Vision Quest Apprentice Protector Training
11-23 May 2026 Warrumbugles, NSW
A 12Night,13Day Initiation into Awareness, Service & Sacred Protection
ARE YOU CALLED TO STAND AT THE THRESHOLD OF TRANSFORMATION?
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN APPRENTICE PROTECTOR
A Transforming Tribes Apprentice Protector is training to serve inside the Transforming Tribes Vision Quest Initiatory framework based on the Lipan Apache - Stalking Wolf lineage. Once successfully completed, you will be able to support our Vision Quest Rites of Passage Offerings in an apprentice capacity with integrity, humility, and deepened spiritual awareness.
To stand as a Transforming Tribes Apprentice Protector is to learn the foundational tools that, once mastered, along with the subsequent advanced protector skills training, will lead to you being able to:
- Support the holding of the ceremonial field with your whole being
- Guard the energetic perimeter of a Questor’s journey without ever shaping it
- Trust the Questor’s rite to meet their own path, timing, medicine, and unique relationship with Self, Spirit and country
- Remove your ego, interpretations, expectations, and personal meaning
- See without projecting, sense without assuming, witness without interfering
- Offer your service as devotion, not identity
This is the first initiation into the Protector Medicine Pathway within Transforming Tribes - a path of service, discipline, humility and deep spiritual maturity.
WHO THIS TRAINING IS FOR?
This path calls those who are:
- Deeply committed to consciousness, integrity and spiritual maturity
- Willing to meet their edges, fears and shadow with courage
- Ready to walk with humility and accountability
- Drawn to the invisible realms and the thresholds of human transformation
- Already walking a healing path and now feel called to serve
- Ready to expand beyond personal healing into sacred service
This program is NOT for:
- Those wanting authority or power
- Those seeking to lead their own Quest initiations
- Those unwilling to do the internal work required to hold others safely
Applicants must understand this is a training for guardians, apprentices, and protectors of the sacred.
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This Path is only available By Invitation ONLY. once we have successfully built out our Core Protector Team for Transforming Tribes, so There is a high likelihood it will not be offered Again for years to come again - if ever.
THE 13-DAY TRAINING: AN IMMERSIVE CEREMONIAL INITIATION
This training is both highly practical and profoundly metaphysical.
It teaches the foundational skills required to safely and effectively support the Anchor Facilitator in Vision Quest Initiations within Transforming Tribes.
It is NOT simply a course. It is an initiation.
APPRENTICE-LEVEL FOUNDATIONS
Before these advanced skills deepen in the Senior Protector pathway, Apprentices begin with grounded, accessible, foundational practices that prepare the body, mind, heart, spirit and energy field for the deeper work ahead.
You will learn and embody:
SPIRITUAL & ENERGETIC PROTECTION
- Learning to recognise shifts in your own energy first
- Basic grounding practices to stabilise your field
- Foundational personal shielding (simple, reliable, repeatable)
- Awareness of emotional and energetic projection
- Understanding what not to do when supporting Questors
Foundational Awareness Skills
- Building somatic sensitivity: noticing internal cues before external ones
- Developing atmospheric awareness (weather, land, group field)
- Learning how to stay personally regulated in chaotic Quester energy, deep stillness, prolonged silence and long durations of intense focus/service to another
- Observation without interpretation
- Learning to sit with discomfort (yours or another's) without needing to fix or resolve it
Foundational Ceremony & Space-Holding
- Understanding your role in ceremony as an Apprentice (why it is different)
- Basics of primitive and sacred fire-making, tending fire, preparing spaces and supporting the Master of Ceremony and Fire-Keeper
- Learning to follow energetic leadership rather than lead
- Building reverence, service, humility, and attunement to the ceremonial field
Foundational Physical & Logistical Skills
- Camp setup, food runs, fire tending, and land care
- Supporting structure and safety without assuming authority
- Learning the rhythms of Pre, During and Post Quest through lived experience and how to hold process these phases of the medicine
- Holding consistency, reliability, and presence over long durations
Foundational Service Orientation
- Moving from personal healing into service to the collective field
- Letting go of personal narratives and arising triggers during Quest service
- Learning how to support quietly, efficiently, and without drawing energy from Questors or the Anchor Facilitator
- Beginning to understand energetic hierarchy, cosmic law and the impact of your concentric rings of energy on that; and why it matters
PREREQUISITES FOR APPRENTICE PROTECTOR TRAINING:To apply for this 13-Day Initiation, you must have
Completed at least one Transforming Tribes Vision Quest
Demonstrated emotional maturity, self-regulation, and embodied integrity
A genuine calling to continue your own relationship with Vision Questing
Appropriate Gear for Camping in All Weather Conditions
A desire to collaborate in a team environment
A genuine calling to serve within the Transforming Tribes Team - not to lead your own quests
WHAT’S INCLUDED IN YOUR APPRENTICE PROTECTOR TRAINING?
