Saturday & Sunday, Febuary 14-15, 2026 | 10:00 am - 5:00 pm

CREATE YOUR INTENTION ALTAR

An Art, Writing, IFS, & Meditation Workshop to Acknowledge 
Your Intentions & Honor What You Love

Valentine’s Day Weekend 2026 at Stardust Ranch, Sonoma, California
Limited to 20 participants. In Person. Please Register by February 7th 2026!

“An intention is not a demand placed on the nervous system. It is an invitation offered to it.” -Lissa Rankin

A Heartful, Playful Invitation

This Valentine’s Day weekend, twenty beautiful souls are invited to gather in person with Lissa Rankin at the luminous Stardust Ranch in Sonoma, California for a deeply nourishing altar‑building experience. This is not about décor. This is about devotion.

Together, we will slow down, listen inward, and create physical altars that honor your New Year’s intentions and your sacred relationships—with yourself, with those you love, with the land, and with who you are becoming.

An altar is a place where intention becomes visible, where longing is given form, where healing can happen, where the invisible is invited into relationship. If you are craving ritual, beauty, meaning, and embodied intention—this weekend is for you.

“Intentions shape what we can see and what we cannot see.” - David Whyte

What Might Your Altar Honor?

Your altar will be uniquely yours. It might honor:
  • A creative project you are midwifing into being;
  • The land you live on—and a wish to deepen your relationship with it
  • Your marriage, or your longing to attract an aligned partner;
  • ​A tender, hurt part of you that longs for healing
  • ​A reactive or compulsive “firefighter” part you wish to lovingly contain (ice cream, alcohol, overworking, creative sabotage)
  • A vision you want to manifest and co‑create;
  • A loved one who has passed;
  • ​An issue you are ready to rage through and release; 
  • A social injustice you feel called to help make right;
  • ​A wish too vulnerable to speak aloud, but ready to emerge through symbol and art;
  • ​A place to connect with your feelings, with nature, with healing
All parts are welcome. Nothing needs fixing. Everyone and every part belongs.

“Ritual does not eliminate pain. It makes pain communal and therefore more bearable.” -Francis Weller

What We’ll Do Together

1. Clarify What You Are Honoring

We’ll begin with gentle IFS‑informed meditations and parts check‑ins to help you listen inward. Instead of forcing clarity, we’ll allow it to emerge.

You’ll be guided to sense:
  • Which intention has the most aliveness;
  • Which part of you most wants to be honored;
  • What is asking for devotion right now.
No pressure, no performance, no spiritual bypassing, no magical thinking. Just curiosity, compassion, and intention setting.
2.  Learn the Sacred Practice of Altar‑Making

Altars are found across cultures and healing traditions around the world. Drawing from ten years of research for Sacred Medicine, Lissa will share altar and offering practices she studied with:
  • Healers in Bali;
  • Shamans in Peru;
  • Qigong masters from China;
  • ​Hawaiian Kahunas
  • ​Faith healers and energy healers
  • ​Trauma‑informed and somatic therapists
These practices will be shared with cultural appreciation, attribution, and respect—not appropriation.

You’ll learn how altars function as:
  • Anchors for intention;
  • Containers for grief, rage, devotion, and prayer;
  • Living relationships with nature and the holy, not just static objects.
3.   Paint & Design Your Honoring Altar

You’ll be provided with all materials needed to create a base altar, which we’ll paint and decorate together with imagery, symbols, gemstones, glitter, found objects, botanicals, or whatever you prefer.

As inspiring music fills the soulful space of Stardust Ranch, you’ll be guided—step by step—into intuitive creation. No artistic talent is required. You cannot do this wrong.

This workshop has been offered before, and every participant—especially those who claimed they were “not artistic”—left with an altar they loved, felt deeply moved by, and were able to find a home for in a sacred space in their home.
4.   Intuitively Choose, Connect With & Place Your Sacred Objects

You’ll be provided with all materials needed to create a base altar, which we’ll paint and decorate together with imagery, symbols, gemstones, glitter, found objects, botanicals, or whatever you prefer.

As inspiring music fills the soulful space of Stardust Ranch, you’ll be guided—step by step—into intuitive creation. No artistic talent is required. You cannot do this wrong.

