Hilary Lake Healing Arts

10/01/2025

ReMembering the Dark & Light: reflections on cultivating a fluid balance at this time of the changing season and beyond . . . also Finding Faith with Horses happening again on Sunday, The Gathering with a conversation about ancestral healing and up to 30% off herbal medicinals now through October 15th - https://mailchi.mp/9e5c329dff72/hillakehealingarts-marchnewsletter-14187997

09/30/2025

This Sunday, October 5th, Carolyne Stolzenfels of and I are offering Finding Faith with Horses again to help you reconnect with your inner wisdom and spiritual path through gentle interactions with her beautiful equine teachers.

Join us to explore your relationship to your intuition and faith through a connection to horses and their embodied gift to bring us fully present. This is a sacred gift at this time of so much disconnection to help us re-member our inner nature to feel more resourced and nourished amidst change.

This month we’ll be focusing on the theme of Coming Home to Our Sacred Bodies. I’ll be sharing about how horses offer us an opportunity to reconnect to our own life force through our bodies, which we can do at anytime with or without horses.

It's by donation and you can learn more and register to join us here:

Finding Your Faith With Horses Sundays from 2 pm to 4 pm, September 7, October 5, November 2 We're thrilled to announce our new group program "Finding Faith with Horses" starting this September. These sessions are designed to help you reconnect with your inner wisdom and spiritual path through gentl...

09/25/2025

What are you giving yourself to as we fall into the darker half of the year?

What practices are holding you through it all?

How are you engaging your creativity to bring conscious transformation into your moment to moment experience?

Who do you want and trust to hold you?

The trees and mushrooms know what’s up or more accurately what’s coming down and they are ready for it. How are you nourishing yourself to be prepared for what’s to come?

give yourself to your desire to be held
give yourself to your desire to be held
give yourself to your desire to be held
surrender and receive
ask for what you need
and that’s what you will be

a song given to me on the autumn equinox at Oden Island while resting on an elder cedar tree.

in gratitude & wonder

09/22/2025

Autumn Equinox blessings to all on this new moon and solar eclipse.

May we honor how we are woven with all of life on this day of balance and cultivate and balance that feels most generative to us in relationship with all of life.

May we be in gratitude for all that we have been given to nourish us and all that we have created with love for the Earth.

May we remember that we are connected and we can reach out to share and be in co-creation with others to mutually support each other through the light and dark times.

May we give back in reciprocity for all we have received and give what we don’t need generously.

May there be curiosity, gentleness and fierce love guiding our way into the darkness of the year.

Infinite gratitude as well for the powerful rhythms and spirit of Sisters of the Drum, Ben Cheney and everyone who came to share their hearts in co-creation on Saturday at the Embodied Equinox gathering. We are recreating village one loving step at a time for the well being of all beings.

blessed be.

🙏🏼🌚🌻🌀

09/18/2025

Interbeing & Creating Together . . . last days to sign up for the Embodied Equinox event on Saturday and Creating Through Change: the art & craft of creating sacred space starting next Wednesday - https://mailchi.mp/f2fdf601a7af/hillakehealingarts-marchnewsletter-14187729

09/13/2025

This will be a unique and enchanting opportunity to come together in community to honor the autumn equinox with rhythm and movement with several gifted Michigan artists and space holders.

Benjamin Cheney of will offer a somatic workshop after having spend a month in Spain deep in somatic practice and Sisters of the Drum (with , Jillian Votava, , and ) will guide us through an ecstatic dance ritual journey to welcome a new balance as we enter into the seasons of greater darkness.

There are overnight options at The Croft by donation too.

Learn more and please register through the link in my bio before September 20th to join us.

🙏🏼🍁🌀

09/10/2025

How are you crafting your life in relationship with others?

Do you long to feel more connected in relationship with yourself, others, and the environment?

Creating sacred space and ritual can help in my experience.

Ritual I’ve learned and am constantly learning is a craft that cultivates relationships, emerges out of relationships as well as the desire to tend to and deepen in these relationships with others. These others may be humans and they may and often are more than human, the animals, plants, ancestors, landscape and spirits that inform us and are around us. We are in a co-creation with these relationships and we can choose to be in conscious relationships with them

I’m learning from my spiritual mentor, Carolyn Griffeth of Earth Keepers Wisdom School, that ritual is born out of a need amidst an experience of change and is a technology to invite a specific change. In the words of Francis Weller: “Ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.”
There is a craft here that requires learning skills that have a specific purpose and my sense is that there is also an art to ritual. The art aspect is more about the flow of expression and emotion and experience that can emerge as a result of the techniques or craft that one has cultivated. The art then brings about an original and new outcome which is the fulfillment of the ritual.

From my perspective it’s like the craft of ritual is the earth element that is the structure and offers a grounding and resourcing container to hold the experience. The art of ritual is like the water, fire and air elements that allow for the flow of emotion (or energy in motion), presence, aliveness and co-creation that arises in ways that we have little control over yet can choose to welcome and respond to in different ways.

