What to expect
These intensive, small-group events are designed to provide a safe, compassionate environment for healing grief and other trapped emotions. Each phase of the workshop helps participants connect with their own personal resources for healing and insight.
Group support accelerates each person's healing process. The power of intentional loving creates a substantial, safe container for people to do their personal healing work.
Our Grief and Loss Retreat can provide valuable additional support to those in grief counseling, recovery programs, and those seeking emotional resilience. Our retreats are not for those who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, but rather for mentally healthy individuals who are stuck in their lives due to a painful loss or a series of losses or trapped in another emotion, such as anxiety or anger.
grief-retreat-process-schema
The First Phase - Coming Together
The group comes together early Thursday evening. (The extended retreat starts on Wednesday, early evening.) The first phase of the retreat is about settling in, into one's body, and into a loving community. To work through grief and loss and other painful feelings, we need to feel safe, supported, and open.
All the activities of this phase are designed to facilitate this safety and support. We breathe together, eat together, move together, and talk with each other.
People often comment, surprised, about how quickly they come to feel connected to the other group members.
We have begun. In the First Phase, we begin to experience the transformational power of a loving community. This is vital for the next part of the workshop.
The Second Phase - Depth Work
The second phase offers a powerful opportunity to move through stuck feelings — something nearly impossible to do alone.
Many of us find ourselves caught in prolonged grief, anger, fear, or guilt, unable to move forward. In this phase, you’ll be gently guided — with expert facilitation and compassionate group support — into the wisdom within your body.
It’s within the body that the “old story” still lives, and where our deepest healing begins.
Grief rarely travels alone. Beneath it often lie other emotions that thinking alone can’t resolve. Suppressing or avoiding them only keeps us stuck — but together, in a safe, loving community, we can move through them.
With group support, the process becomes faster, gentler, and profoundly transformative. Participants often say the weekend feels longer than it is — because of the depth we reach together.
This work goes beyond thought and logic. Our minds can’t think our way out of grief — but our hearts and bodies know how to release it.
You may not fully understand the process until you experience it. The mind may resist; the heart already knows it’s needed.
As participants surrender to the process, something extraordinary happens: a return to the present moment, to connection, and to life itself.
From the ashes of the past, a new aliveness begins to rise. 🌿
Third Phase - Integration and the Return Journey
The alchemy of the second part can lead to a place of deep peace and healing.
Lead becomes gold. Our dark, stuck feelings come bearing gifts, treasures waiting to be discovered.
And in this discovery is a celebration!
To complete this journey of grief recovery, we have to integrate this experience back into one's life.
We touch into Big Energy/Big Medicine during the retreat, and we need to descend back to make the transition homeward gently.
We do simple grounding activities. One of them is to spend some time "cleaning the Temple that has served us." We push a broom, vacuum, or take another action to bring us back into the physical world.
We journal to ground our experience into practical actions that we can take during the week after the retreat.
Through group and individual exercises, we learn to step down the energy back into our bodies. We fully engage our brains to plan our next steps.