This workshop has been offered before, and every participant—especially those who claimed they were “not artistic”—left with an altar they loved, felt deeply moved by, and were able to find a home for in a sacred space in their home.
5.   Altar Object Swap

You’ve been to clothing swaps. Why not swap sacred objects you’re now complete with? Got extra crystals, statues, incense, candles, or holy water from your favorite sacred spring, beach, or river? Bring objects from home that you’re ready to give away and take objects from others. If you have nothing to contribute, bring a pinecone, a bouquet of flowers, or a stone, shell or branch of leaves you bring from the land you’re coming from.
6.   Be Moved By The Music

We’ll be moving as we paint and create, inspired by the music, listening to the music, connecting with each other via the music. We’ll be singing when we feel like we want to, dancing when we feel the impulse, and consecrating our altars ritually.
7.   Engage In Spiritual Practices Through Your Altar

We’ll teach you simple trauma healing and spiritual practices that you can add to your daily or weekly practice, if that’s your jam. And if it’s not, no pressure! You’ll learn how your altar can support your healing practices without spiritual bypassing, by keeping the baby of spirituality and throwing out any bathwater that doesn’t serve you.

“Ours is not the task of fixing the world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” -Clarissa Pinkola Estés

WHY VALENTINES DAY WEEKEND?

  • Loving the parts of yourself that rarely receive devotion;
  • Honoring relationships, including romantic ones but also including other sacred love relationships, like those with chosen family, friends, and kids;
  • Practicing reverence for what truly matters to you.
  • Loving the land you live on- and becoming intimate with it;
  • Putting your attention and intention on something you can be reminded of every time you see your altar;
  • ​Making your altar a Valentine- to yourself, your parts, your home, your land, or someone you want to honor with your altar.
Consider this a reclamation of love as sacred attention.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -James Baldwin

WHO THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR

This experience is for you if:
  • You crave embodied ritual but are allergic to ungrounded woo, spiritual bypassing, or spirituality that denies social justice, trauma healing, or intimate relationships (with ourselves and others);
  • You are drawn to IFS, meditation, soulful creative practice, music, and movement practice;
  • You want to mark a threshold moment in your life;
  • ​You long to slow down, listen deeply, and bond to others in Sonoma County;
  • ​You want to create something meaningful you can bring home.
You do not need:
  • Artistic experience;
  • ​Prior IFS knowledge;
  • ​To have everything figured out;
  • ​To bully your parts into manifesting your will
  • ​To suppress your creative expression because you think you’re not good enough
You only need a willingness to show up with curiosity, honesty, a desire for connection 
with yourself and others, and an open heart.

Event Details

Dr. Lissa Rankin

  • A vegetarian lunch prepared by Lissa’s chef parts is included. Overnight stays are not included, but we will provide a list of local accommodations if you are coming from afar;
  • ​Location: Stardust Ranch, Sonoma, California, 75 Fremont Dr, Sonoma, CA 95476;
  • ​Materials: All altar‑painting and decorating materials provided (altar objects sold separately or brought from home);
  • ​What to Bring: Sacred objects from home, objects from nature, flowers, candles, any objects you wish to donate to the altar swap, comfortable clothing, an open heart;
  • Capacity: Limited to 20 participants.