Francis Weller also says that “recovering this fundamental skill would help us better tend the needs of our soul and culture. It is a language we have forgotten, but one that we are designed to understand and speak. We need to recover our ritual literacy.”

If this exploration is inspiring to you and you’d like to practice the various arts and crafts that can support the creation of ritual and sacred space in your life, join me and others for a 6 week series in Creating Through Change: the art and craft of creating sacred space at the Crooked Tree Art Center on Wednesday evenings starting September 24th through October 29th. Registration closes September 18th.

Learn more here: https://crookedtree.org/class/ctac-petoskey/creating-through-change-art-crafting-sacred-space

09/04/2025

How were/are you able to show up for yourself today?

Do you long to express your creativity more consistently and fully?

Do you yearn to feel a greater sense of belonging and capacity to live from your soul?

Amidst a time that can feel so full of despair with the loss of life that we are present to through social media and news as well as the rise of authoritarianism that we are facing in our country and beyond, what are you choosing to see as abundance and is inspiring you to strive for personal and creative fulfillment? Just these questions can feel overwhelming at times.

While I am in my own person journey with this question I have been feeling more deeply aligned and creative over the last few years because of the commitment that I've made to creating sacred space for myself on a regular basis. There are many ways to create this space and each of us have different gifts and needs on our path.

That's why I'm offering this course through the Tree Art Center in Petoskey called Creating Through Change to practice the art of crafting sacred space.

We will explore different creative modalities to learn more about ourselves together. It's like being a kid again and not having to get it all right the first time. This time we can be intentional to make the space for our inner kids and see what they have to show us. You'll also learn about the elements of creating sacred space for yourself and others.

Come to have fun, to play and to be curious about what else is possible!

The journey starts Wednesday, September 24th and is through October 29th 6:30-8:30pm.

Learn more here

Explore of the art and craft of holding sacred space for yourself and others.

09/04/2025

Creating Sacred Space to Welcome Change . . . Embodied creative practice opportunities in community including Embodied Equinox on September 20th and Creating Through Change course starting September 24th. Learn more . . . - https://mailchi.mp/2c396c6c8ce1/hillakehealingarts-marchnewsletter-14187368

08/27/2025

“The only constant in life is change” - Heraclitus

Change is inevitable, the difference is made in how we respond to it and the choices that we make in how we relate to it.

We are all in a time of massive societal, collective, environmental and yes personal change. There’s no way to fully avoid it and yet our overculture so often says we can buy or consume our way through or around it. Some of us feel more impacted by these changes and yearn for other creative ways to relate to change.

I’m curious how you relate to change at this time?

What if you could create through it all and trust that in honoring your embodied experience, whatever it might be that you can open to what wants to be created through you?

What if loss and grief is an opening to creating what you truly long for and not just for yourself, for your relationship to all of life?

What if you could create the space to be in this exploration of what is possible for you and your relationship to life at this time of collective change?

If this intrigues you, and you live in the area, consider joining me at the Crooked Tree Art Center in Petoskey this fall for a 6 part course called Creating Through Change that is a part of the Art of Well Being exhibit and offerings this fall. We will be exploring the art and craft of creating sacred space for ourselves and others on Wednesday evenings September 25th - October 29th, 6:30-8:30pm.

Each week we will experience a different art form while relating to the natural elements that can support the movement of creativity and therefore healing that can lead to greater wellness for you and all beings. There is a balance in nature that can help us to remember who we are and what we need to be in the flow of change.

From altar creation and hand weaving to mindful movement, deep time art and resonant vocal expression, you’ll have the opportunity to connect with yourself, others and create without the pressure of making it “look good.” The focus is on what is emerging and showing itself through you and for you.

Learn more and register here: https://crookedtree.org/class/ctac-petoskey/creating-through-change-art-crafting-sacred-space

What else is possible if we can co-create through change?

🌀

08/26/2025

Join Carolyne Stolzenfels of WildFire Dreams and I in this new monthly offering during the fall to explore your relationship to your inner wisdom and faith through a connection to horses and their embodied gift to bring us fully present. This is a sacred gift at this time of so much disconnection to help us re-member our inner nature to feel more resourced and nourished amidst change.

We meet for the first time on Sunday, September 7th at 2-4pm at Schön Frieden Farm near Charlevoix. Learn more through the link below . . .

We're excited to announce our new program, "Finding Faith with Horses!" 🌟 Starting this September, join us for enlightening sessions aimed at connecting with your inner self through equine interactions. Don’t miss out on this unique experience! Details here: https://wix.to/3Bq53kN
https://wix.to/AmSSYxr

08/19/2025

Breathing with the Winds of Change . . . last chance to sign up for Earthing Our Birth Stories and new offerings: Embodied Equinox, a day of dance & rhythm with Sisters of the Drum & NoMi Ecstatic Dance as well as Creating Through Change, a 6 week course with the Crooked Tree Art Center - https://mailchi.mp/6af9f74d0ce3/hillakehealingarts-marchnewsletter-14186951