What I Found at a Natural High Healing Festival: Holotropic Breathwork, Dark Feminine, and the Body's Forgotten Knowledge
The opening ceremony happened in a beautiful tent. Barefoot. Hundreds of people I had mostly never met. Someone started singing. Then someone else. Then the whole crowd was singing, and I was singing too, and something in me that had been braced for a long time started to release.
That is where the weekend began.
I spent four days at Natural High Healing Festival in July 2026. I had been curious about this kind of space for a while, and I did not know quite what to expect. What I found reached into parts of me that coaching training, reading, and years of self-reflection had not touched in the same way. I want to write about it honestly because it changed how I understand what I do and what it means to return to yourself.
What Is Natural High Healing Festival?
Natural High Healing Festival is a Finnish multi-day outdoor event that brings together teachers and practitioners of healing arts: somatic practices, yoga, shamanism, breathwork, voice work, sound healing, meditation, tantra, and ceremony. It is not a music festival in the conventional sense. It is closer to an intensive retreat compressed into four days, with workshops running from morning until late into the night.
The atmosphere was unlike anything I had encountered in wellness spaces before. Completely free, completely accepting. People dancing with their eyes closed. Crying in the grass. Holding each other without knowing each other's names. No performance required of anyone.
What Is Holotropic Breathwork, and What Happened When I Tried It?
Holotropic breathwork is a therapeutic practice developed by Czech-American psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof in the 1970s. It uses accelerated breathing, evocative music, and focused bodywork to access non-ordinary states of consciousness. The name comes from the Greek: holos (whole) and trepein (moving toward). Literally: moving toward wholeness.
Unlike meditation, which tends toward stillness, holotropic breathwork is active. The breath drives the process. Participants breathe faster and more deeply than normal for an extended period, often two to three hours, while lying down with eyes covered. Music shifts through phases: building, intense, softer, integrative. The result, for many people, is a significant shift in ordinary consciousness without the use of any substance.
I had read about it. Reading about it does not prepare you.
For the first fifteen minutes of the session, nothing seemed to happen. Then something shifted. My body took over in a way I had not experienced before. Sensations moved through my chest, my throat, my hands. At some point I was making sounds I had not consciously decided to make. At some point I had stopped thinking entirely.
When it was over, I lay on the mat for a long time. The world looked slightly different. Not dramatically, not mystically. Just more present. As though a layer had been removed between me and the actual moment I was in.
Holotropic breathwork requires proper training to facilitate safely. The Grof Foundation and certified practitioners across Europe offer multi-year training programs for those who want to work with others using this method. What I took from it was personal: a direct, physical experience of how much the body carries and how little of it surfaces in ordinary awareness.
Shamanic Ceremony and Connection to the Earth
Across the weekend, I also participated in shamanic ceremonies. Shamanism is a category of spiritual practice found across many cultures, centered on the understanding that the world is alive, that all things carry spirit, and that a skilled practitioner can move between ordinary and non-ordinary reality to facilitate healing or guidance.
Finnish shamanism has its own deep roots. The tietäjä tradition, the drum, the relationship between people and the forest, the land, and the waterways belong here. Sitting in a tipi, I felt that specificity. There was something different about connecting to the earth through practice that knows this particular land, these particular trees, this particular light.
What I connected to in those ceremonies — what some call Pachamama, Gaia, or simply the living earth — stopped feeling abstract. The land as a being rather than a backdrop. The forest as something that knows you are there.
This is not mysticism for its own sake. It is a practice of attention. Of remembering that you are part of something much larger and much older than your own thoughts about yourself.
What Is the Dark Feminine, and Why Does It Matter?
This is the part that has stayed with me most, and the part I find hardest to write about cleanly.
The dark feminine refers to the aspects of feminine energy that most cultures have systematically suppressed: power, wildness, anger, sexuality, the refusal to comply, the shadow self. It is not negative. It is feared. And the fear of it has caused enormous damage, both to women individually and to broader culture.
In Jewish mythology, Lilith was Adam's first wife. She refused to be subordinate and was expelled from the Garden. She became one of the central dark feminine archetypes: the woman whose power is considered dangerous, who will not be contained. In Finnish mythology, Louhi is a parallel figure. The formidable mistress of the north, feared and impossible to control.