Why We Need A Sanctuary For The Broken Heart

The tragedy of relational trauma presents itself as a fragmenting of the wholeness of the soul. It unravels us more deeply than mere betrayal and cuts into us as a primal wound, one that leaves us feeling far less than the wholeness that is our natural state, our birthright. To dare to move beyond this kind of wound, to reach out to the wounded child in ourselves and to stretch a hand towards a trusted other, to say to the heartbroken inner child, “Come, sit, stay for a while, let us rest here together,” to trust enough to heal the broken heart and start to live,requires profound courage and knee-trembling risk.
The absence of trustworthy companionship, the feeling that one is existentially alone, the chronic unmet longing to be seen, heard, understood, validated, and most of all, loved and accepted for all of who we are, lies at the healing heart of all trauma. To offer up even a moment of unconditional positive regard to the inner child inside, to see and mirror back our hurt parts in their beautiful wholeness, to hold our own vulnerability safe, to remind ourselves that they are not and never have been broken, to show our respect for our own autonomy by allowing ourselves to have our sovereignty not only respected, but appreciated, to withhold judgment and offer up admiration for the ways we have managed to survive in a world that has not always been kind, to dare to love instead of transact, this is brave stuff. To refuse to sell ourselves out to someone else’s oh-so-conditional agenda while making it clear what’s okay and not okay in the field between two individuals, to learn also to do this for ourselves- this lies at the core of all healing.
But we cannot heal in isolation. Trauma that happens in relationship must be healed in relationship. The primary attachment relationship starts within our own hearts, where we celebrate a long-overdue reunion between the soul that cannot be broken and the broken-hearted little child who didn’t get loved enough. When those two reunite, when the bereft little child sees that we are here to rescue them, to hold the hurt inner child with the tenderest care, to be the parent to that little one who can finally redo what went wrong and make things right, harmony can be restored in the sanctuary of our own hearts. 
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography
Then we have to risk trusting other trustworthy beings. To become a place of refuge for ourselves, to make ourselves vulnerable to another fellow journeyer, to allow ourselves to receive solace inside our own hearts and then to risk reaching out, to seek that same solace in the arms of another, to build a container of trust and safety, to allow all that enters that field to become available for transformation without requiring it to be so, to dare to open our hearts without collapsing our right to have wants, needs, fears, and boundaries that keep us separate but still in the field of love, this is the promise of healthy, bilateral relationships that help you live a life your body will love, one that opens the door to the intimacy we all crave without erecting walls or engaging in “power over” or “power under” dynamics that foreclose intimacy.
It is the paucity of intimacy, the starvation of real, nourishing connection, that makes trauma survivors so lonely. In the absence of the intimacy we crave, we settle for transacting, and sometimes we get the raw end of the transactional deal, if we’re the giving tree, doing most of the giving. Because transactional relationships will never fill the void we yearn to fill with real love and intimacy, this way of selling ourselves out makes us even more lonely.
We wall up to protect our broken hearts, but then we’re encouraged to open up, to be vulnerable, to spill our guts and bare our souls, to divulge our secrets, to unguard our hearts. Yet not all who wish us to be open wish us well, and without good boundaries all around, openness can be masochistic. We may splay ourselves open, but at what cost?
We wall up to protect our broken hearts, but then we’re encouraged to open up, to be vulnerable, to spill our guts and bare our souls, to divulge our secrets, to unguard our hearts. Yet not all who wish us to be open wish us well, and without good boundaries all around, openness can be masochistic. We may splay ourselves open, but at what cost?
Souls are more robust than hearts. They can’t be broken and are never damaged. But Stanford chaplain and physician Bruce Feldstein, MD warns that the soul can become sore when we experience too much heartbreak, especially spiritual heartbreak. This “soul soreness” needs the kind of medicine no drug can provide. Only safe, intimate relationships- with ourselves and our inner children, with other safe enough people, with nature and the Earth, and with whatever we might call “God"- can nurture and heal the broken heart at the core of soul soreness.
“The soul can become sore when we experience too much heartbreak, especially spiritual heartbreak. This “soul soreness” needs the kind of medicine no drug can provide. Only safe, intimate relationships- with ourselves and our inner children, with other safe enough people, and with whatever we might call “God"- can nurture and heal the broken heart at the core of soul soreness.” -Lissa Rankin, MD

“Crawl inside this body, find me where I am 
most ruined - love me there.” - Rune Lazuli

 We Will Guide You Through

  • A series of experiential exercises to help tend to the state of your heart and optimize it for daring to risk love again;
  • Rituals to guide you into a portal of realistic possibility, in case you have hopeless parts that have simply given up daring to hope;
  • Psycho-education about the predictable patterns we can learn to avoid by spotting them early;
  • How to spot the green flags of healthy relationships, so you can avoid investing too much time in ones that are full of early red flags;
  • The basics of the IFS model, so you can learn how to foster the heart-opening, gobsmackingly effective Self-to-wounded child reunion- as an ongoing practice you take home with you;
  • IFS guided meditations to help you find the sanctuary within your own heart- one you can return to whenever you need refuge;
  • ​Embodied writing practices to move the broken-hearted energy through your body, into your hand, and onto the written page, which will be the repository for your pain and also an alchemical transformation of heartbreak into beauty;
  • ​Dancing to shake it all out and get your groove on!
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography

