This retreat is not a counseling or psycho-therapeutic facilitation. Rather it is a personal, transformational journey into conscious living through gently, tenderly and wisely learning to hold both the beauty and sorrows of your personal life.
Our personal losses and collective pain for the ailing world, leave all of us touched by grief. Death of loved ones, divorce, job loss, environmental degradation, financial strains, home insecurity, dashed dreams.
While the big and little losses are complex and seemingly infinite, modernity has left us with fewer tools for healthy equilibrium. The lineage of rites and practices for tending life’s challenging passages have been lost or weakened. Our pain-avoiding and death-denying culture has left us unskilled in the practices of holding contradictions – grief and praise, beauty and sorrow, despair and hope.
Our ancestors understood that grief needs to be companioned. We need an active, honest, conscious relationship to its presence in our lives. We deserve a village of others coming together in a circle to listen, to be listened to, and to share in the presence of each other.
These aspects are at the heart of this offering.
In our time together, we will explore our dreams, hopes and fears around our grief, sorrows and disappointments. We will experience one-on-one engagement, group practices and ritual – including a Grief Ceremony. We will hold sacred ground for all to feel safe, heard and held through practices that cultivate compassion, deep listening, openness, forgiveness and love. Through this,, we will have the opportunity to transform our relationship to the many “small” deaths in our daily lives and the big losses of those we love.
This intimate gathering will be a deeply nourishing, enlivening and transformative experience. You will leave feeling renewed by your sense of a balanced relationship within the cycle of life and death. You will discover grief – and death – as the generous teacher it can be.
This exploration is facilitated by Woody Winfree and Lynn Principe, both certified and practiced in the arts of ceremony, holding space, initiating engagement and evolving human consciousness.
Woody and Lynn are both certified End-of-Life Doulas, Conscious Dying Educators and Lifecycle Celebrants®. They were also faculty colleagues at the Conscious Dying Institute, a premiere doula and coach training organization distinguished by principles of personal transformation and holding grief and death as sacred rites of the human experience.
For more information and to sign up, contact Woody Winfree at woodywinfree@gmail.com or Lynn Principe lynngoldenlife@gmail.com
For venue information email: 400centerstreet@gmail.com