The Circle That Holds The Container
Gaian Rhythm is held by a small circle of people who have been walking this path together for years. We are not colleagues who show up for a weekend. We are family, forged through ceremony, seasons, and shared purpose. Our core team has held every retreat side by side, and that consistency is the foundation everything else rests on.
Each of us brings our own training. Shipibo lineage facilitation, trauma informed integration therapy, ceremonial music, engineering, hospitality. But the thing we trust most is our collective rhythm. We move like the cycles we honor, each retreat aligned with the turning of the wheel and the inner work that turning asks of you.
This is a living prayer, carried by people committed to the medicine, to each other, and to holding you with care from the moment you apply to long after you go home.
Our Core Team
Stormie
Founder & Medicine Carrier
Stormie's path with ayahuasca began in 2018, sitting regularly in ceremony and doing the kind of sustained personal work that doesn't resolve quickly. By 2021 she had begun helping out behind the scenes, and by 2022 that had grown into something much more total.
From 2022 forward, she built and ran Gaian Rhythm in full: designing the seasonal philosophy and retreat framework, structuring every schedule, screening every participant, writing every email, managing staff and supplies. In ceremony, she sat at the altar alongside the medicine carrier, sang in every circle, held the space energetically, smudged, and was the primary point of contact for any participant needing support during a difficult experience. If the medicine carrier stepped out, she was in charge. She knew every person in that container and was responsible for reading the room.
In 2024, she began more formal dieta work in Peru to deepen her relationship with the medicine and to train as a backup if the situation ever called for it. Later that year, unexpected circumstances placed her in the serving role earlier than she had planned. Rather than cancel on a community that had already committed and paid, she stepped forward.
Her formal training has been with Don Enrique Lopez, a Shipibo curandero who comes from a multi-generational line of healers and has been working with the medicine for over 30 years. She has completed multiple month-long dietas under his guidance and continues to return for deeper work. Don Enrique knows she serves medicine and has been supportive of her continued path. Her entire team has committed to completing a dieta together in 2026.
She does not describe herself as a “Curandera.” That title belongs to a lineage and a lifetime of work she respects too much to claim prematurely. What she will say is that her relationship with this medicine spans eight years, that she has sat in hundreds of ceremonies, that she continues to return to the jungle to deepen her practice, and that she holds what she does with the seriousness it deserves.
Stormie also brings a foundation in esoteric studies, astrology, and the Wheel of the Year that shapes how Gaian Rhythm relates to ceremony as part of a living seasonal rhythm rather than an isolated event. That framework is her own, and it runs through everything the organization does.
Nathan
Nathan is probably the first person you will talk to. He handles our email, our texts, and our phone calls, which means he is the one answering your questions in the weeks before a retreat, sorting out your travel, and telling you the truth when you ask whether you are ready. If you have been in touch with Gaian Rhythm, you have been in touch with Nathan.
At retreat he works at Stormie's side. When she is at the altar and cannot step away, he carries the rest of the container. He also stays our resident MacGyver. A Marine Corps veteran with a master's degree in engineering from Purdue, he troubleshoots the tech, repairs what breaks, drives what needs driving, and steps into the kitchen when the kitchen needs hands. Guests tend to notice him most when something almost went wrong and then quietly did not.
In ceremony he plays live music and anchors the circle with a steady, grounded presence.
Nathan travels to Peru twice a year to diet with Don Enrique Lopez and has completed multiple dietas, including the 2026 master plant dieta the whole core team sat together. He is also Stormie's partner, and the two of them live and travel full time between retreats.
Retreat Operations & Communications
Kate
Kate is a seasoned integration practitioner with a deep background in trauma-informed care, somatic practices, and spiritual healing. She weaves together training in Internal Family Systems (IFS-I) parts work, somatic processing, and plant medicine integration to offer grounded, heart-centered support for those navigating the transformative realms of ayahuasca and spiritual experiences.
With years of experience in confidential client care within the mental wellness field, Kate brings grounded and intuitive insight to her work. Her approach is rooted in compassion, curiosity, and a deep respect for the inner healer within each person. She holds space for the full spectrum of what arises in integration — from shadow material and re-patterning to mystical breakthroughs and ancestral remembrance.
Drawing on her studies in plant medicine traditions, depth work, and earth-based spirituality, Kate bridges indigenous and Western frameworks to guide clients into embodied, soulful integration. Whether supporting first-time seekers or long-time journeyers, she helps people reconnect to their inner wisdom, repair their nervous systems, and anchor spiritual insight into meaningful, sustainable life changes.
Kate completed the 2026 master plant dieta in Peru with the core team.
Ayahuasca Integration Practitioner | IFS-I Trained | Somatic Processing
Musician, Retreat Chef & Ceremonial SupportDale
Dale came to medicine work through rhythm. He is a lifelong professional musician with decades of performance, recording, and soundcraft behind him, and in ceremony his guitar carries the icaros and the songs that hold the room through the long middle of the night. His playing is the thread between the seen and the unseen, and guests remember it.
Out of ceremony, he feeds you. Dale runs the kitchen with real hospitality, cooking clean, grounding meals that support the body through a week of hard work. Whether by fire or fretboard, his offering is central to the rhythm we keep.
Dale completed the 2026 master plant dieta in Peru with the core team.
Why We Diet
Dieta is the traditional way Shipibo healers are formed, and it is the training our facilitation actually rests on. It is not a retreat. There is no group, no comfort, and no schedule to hide inside. You live in isolation, you eat food with no salt, no sugar, and no flavor, and you take the plant you have been given for as long as the curandero says. What comes up is yours to sit with alone. It is slow, uncomfortable, and completely unglamorous, and there is no version of it you finish.
Stormie has been dieting with Don Enrique Lopez since 2024 and continues to return. Nathan travels to Peru twice a year to do the same. This is ongoing work, not a credential any of us collected once.
In July 2026, all four of us went together. Sitting the same dieta, in the same place, with the same maestro, changed how we hold ceremony as a circle. When you sit with us, you are held by people who each have their own relationship with these plants, forged in the tradition this work comes from rather than studied from outside it.
Stormie documented the trip for the Stormie Atlantis channel. This is the honest version, mosquitoes and all.
Beyond our core circle, every retreat is supported by facilitators who return season after season. They hold the container alongside us: setting up ceremony, tending fire, keeping the atmosphere steady, and meeting the practical and physical needs that arise from arrival to departure.
Their consistency is part of why the space feels the way it does. Each brings their own gifts and their own sense of service to the circle.
Retreat & Ceremony Team
Teddy
Noel
Daniel
Heather
Volunteers
Some of the people holding your retreat are not on staff. They are past participants who came back.
Our volunteers help with setup and teardown, kitchen support, grounds and fire, and the hundred small tasks that make a retreat feel effortless from the inside. Most of them sat in this circle first as guests. Coming back to serve is its own form of integration, and it is one of the ways this community stays a community rather than a customer list.
Volunteers work closely with our team, receive orientation before the retreat begins, and are held to the same agreements around confidentiality and care as everyone else in the container.