WHAT'S INCLUDED

  • All basic altar-building materials (a base altar structure, paints, decorative craft supplies, flowers, objects from nature);
  • Two nourishing, on-site vegetarian lunches prepared by Lissa Rankin, shared in community, so the day can unfold without interruption;
  • ​Lissa’s famous raw vegan Valentine’s chocolate (plus the secret recipe if you must go home and make more!);
  • ​Exclusive use of Stardust Ranch, formerly known as “The Musea Center for Intentional Creativity,” a purpose-built space devoted to art, ritual, grounded spirituality, and meaning-making
  • A carefully held creative and ceremonial container guided by Lissa Rankin;
  • ​Ceremonial red or rose wine intentionally handmade by Jonathan McCloud of Musette Winery with the grapes grown on Stardust Ranch or strawberry champagne balsamic vinegar mocktail made from the strawberries from Lissa’s Sonoma garden;
  • IFS facilitation for the parts that set intentions, the parts that might sabotage intentions, and the tender, vulnerable parts they protect;
  • ​An intimate small-group experience (limited to 20 participants) to preserve intimacy, safety, and depth.
This pricing reflects a commitment to access without dilution—an offering that is intentionally resourced, lovingly facilitated, and not rushed or scaled beyond what care allows. Rather than asking participants to assemble materials, manage logistics, or fragment their attention, this workshop is designed so you can step out of daily life and into devotion, creativity, and presence for the day. Space is limited to honor the integrity of the container. Because space is intentionally limited, early registration is encouraged. 

If you feel a quiet yes in your body—or even a trembling maybe—trust that. This is an invitation to honor what you love and intend to create in 2026 and beyond.
Preparing The Heart With Internal Family Systems
10:45 am - 12:00 pm PT
Prepare for a dive into the sanctuary of your own heart, using a gentle version of the Internal Family Systems model. We will help you touch lightly into the pain at the root of the child who did not get their needs adequately met. With our wise, loving Self preparing the sanctuary for reunion, we can connect with and welcome the broken-hearted child that might cause us to choose relationships in adulthood that retrigger the wounds of the broken-hearted child. We will take that pain and get it out of our bodies and onto the written page, where it can be alchemized into beauty, healing, and medicinal art. Offering medicine to the wounded parts through the unconditional love of our own Self energy can be a balm for parts that may feel sad, lonely, rejected, and hopeless. The best antidote we have lives right inside. To prepare the heart to love someone else again, we have to start with loving even the most unlovable parts inside. IFS makes it easy to do this, and when we invest the energy in doing so, we prepare ourselves to be easier to love, warmer, less needy because we’re meeting some of our own needs inside, more available to both give and receive, and more attractive to those in our outer world.

Preparing To Better Protect The Strong But Fragile Heart
Lunch Break
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT
We’ll review some psycho-education about how to protect the fragility of the heart, so you don’t wind up letting old childhood traumas cause you to be reckless with your tender heart. We’ll review some of the basics of understanding narcissism and codependence from a trauma-informed, IFS lens, including what causes those painful dynamics, how to relate differently, and how to heal from past relationships that might have fallen into the narcissism/ codependence pairing. We’ll help you explore why you might have a backwards compass, one that thrusts you towards danger and pushes away safe people, setting you up to be retraumatized again and again. And we’ll help you get in touch with an inner guide, a healthy protector inside who’s got your back, so you can feel more confident preparing to love more openly, knowing you have wise protection anchored in, preparing to keep any vulnerable inner children safer, so you don’t splay those most vulnerable parts open for people who have not earned the right to that openness.
Doing The “YOU-Turn”
9:00 am - 10:30 am PT
We’ll introduce you to the “YOU-Turn”- a practice of unconditional love, nurturing, and support for the broken-hearted child who didn’t get loved enough- or got approval as a poor substitute for love. If you’ve been conflict avoidant, passive aggressive, or “spiritually bypassing” in your relationships, rather than holding others (or yourself) accountable and navigating real repair, the YOU-Turn is the antidote. We’ll help you navigate a healthy repair process with your own hurt parts first- since you can’t repair with others if you can’t bond and reunite your hurt parts with the unconditional love of Self energy. Then we’ll review what healthy repair requires, to help prepare you to face the inevitable imperfections of yourself and other people you choose to love. The YOU-Turn will help rebuild trust between the broken-hearted child and the mature, adult caregiver your wise Self can be now, which also helps you figure out who you can trust on the outside- with more clarity, less naivete, and greater discernment. We’ll also review some basics of healthy boundaries, so you can advocate for your parts to get core needs met in present time. We’ll use some creative practices to anchor in this act of radical self-nurturing and trust-building with the child inside who can be liberated from the burdens of the past to unleash magical child energy that can be used for healing.

