practices, inquiry questions and unique approach to accelerated transformation.
Enjoy a total life reset with this custom curated journey just for you on our sacred land. Our spaces are intentionally attuned for your inner exploration and accelerated transformation.
“The myth is alive. The land is listening. Your body knows the way home.”
WHAT’S MY TYPICAL DAY LIKE AT PALIULI FARM?
MORNING
Enjoy breakfast at your own time catered to your specific needs
Teaching circle with group myth exploration and guided inquiry to inform your intentions for the day
AFTERNOON
Solo time following your body's wisdom: rest, explore, swim, journal, private ritual
Lunch on your own
Private one-on-one sessions with Elle available or curated healing sessions with local healers (additional cost)
EVENING
Community dinner
Optional sharing circle
ALSO INCLUDED:
Group excursion to Volcano National Park and Paleaku Peace Gardens
Local guidance for additional exploration aligned with your sabbatical intentions
Two meals per day, lodging, and tuition for six nights
Something in you already knows it is time.
Brigid’s three fires — forge, hearth, inspiration — meet Pele’s volcanic earth, building new land from fire beneath the sea right now, underfoot. You arrive carrying winter. You leave carrying the seed that has already begun to move.
Paliuli Farm Sanctuary is an active Kona coffee farm on the Big Island of Hawai'i. With over ten acres of sacred land above Honaunau Bay, enjoy a taste of heaven on earth.
Activate your childlike joy and wonder with wild spinner dolphins who return here to play and rest. Flow with the ocean tides and uncover a hidden universe underwater. Savor ripe seasonal fruits from our lush tropical garden and taste or fertile coffee and cacao trees. Experience life with all your senses.
For one week, you have the space and a dedicated team devoted entirely to your healing and transformation.
Maybe you are exhausted in a way that sleep hasn’t touched.
Maybe you are navigating a life transition and you need more than a weekend to feel your way through it. Maybe you are deep in burnout recovery and ready, finally, to invest real time in yourself.
Everything you need to
stop managing and start receiving
Seven days of somatic healing, fire ceremony, whale migration ritual, and an afternoon walk through Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park where fire has built new earth from nothing.
Your sabbatical includes:
Private lodging in one of four distinct farm sanctuary spaces
Healthy pre-meals stocked in your space prepared by our local food co-op, ready when you are
Full access to the land and lounging areas with stunning sunsets and ocean views
Personalized morning group sessions with Elle, your dedicated space holder
A custom curated journey shaped around your intentions and a guide to our favorite places on the island
Sacred rituals to open and close your week
Sabbatical toolkit — journaling pages, reflection deck, and seasonal wellness gifts
Guided group rituals and curated ceremonies to sacred sites aligned to our personal and group intentions (i.e., Place of Refuge, Paleaku Peace Gardens & sacred Kealakekua Bay)
Entrance to Volcano National Park
YOUR INVESTMENT:
$2,900 solo room with shared bath / $3,200 solo room with private bath
What’s NOT INCLUDED
Airfare and local transport
Onsite massage, acupuncture or energy healing sessions
Guided tours to our favorite sacred sites around the island
Whale and manta ray boat excursions (we can help you book these!)
1:1 follow up sessions with your retreat host
Join us for this IMMERSIVE Week for IMBOLC 2027
$2,900 solo room with shared bath
$3,200 solo room with private bath
ABOUT YOUR SPACEHOLDER
Elle Saunders is a licensed marriage and family therapist, mythic educator, and ritual facilitator working at the intersection of Celtic mythology, depth psychology, somatic healing, and earth-based spiritual practice. She treats story as transmission, ceremony as medicine, and the body as the first and most reliable oracle. Rooted in Avalonian priestess training and multiple oracle and ceremonial traditions, she holds the clinical and the sacred as one unbroken thread.
Elle is the founder of Trinity Star Family Counseling, Inc.
Learn more about her work at The First Altar on Substack and at ellesaunderswisdom.com.
“Healing is a spiral. We do not move through it in a straight line — we go down, we integrate, we rise changed, and then life calls us deeper. What the body carries in its tissue, the stories handed down without being spoken, the self that was never allowed to finish becoming — all of it is workable. We enter through myth and memory, through breath and the felt sense, through ancestral thread and the earth’s long intelligence. Twenty years of sitting with people at this kind of opening has taught me one thing above all:
you are beyond what you think you are.”