This 3-month Container (including a12‑night/13-Day face-to-face immersion) is designed as a complete ceremonial container designed to deeply honour this threshold crossing.
Your training includes:
12 Nights / 13 Days Camping Accommodation
Secluded bushland on a privately held 2500‑acre property in Central NSW, surrounded by the Warrumbungles Mountain Range.
This is a deliberate wilderness immersion with basic facilities (hot bucket baths, drop toilet, camp kitchen) to deepen your connection with land and strengthen your Protector foundations.
Preparation For Your Initiation Experience
Online Preparation Component Involves:
1 x 1.5hr Apprentice Protector Group Preparation Video Call approx. 4 weeks prior to the face-to-face aspects of the program.
Participation as an observer on the 1 x 1.5hr Quester Preparation Video Call that will be conducted 3 weeks prior to the date the questers will be joining us our on the lands.
Face-toFace Preparation Component Involves:
Your First 2 Days and 2 Nights on the Land (11-13 May) and includes teachings, group processes, individual reflection time, ceremonial practice, and tribal council.
On the Job Training as your participate as an Apprentice-Protector-in-training for an ACTUAL in real-time Vision Quest (13-21 May)
During this component of the training you will:
Observe all the workshops and ceremonial components through the lens of an Apprentice Protector;
Assist the Anchor Facilitator in the smooth running of logistical, labour intensive and non-energetic/spiritual/ceremonial components of the quest;
Participate in Apprentice Protector Specific Training including individual and group processes for the Apprentice Protector cohort.
Safe & Supportive Counsel
Continuous support from Kat throughout the entire training.
Apprentice Protector Specific Sacred Opening, Initiatory, Despacho & Closing Ceremonies
Marking your entry into, process during and completion of this portal of initiation.
All Meals & Snacks Provided for the Duration of the Face-to-Face Component
Wholesome, organic, slow-cooked meals prepared with love by Kat ad (you) the Apprentice Protector Training team. Y'all know what you know about the food out there ;)
Integration Support for Your Initiation Experience
The Face-to-Face Integration Component Includes:
Once we all farewell the questers around 11am on Day 11 of your program, we debrief your first Apprentice-Protector-in-training Vision Quest Experience and dive deeper in further tools, awareness skills and integration processes specific to your training container. This aspect of the program rolls out over your last 2nights and 3 days (21-23 May) of the face-to-face component.
The Online Integration Component Includes:
Participation as an observer on the 2 x 1hr Quester Integration Video Calls that will be conducted over the initial 8 weeks period post Quest.
1 x 1.5hr Apprentice Protector Group Integration Video Call approx. 2 weeks post your face-to-face aspects of the program.
An opportunity to extend your mentorship post training to include a further 6months of both 1-1 and Group online support within the Apprentice Protector Container (see add-ons for more details).
Your Guide
Your Training will be held by Kat Sforcina. As you may well be aware, her experience includes:
- Initiated Vision Quest Guide
- Initiated Shaman in the Andean Inkan Q’ero lineage
- 7+ years in shadow work, ceremony, rites of passage, energy medicine, indigenous awareness and deep nature connection
- 28+ years in integrative health, conscious leadership development, team building, innovation and regenerative culture
- A lived initiatory path shaped through trauma, death, addiction, illness, awakening, and mastery - a medicine not learned through theory, but embodiment of ones own life lessons.
⭐ KAT HOLDS THE QUEST FIELD WITH UNMATCHED INTEGRITY, DEVOTION & FIERCE COMPASSION
Kat’s presence is the container.
Her lineage, lived experience, and depth of spiritual mastery anchor the entire field of the quest and this training - ensuring safety, clarity, and a level of energetic precision rarely found in modern rites-of-passage facilitation.
This is not leadership from concept. This is Eldership by design.
WHAT MAKES THIS Training DIFFERENT?
Unlike other Protector trainings, the Transforming Tribes path is:
✔️ Lineage-rooted yet modern-earth aligned
It is the ONLY Vision Quest Protector pathway globally that simultaneously draws from The Stalking Wolf (Lipan Apache) North American lineage, the Andean Q’ero shamanic energy medicine principles, the Yadjuri/Gamilaraay/Wayilwaan Dreamtime teachings and ceremonial practices, nature-based ceremonial frameworks, and your lived initiatory wisdom.
