Sacred Playground Presents
The Immersive Retreat Experience
Five days of radical self-reflection, plant medicine wisdom, and the kind of honest inner work that doesn't perform healing — it becomes it. This is not a beginner's retreat. This is for people who are ready to stop knowing and start living differently.
Explore the ExperienceWhat This Is
Most healing spaces ask you to learn. This one asks you to live differently — starting now, in the room, with real people doing the same work.
The Authentic AF Retreat combines the full four-week Authentic AF curriculum, deep plant medicine education, and the Sacred Playground retreat container into a single five-day immersive experience.
You leave with more than insight. You leave with a shifted relationship to yourself — and a 30-day integration structure to hold it.
The complete four-week framework — self-awareness, accountability, patterns, integrity, and authentic living — compressed into four focused days of real work.
Barbara's herbalism and shamanic plant knowledge woven throughout — as nervous system support, emotional tools, and daily self-care practices you can actually use at home.
The lived experience of doing this work in community. With Barbara present. In real time. Where your patterns show up — and you learn to work with them instead of around them.
This Retreat Is For You If
I've done years of therapy, workshops, and courses. I understand myself — but I keep repeating the same patterns anyway.
I know what I should do. I know what I need to change. Something keeps stopping me from actually doing it.
I'm tired of performing healing for other people. I want to actually heal — honestly, privately, without the show.
I'm ready to stop asking life to change while I stay the same. I want to look at my own contribution to my patterns.
The Experience
Each day carries one theme from the Authentic AF curriculum — deepened by group work, guided reflection, and plant medicine wisdom woven throughout.
Plants that support presence and nervous system settling as you begin the work
Plants historically used to support grief, emotional release, and clearing old stored tension in the body
Plants that support the body's capacity for clear communication and trusting your own perception
Plants that support sustainable energy, daily nervous system care, and staying rooted through challenge
After You Leave
Full lifetime access to the online course — now experienced as post-retreat integration, not introduction. The daily teachings reinforce what you began in person.
You leave with the knowledge to build a real daily plant medicine practice — not a collection of supplements, but a living relationship with the plants that support your specific work.
Barbara's four core teachings from the retreat, recorded and available to revisit when the work gets hard — which it will, and that's exactly the point.
Your Guide
Master Herbalist · Shamanic Medicine Practitioner
Educator · Retired Air Force Veteran
Barbara James-Payne has spent more than a decade at the intersection of herbalism, plant medicine, nervous system awareness, ancestral wisdom, and the honest work of self-examination.
Her teaching style is direct, grounded, and deeply committed to truth over performance. She is not interested in helping you feel better temporarily. She is interested in helping you change.
Her work bridges the practical and the spiritual without dressing either up in aesthetics that don't belong to them. The plants are real. The work is real. The change is real.
As a retired Air Force veteran, she understands discipline and commitment. As a Master Herbalist and Shamanic practitioner, she understands the body, the plants, and the deeper currents that move through both. As an educator, she knows how to hold a space where real learning — the uncomfortable, necessary kind — can actually happen.
Your Investment
This is one experience. Not a course plus a retreat. Everything is included, integrated, and designed to work together.