Emotional Intelligence Retreats
By Jon Terrell, M.A.

Are you looking to improve your emotional intelligence (EQ)? Our emotional intelligence retreats help people who get caught up in fixed and uncomfortable emotional states, and want to improve themselves.

Do you get stuck emotionally? Do you get caught up in grief, anger, anxiety, or other feelings? Do you sometimes find yourselves depressed and unmotivated? If you say "yes" to any of these questions, read on as you may find our retreats extremely valuable.

EQ And Suppressed Feelings
We all know about IQ, which is a measure of our mental intelligence. But only recently have we given attention to our emotional intelligence, our EQ. In school we learn information skills, but who is there to teach us how to navigate in the world of feelings?

We need both mental and emotional skills to be effective in the world. All too often intelligent people find themselves in pain because of their emotional difficulties.

We turn to divorce, alcohol and other drugs, projection and denial to try to get by. But what we really need is to grow up emotionally so that we can function as a fully loving and fully present human being.

Why We Get Stuck & Why We Need To Improve Our EQ

Many of us come from families where emotions were denied or criticized.

Growing up, were you allowed to be angry? Sad? Express fear?

Or did these feelings go underground because they weren’t acceptable.

Sometimes one feeling dominates in a family, and others are suppressed. It could be that your father or mother dominated through anger, or through fear. Or someone in the family was overwhelmed by grief or depressed and everyone else compensated.

This childhood learning can lead us as adults to react to other people's feelings, being angry or afraid of them, and sad about that. We can end up suppressing our feelings to meet the needs of others, because that's what we learned to do.

And when our feelings are buried, our life force is buried. With that burial we can’t develop our emotional intelligence, so our emotions remain underdeveloped and primitive.

When we see the wonderful, joyous life energy of a baby, it invokes a  smile and joy within us. But then when we look at the same person at 25 or 30,  we may wonder what happened to all that life, all that curiosity and excitement. What happened was that the child lost themselves, suppressed their life force in order to survive in the world.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We can reclaim our lives and our life force! That's exactly what people do at our emotional healing retreats.

• People experiencing depression come to our retreats to help them come alive again. Go here for more on depression.
  
• Angry people come to work it through so they don't have to keep being angry. They finally transform their anger.
  
• People caught in life-long sadness attend to find their joy again.
• Those who are stuck in grief due to loss of a loved one move to the next step in their process, so they can live again.
  
• Folks living with anxiety and fears come to our emotional healing retreats to release those feelings out of their nerves so they can live more freely and safely in the world.

The Power of Projection
Very often our power is projected out at others. They become more powerful and we become weaker. When we deny a feeling in ourselves, it tends to find its way back to us, through other people. This idea is sometimes expressed as our Shadow.

The way I see it, our feelings want to come back to us to evolve, to grow. So if we have suppressed our anger, we tend to attract angry people in our lives. (And in our dreams!) And we become victims of that anger until we learn to own our own anger. This doesn't mean we have to express anger at others but it does mean that when someone violates our boundaries, is rude or hostile to us that we can respond appropriately.

At our emotional intelligence retreats folks who have been victims all their lives learn how to reclaim their power which was projected out. As they do this they feel bigger, more grounded and more alive and joyful.

This is also true of other feelings. For more on this theme, go to Understanding "Dark" Emotions.

Emotions Evolve
When we feel safe, we can express ourselves. Our body wants to work through what we have suppressed inside of it. We naturally want to release our fears, our sadness, our anger.

At our emotional healing retreats, we help you do just that. We help create a safe, supportive environment so that people can more easily bring up into awareness what has been buried and work it through.

Amazingly, it doesn’t need to take years, or months or weeks. When we set the right stage, our bodies are ready to release the feelings. People are surprised about how much change can occur over such a short time.

What We Offer
Our emotional intelligence retreats. are offered about 6 times a year. They focus on helping you work through stuck or buried feelings so you can come more fully alive again.

The Grief, Loss and Other Difficult Emotions Retreat is a Thursday-Sunday event for small groups up to 12 participants. These are offered mainly in western Massachusetts at Star Dance Ranch. Once a year they are offered in Florida.

For more information go to Grief Retreat.

If you would like to learn more about our emotional intelligence retreats, or ask me a question, please use the form below. I would be happy to talk with you, so if you would like to speak directly to with me let me know some good times to reach you.

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