Teacher Training · 7-Month Certification · 2026 Cohort
Get certified in the seven-step Morning Altars modality, a nature, creativity, and ritual practice you can bring into your sessions, groups, and community. For therapists, coaches, death doulas, and the helpers who hold everyone else.
Seven months · Begins Oct 4, 2026 · Limited to 100 practitioners · Scholarships & payment plans available
"Day Schildkret, founder of the Morning Altars movement has created a beautiful commentary on nature and ritual."
If you're the one who holds everyone else
You spend your weeks holding other people's grief, trauma, and big transitions. And when it's your turn, the room is usually empty. Who holds you?
Talk, screens, and four walls only reach so far. You sense your clients need something embodied but you don't have the modality.
You've done meaningful work for years, often with no peer you can really go deep with. You're ready for people who get it.
You already know nature, creativity, and ritual are medicine. You've just never had a structure for bringing them into your work, or the space to receive them yourself.
The practice at the center of it all
Most people who find this work say the same thing: "I've been doing this my whole life. I just never knew it had a name." If that's you, welcome home.
Nothing is bought and nothing is drawn. You arrange what's already on the ground: leaves, petals, stones, bark. There's nothing to get wrong.
You build it, behold it, and let it return to the earth. There's no finished, no perfect, nothing to keep. For anyone holding grief or change, the altar is a practice of letting go.
Ceremony and reverence without dogma or belief requirements. It meets people of every faith and none, which is why it travels into hospices, prisons, classrooms, and grief circles alike.
What it gives back to you
What happens when you let your body touch nature's body, on purpose, every month.
The antidote to fear. A reliable way to meet uncertainty with your hands instead of your worry.
Slowing down, unplugging, and remembering you're part of a planet that is alive and on your side.
Seven months alongside other nature-loving healers who get it, and a lifetime in the circle after.
The modality you'll be certified to teach
Each step is a teachable, repeatable doorway you can open for a grief group, a 1:1 client, a classroom, a memory-care room, or yourself on a hard morning.
Childlike exploration, attentiveness, and awe. The doorway back into presence.
Wonder & uncertaintyTracking stories outdoors
Belonging, slowing down, and the sensory work of truly meeting where you are.
Meeting the placeSpiraling to the center
Opening creative channels and working with art as healing, with no artistic background required.
Playing with possibilitiesCreate a rippling altar
Reciprocity, gratitude, and the practice of offering, turning a private act into ritual.
What is fierce trust?Create a broken-whole altar
Impermanence, grief, and rest, the hardest and most needed medicine for the people you serve.
Impermanence as a guestCreate a changing altarTwo further steps, facilitation and the four directions of holding space, complete the seven-step modality and prepare you to lead it for others.
Graduates bring Morning Altars to the people they already serve, and those they've always wanted to reach.
Morning Altars come in all shapes and sizes. Here are just a few created by practitioners like you, using whatever was right outside their door.
What the seven months include
One Sunday a month, fully online and hands-on. You'll be outside, building altars, not watching slides.
Creative blocks, facilitation, holding groups, impermanence. Plus business, pricing, and self-worth for your own offering.
Small groups with certified mentors to review material, practice facilitation, and be witnessed.
Alumni return as guides for new cohorts, so you're held by people who've walked the path before you.
A members-only forum, every session recorded, plus a growing library of resources and collaboration space.
Design a personalized offering for your specific clients or community, and craft the vision you'll take into the world.
Graduate certified to bring this seven-step nature, creativity, and ritual practice into your sessions, groups, workshops, and community, as a distinct offering that's unmistakably yours, with lifetime membership in the practitioner community.
You won't do this alone
650+ practitioners. 15+ countries. One circle.
The part graduates name most often isn't the certification. It's finally finding their people. If you've spent years being the "too woo" one, the only nature-and-ritual person in your field, or the practitioner with no one to share the work with, this is where that ends.
Your cohort becomes a lifelong circle, and membership in the wider community is yours for good.
Your teacher
Morning Altars began in grief: his father's death, a breakup, his mother's dementia. Sitting under a tree one morning, Day began gathering leaves, petals, and bark into a single symmetrical pattern. After months of pain that nothing had touched, something shifted.
Since then he has created over 1,000 nature altars and brought the practice to the people who need it most: families who buried children, wildfire-devastated towns, veterans with PTSD, prison and recovery programs, dementia patients, and 9/11 survivors. People don't just take this training. They come to study with Day. Now he trains the helpers and healers who carry the work forward.
The reach of past cohorts, across the communities they serve.
From the practitioners who've gone through it
"This changed everything: my direction, my comfort with my creativity, and it gave me a platform to take this out into the world."
"A gentle yet powerful transformative experience of reawakening my inner artist."
"This training changed me and my approach to healing myself and serving others in so many good ways."
The shape of the year
How you join
Connection is at the heart of this community, so the way in is a conversation, not a checkout button. We want to hear your story, learn who you serve, and share more about the work, so that everyone who says yes truly belongs here.
Answer a few questions about you and the people you hold. It takes a few minutes and places you with no obligation.
You'll have a real conversation with someone on our team. We'll feel out the fit together, and you can ask us anything, including tuition and scholarships.
If it's a yes on both sides, you choose your tuition path and join the upcoming cohort. That's the whole door.
Yes, and so can the people you serve. Morning Altars uses what nature already makes: leaves, petals, stones, bark. There's nothing to draw, paint, or "be good at." The creativity is in arranging and noticing, which is exactly why it reaches clients who would never call themselves creative.
This is the most common worry we hear, and naming it is part of the work. What trips people up usually isn't the schedule. It's the fear of doing it wrong: the perfectionism, the comparison, the quiet voice that says "I could never make what Day makes." So we build the training around the opposite of that. There's no right altar and no finished one. Everything here is process, not product. You'll be held in small mentored groups the whole way, and you can move at the pace your life allows. If the fear of being in over your head is showing up, that's often a sign this is exactly the edge worth meeting, gently.
Most people arrive in the middle of something: a loss, a transition, a season of depletion. That's rarely a reason to wait. For many it's exactly why the training becomes part of their own healing, not one more thing on the pile. If this work found you now, that's worth listening to.
You don't need to be a certain kind of healer or "far enough along." If you already hold others, formally or informally, you have what this is built on. The application is a conversation, not a test, and it's there to make sure the fit is right for you.
You graduate certified to bring the seven-step Morning Altars modality into your own sessions, groups, workshops, and community offerings, as a distinct service that's yours. Your final project is designing exactly that offering for the people you serve.
The live sessions are on Zoom, but the practice itself happens outside, with your own hands, in your own place. Graduates consistently describe the daylongs as feeling like sacred, in-person space, and the format means a global circle of peers you'd never otherwise meet.
No. Morning Altars is sacred but not religious. Ceremony and reverence without dogma or belief requirements. Many participants have left organized religion but still long for ritual and the sacred, and this fills that gap. It meets the people you serve across every faith and none.
Every session is recorded and lives in the private library, so you can catch up if life intervenes. The monthly practice groups and forum keep you connected to your cohort between daylongs.
Apply for the 2026 cohort. It takes a few minutes, there's no obligation, and it's the first step toward a practice that changes your work and refills you.
Apply for the 2026 Cohort →Begins Oct 4, 2026 · Limited to 100 practitioners · Scholarships & payment plans available