Softening The Edges Of The Heart
10:45 am - 12:00 pm PT
When we’ve been hurt, we can understandably get prickly, closed-off, cynical, hopeless, or all of the above, and this can push people away before they even get to know us. We can also get desperate, clingy, frightened, and needy- and this can scare people off before they get a chance to bond. When we begin to tend to the sensitivities, needs, longings, and desires of our own hearts, we can soften these edges and make the heart more ripe for connection. We’ll share some neuroscience about why we harden up, and we’ll engage in some experiential exercises intended to help us soften our hearts- together, in community.
Lunch Break
Preparing Possibilities For Loving More Openly
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT
We’ll close out the workshop by visioning what you yearn for- allowing ourselves to be with the vulnerability of longing, desire, hopes, and dreams. We’ll engage in some juicy “as if” imagining- and explore what comes up when we dare to let ourselves feel into what we truly want- and maybe what we haven’t really had. If we can’t dream it, it’s hard to actualize what we truly want! We’ll use Intentional Creativity, music, writing, movement, and sharing to create the field of possibility, of hope, of realistic optimism, of visioning. But we’ll also focus on some practical tools that can help you do more than just vision, putting into practice trauma-informed ways of relating, including realistic expectations of yourself and others- that have the chance to protect your beautiful heart more as you prepare to love again.

TESTIMONIALS

Lissa, I really value your work. I've attended several of your workshops and appreciate your honesty and openness about who you are, as well as the insight you offer to relationships and and health. Adding your IFS perspective is also valuable to me as a IFS therapist.

I have loved this. I will go in quiet and stillness. Love to you all! Collaboration has indeed been lovely. My system is so glad to have been here and thankful to both the facilitators and all my fellow students for your leadership, vulnerability and sharing.

Lissa, IMHO, you are one of the clearest voices in our world who truly understands and therefore is able to clearly and directly articulate what trauma is. Your ability to describe its origins, how it presents and impacts people and therefore, societies, and how we can bring awareness and healing to.

You are masterfully subverting the dominant paradigm and I am confident you will succeed in overthrowing it!  
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography

“The unruined heart is something that we all carry. You can feel like you’re completely wrecked… But there are essential things—the soul and the heart—that cannot be harmed or killed or ruined.” 
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Bonuses

Relationships as the Guru
Audio Recording
When You're Single and Wish You Weren't with Katherine Woodward Thomas
Audio Recording
When Others Don't Want You to Wake Up with Joan Borysenko
Audio Recording
Spiritual Bypassing & Transformation Through Intimacy with Robert Masters
Audio Recording
Expectation Hangovers-in Relationships with Christine Hassler
Audio Recording
Sacred Sexuality 
with Rachel Carlton Abrams
Audio Recording
When Death Doesnt Part You 
with Kristine Carlson
Audio Recording
Spiritual Surrender & Conscious Break Ups with Tosha
Audio Recording
The Soul's Prison or an Alchemical Crucible with Anne Davin
Audio Recording

CREATE YOUR INTENTION ALTAR

An Art, Writing, IFS, & Meditation Workshop to Acknowledge Your Intentions & Honor What You Love

$499.00
Saturday & Sunday, Febuary 14-15, 2026 | 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
PLEASE REGISTER NO LATER THAN FEBRUARY 7TH.
This is a full-day, immersive altar-building experience designed to be spacious, nourishing, and beautifully resourced.

*Accommodation and transportation to and from the venue is not included. The cost of the workshop is non-refundable. Please review our refund policy before purchasing.

Dr. Lissa Rankin
Lissa Rankin, MD, is a mind-body medicine physician and author of 7 books, who researches radical remission, trauma-informed medicine, and spiritual healing. She teaches memoir writing for therapeutic purposes, in addition to being an educator of Internal Family Systems (IFS). Lissa is currently co-writing her eighth book, YOU-Turn, with her partner Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv about the link between narcissistic abuse and medical illness, focusing on how healthy boundaries and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy can help reverse diseases related to nervous system dysregulation caused by relational trauma. 
© 2026 Lissa Rankin INC ·  All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

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