People search for emotional healing when they are experiencing grief from a major loss or other difficult emotions like anger. For over twenty five years we have lead retreats that help people heal deep emotional pain keeping them stuck.
Sometimes a tragedy occurs...we lose someone we love. Othertimes its a slow process of getting stuck and caught up in destructive emotions. We can feel cut off from love, from our sources of aliveness and healing.
Life happens:
The day we realize that we’ve lost our way is the start of a new journey towards wholeness, healing, and love.
The journey is not about following another person's path but discovering your own.
The key is emotional healing.
Within each of us are the keys to healing, awakening, and finding our way home.
This site is about finding those keys.
Our intensive Grief, Loss, and Difficult Emotions Retreat is our gateway program for emotional healing.
Healing occurs when we fully experience our feelings. It is blocked when we suppress uncomfortable feelings.
We experience grief when a tragedy or series of events/losses occur and we end up trapped in the past.
Most of us don't know how to move through difficult feelings. We get stuck. We try to suppress or step over or just avoid our uncomfortable feelings.
We try to rise above them through meditation or prayer or affirmations and other techniques. These can be valuable tools for us, but when we use them to avoid our feelings they can just postpone the emotional healing work we need to do.
We can try to suppress feelings through alcohol and other drugs, or through other addictive behaviors.
We may try to medicate ourselves out of pain. And sometimes medication can be very helpful if it helps us also move through the feelings we haven't faced.
We try other methods....move somewhere else to avoid the pain, change our relationships, dropping out, etc.
We may be overwhelmed by uncomfortable or scary emotions. Many of us have learned from an early age to avoid and push away our feelings.
We suppress our grief, anger, and fears. Our brains can feel threatened by these powerful, uncomfortable feelings. So we push them out of aware. This can lead to being stuck in the past, worried about the future, or trapped in our heads.
We lose contact with our bodies and the present moment.
Sometimes, uncomfortable feelings come screaming up as anger. And, we can hurt others with our anger. Then, we can end up feeling guilt and shame.
At other times, we feel stuck and powerless.
When we suppress uncomfortable feelings we also suppress our light, our joy, our life force for good.
People come to our retreats for relief of emotional pain, and to feel fully alive again. As feelings are worked through, in a warm, caring environment, we come alive again, reclaiming our love, our joy, our light.
Some people come to our retreats because they feel depressed. When we have stuffed our feelings, especially grief, for a long time, we can end up depressed.
While clinical depression may be helped with medication, we may find that we feel tired and depressed because we are carrying inside us heavy uncomfortable feelings that weigh us down. As we work through those feelings we can reclaim our life, and our life force. We can return to wellness and joy again.
We can have a complete understanding of our situation but still be stuck because people are stuck not at the thought level but in their feelings.
That is where the work needs to happen!
And that is what makes our retreats unique.
You can talk about emotions all day and still not change them. To transform feelings, we need to experience them thoroughly to allow them to evolve. That means moving from mental activity, your thoughts, ideas, and concepts, to experience your feelings.
At our retreats, we help you do this. We create a safe environment where all feelings are honored. Where it is okay, and even encouraged, to express emotions that have been suppressed and avoided.
All of you is welcome.
And we have the tools to help participants work feelings through to the other side.
The other side of:
People sometimes attend because they are trapped in one emotion to the exclusion of others. They may be sad all the time, or angry, or anxious. At our emotional wellness retreats, they learn to be whole again and experience the full spectrum of life.
Within these uncomfortable feelings are our joy, passion, aliveness, and excitement, waiting for us to reclaim them.
Feelings, especially the challenging ones we tend to avoid, are our greatest teachers and healers. They hold treasures waiting to be discovered and embodied.
We offer two emotional healing retreats:
Grief, Loss, And Other Difficult Emotions Retreats are small group events (maximum of 12 participants) from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon, for people seeking relief from emotional pain. These retreats take place in western Massachusetts, at Star Dance Ranch. Once a year, we offer this retreat in Florida, and every few years, we lead one in California.
Breaking Free To Emotional Wellness is an extended version of our Grief and Difficult Emotions Retreat and is one day longer than the other retreats, which allows for a more relaxed pace and some additional processes. We offer this retreat each summer.
Healing is best done in groups, where the power of love is unmistakable and pervasive.
What can take years in a private psychotherapeutic setting can often be worked through in the course of a retreat or two that focuses on feeling and transforming emotions rather than talking about them.
When shared with others, the pain of our wounding brings both relief and a recognition that we are not alone.
Participants reclaim lost power and awareness as they transform the emotional energy locked in old feelings. They experience a new sense of emotional and physical wellness, feeling whole, loving, and joyful.
If you would like to find out more about our work with grief and other difficult emotions go here to our main retreat page. You can also ask me a question or set up a call with me by filling out the following form. I will get right back to you.
Best wishes,
Jon Terrell, M.A.
May 15, 25 12:37 PM
May 07, 25 04:49 PM
Apr 21, 25 06:14 PM