These figures are parts of women projected onto an enemy.
At the festival, in a ceremony specifically about reclaiming the dark feminine, I found something I had not fully known I was missing. A kind of aliveness that does not wait for permission. A fierceness that is not performance. I cannot claim to have integrated it in four days. But I know where it is now, and that is different from before.
What This Changes About Coming Back to Yourself
For the women I work with, this is not theoretical.
The pull toward a life that looks right on the outside while something inside has gone quiet. The difficulty trusting their own knowing. The exhaustion of managing an outer picture that does not match the inner one. Underneath these things is often a dark feminine that has been suppressed for a very long time. Not something wrong. Something waiting.
Coming back to yourself includes coming back to all of yourself.
The Return Arc — the framework I use in my coaching — describes four stages of the inner journey: awareness, emotions, self-trust, and intuition. What I experienced at the festival showed me that this arc is not only cognitive. It is also somatic. Seasonal. Ceremonial. The body holds the arc in ways the mind cannot always access.
My coaching is not breathwork facilitation or shamanic ceremony. Those are distinct practices that require specific training and lineage, and I am at the beginning of that relationship, not the end. But what I experienced expands my understanding of what returning to yourself can look like, and it is present now in how I work, what I invite, and what I trust.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is holotropic breathwork?
Holotropic breathwork is a therapeutic practice developed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof in the 1970s. It uses sustained, accelerated breathing, evocative music, and bodywork to reach non-ordinary states of consciousness, allowing psychological and somatic material to surface without the use of substances. Sessions typically last two to three hours and are led by trained facilitators. The practice is used for trauma processing, psychological integration, and expanded self-awareness.
What is the dark feminine?
The dark feminine refers to aspects of feminine energy that most cultures suppress: power, wildness, anger, sexuality, the refusal to comply, the shadow. It is not negative, though it is often treated as dangerous. Reclaiming the dark feminine is part of whole-self integration. It does not reject the nurturing or gentle aspects of femininity — it insists that those aspects are not the whole picture.
What is shamanism?
Shamanism is a category of spiritual and healing practice found across many indigenous cultures, based on the understanding that the world is alive with spirit. A shaman is a practitioner who works between ordinary and non-ordinary reality to facilitate healing, guidance, or ceremony. Finnish shamanism has its own distinct tradition rooted in the tietäjä practice and a deep relationship between people and the natural world.
What is a healing festival?
A healing festival is an event that gathers teachers and practitioners across healing modalities, typically including somatic practices, breathwork, sound healing, voice work, shamanism, and ceremony. Unlike retreats or conferences, healing festivals tend to be outdoor, multi-day events with an experimental, community-oriented atmosphere, where participants attend multiple sessions over several days.
How does earth-based spirituality connect to coaching?
Earth-based spirituality and holistic coaching share an underlying understanding: a person is not only a mind to be optimized. Both take seriously the intelligence of the body, the natural world, and the cycles and thresholds of the year as sources of guidance and regulation. Coaching that incorporates seasonal awareness draws on the wisdom of the living world as a mirror for inner process.
What is Natural High Healing Festival?
Natural High Healing Festival is a Finnish outdoor, multi-day festival that brings together practitioners of healing arts, including breathwork, shamanism, sound healing, voice work, and ceremony. It is held in the summer and is known for its open, community-oriented atmosphere, where participants are invited to experience multiple healing modalities over several days.
A Note on Where This Sits
I am a holistic coach, not a breathwork facilitator or a shaman. This article is about what I experienced as a participant, not a practitioner.
If any of this is calling to you — the breathwork, the ceremony, the dark feminine, or simply the pull toward something you cannot quite name yet — I think that pull is worth listening to. That is what this work has always been about.
If you are curious about coaching or about what it looks like to come back to yourself in a way that includes the whole of you, you are welcome to book a free conversation below.
Jenna Lamberg is an LCAF-certified holistic coach based in Espoo, Finland. She works with women in transitions online worldwide and in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, in Finnish and English.
Last updated: July 2026