✔️ Focused on service within one unified container
This is NOT a brief overview-style training that leaves gaps for you to figure out how the heck to land after such an expansive experience on your own. It is deep, comprehensive work that will fully prepare you for what is required as an apprentice protector.
✔️ Trauma-informed, energetically attuned and grounded
Another global first - We honour the nervous system, shadow dynamics, and spiritual hygiene equally.
✔️ Deeply mythic, ceremonial and experiential
Not theoretical.
You will be profoundly changed inn the most beautiful ways by this training.
✔️ Held by a Guide who has walked through fire & returned with the medicine of transformation in her bones
Held by Kat, whose deep lived experience, lineage initiations, and embodied medicine shape the integrity of this work
HOW THIS TRAINING TRANSFORMS YOU
You develop a level of self-awareness most people never access.
This training does not only prepare people to support Vision Quests.
It rewires the energetic codes you live your life by.
You learn to read your own field, regulate your nervous system, sense subtle shifts in yourself and others, and stay grounded under pressure. This changes how you ‘adult’, parent, lead, love, communicate, and navigate conflict.
You learn to hold space without trying to fix, manage, or rescue.
Most people leak energy through over-helping or over-identifying. Apprentice training teaches you how to witness without collapsing, support without taking on, and be present without entanglement.
This is a life skill that transforms relationships, leadership, and emotional sovereignty - not to mention protects your peace and energy levels!
You stop taking things personally.
By learning how to remove projection, interpretation, and assumption when supporting Questors, you simultaneously learn how to stop doing this in your everyday life.
Drama dissolves. Clarity increases. Emotional resilience strengthens.
You develop an extraordinary capacity for discernment.
Energetic discernment becomes practical discernment:
who to trust, what opportunities to choose, how to read people and environments accurately, how to sense truth beneath words, how to call out your own blind spots and own them.
You learn how to stabilise yourself in intensity.
When you learn to hold yourself in an active Quest field, your nervous system, intuition, perception, and energy body recalibrate. Even if you decide after the training you don't want to pursue being a protector, this shift changes how you understand your purpose, your relationships, and your sacred role in the world.
People often report after this training:
-heightened intuition
-deeper clarity about their life path
-increased confidence and groundedness
-more honest relationships
-reduced reactivity
-greater ease accessing their spiritual gifts
-a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves
This is the real medicine.
Whether or not you ever stand as a Protector, this training evolves you.
It becomes a turning point.
A before-and-after moment in your life.
A quiet initiation that changes everything.
ALSO IMPORTANT TO KNOW:
Completion of the 13-Day Apprentice Training does not make someone a fully fledged Protector.
It opens the path.
To become a fully initiated Protector within Transforming Tribes, Apprentices must complete the following:
✔️ Complete at least 2 full Vision Quests Programs as a participant with Transforming Tribes
No time limits, can be done over any time period (months … even years). The one you completed to be eligible for this program also counts in this tally.
✔️ Apprentice at 4 Transforming Tribes Vision Quests
The Quest within this training counts as one of these.
The additional three incur no additional training fees.
Equally, you are not paid for your time to be in this support capacity as Apprentices continue to receive significant mentorship, skill refinement and guidance during these quests.
There is no timeframe for completing this aspect. Some will take years to complete their apprenticeship - so yes, it really is like any other apprenticeship out there. This is a life long path, so you go at your own pace :)
✔️ Complete the Advanced Awareness Protector Training
A 14-day advanced protector program that has you support the Anchor Facilitator in all aspects of the Vision Quest program including the energetic and spiritual aspects of the program.
We will coordinate this program to align with our graduate apprentices call to continue this journey.
Likely to be held Spring 2028 or sometime in 2029. Again, this program will be seldom run as it will be run only to serve the core protector team.
Then … Once you are initiated as a full protector you will be able to be paid as staff for any further Vision Quests you support on.
Next Steps
Enrol
Click on the Button below to complete the initial enrolment process.
Secure Your Place
Confirm your enrolment by paying your deposit and selecting the payment options and add-ons that best suit you.
Begin Your Preparation
8 weeks prior to the commencement of training you will receive a comprehensive information pack outlining what to bring, how to best navigate your preparation in mind, body and spirit and receive calendar invitations to all online video calls included in the program.
IF YOU FEEL THE CALL…
Listen closely.
something ancient Will stir deep within your bones and say “yes… this.”
IF that resonates, know this:
You don't need to know where the rest of the path will take you.
just that We will walk it together from here.
See you in the wild & sacred.
With love,
kat x