A Guide About Our Grief Retreats
Jon Terrell, M.A.
Are you looking for more information about our grief retreats? Are you seeking a unique, powerful, life-changing retreat? Are you looking for a place to do deep healing work? Do you want to return home refreshed, renewed, and motivated? You're in the right place.
Our main retreat offering focuses on deep emotional healing, whether from a major loss or multiple losses. Sometimes we feel stuck in life because we've lived through so much pain and tried to move beyond it, but can't.
We offer Grief and Loss and Other Difficult Emotions Retreats about five times each year in Massachusetts and once or twice a year in Florida. These usually run from Thursday afternoon to Sunday. We're also building a network of retreat leaders around the country, in New York State, Colorado, California, Georgia, Washington State, and other locations coming soon.
In the summer, we offer a longer, five-day version of this retreat: Breaking Free To Emotional Wellness.
Both retreats have a lot in common. They:
- Focus on deep emotional healing and transformation
- Have highly skilled leadership
- Are intensive personal growth events
- Focus less on intellectual understanding and more on transformation
- Give each participant time to work one-on-one with the leader
- Rest on the core principle of intentional loving: every person is worthy of love and respect
Why Our Retreats Work
People often contact me because they are stuck. They're stuck in grief, unhappiness, depression, anger, or other feelings. They need emotional healing.
Most people who attend one of our retreats experience a huge release of that stuckness, along with a sense of relief and freedom. It's a life-changing event.
We try to make it easier to come by keeping the cost affordable, offering weekend dates, and offering different formats. And yet many people who learn about the retreats don't attend. Some get help elsewhere. But many remain stuck.
So I want to explain, as clearly as I can, why the retreats work, in the hope that more people will come and find relief. Here are two reasons.
1. The Power of a Loving Community
Love is the most potent force in the Universe. Love heals. It holds us close to each other.
Love dissolves stuck feelings, whether they are fear, grief, anger, hurt, or pain. I've seen love's healing power at work with hundreds of retreat participants.
Grief is the feeling we have when we lose someone or something we love. It expresses that love, and it's how our body and mind respond to the loss. But when we get lost in grief, and its natural process gets blocked, we may need a loving community to help us find our way back to love.
Our culture doesn't support working through big emotions. It supports suppression and denial. We're told to "put on a happy face," to "keep a stiff upper lip," and countless other ways to hold our feelings in.
And most of what people tell us when we're suffering isn't helpful: "Don't cry." "Get on with your life." Our inner radar picks up on this, and the message gets muddied.
We've been taught to sidestep, avoid, or suppress grief, anger, and fear. Even when love is offered, we can talk ourselves out of receiving it, especially from a family member or friend. The love may feel tainted by our history together. We tell ourselves, "They're just saying that." And sometimes they are saying it to make themselves feel better.
The retreats are designed to help us work through stuck feelings with the power of a loving community. You're among people you don't know, so it's much harder to deny that the love is real. We take the time to build safety and support, so that we can finally open to the healing power of love.
We learn and practice the Skills of Loving. This love is clean, untainted by the past. It is direct, and it is big.
2. The Power of Now
At the retreat, each participant has time to do their own work, surrounded by the loving community. The group holds you in its embrace. It becomes a larger Self, a sacred, supportive container for you to do what you came to do.
Your time comes. It's time to receive, not to care for others. It's time to attend to what rises from the past into the present moment, hear it fully, and work it through.
You go deep into your body and discover the tight places that have been calling to you. You feel held in the group's embrace, supported by love and by loved ones beyond time and space.
You do your work.
You bring light to what you've held in the shadows, and love transforms, heals, and awakens.
You are present to yourself and to others. You're ready to re-enter the world, to see and be seen, and to do what needs to be done, with love and gratitude.
About Our Grief Retreats:
Are They For You?
These retreats are for people stuck in pain who want to move forward in life.
Many who attend have had a recent deep loss or a series of losses, or are anticipating a loss, such as the death of a family member or the end of a relationship.
Others come because they feel stuck. They may not be happy with themselves or where they are in life. Often they sense that how they feel goes back to childhood or adolescence.
Some come because they don't know what to do next. At the retreat, they're looking for a new vision for their lives.
The retreats are limited to 7–12 participants.
For dates, prices, and details of what happens at the retreat, see our Grief and Loss Retreat page.
To learn more about my work with specific emotions, check the site map for pages on grief, anger, fear, and other feelings.
These retreats are for those stuck in pain who want to move on in life.
Many who attend have experienced a recent deep loss, a series of losses, or are anticipating a loss, such as the death of a family member or the end of a relationship.
Others attend because they find themselves stuck. They may not be happy with themselves or where they find themselves in life. Often, they feel their condition relates to their childhood or adolescent experiences.
People also attend because they don't know what to do next. At the retreat, they are seeking a new vision for their lives.
These retreats are limited to 8-11 participants.
For more information about our grief retreats and our current retreat schedule, go to our calendar of events here.
If you would like to learn more about my work with specific emotions, check out the site map to find pages on working with grief, anger, fear, and other feelings.
To read what past participants have to say, visit our testimonial page.
Go to Breaking Free To Emotional Wellness Retreat
Legal Documents for those who want to attend our retreats: Go Here
Recent Articles
-
Florida Grief And Loss Retreat
Oct 21, 26 03:22 PM
The Florida Grief and Loss retreat is for those dealing with painful emotions or feel stuck in their lives -
Healing Divorce Grief - A Retreat Participant's Experience
Oct 21, 26 02:16 PM
Working through divorce grief. An interview by Jon Terrell with Ann, who attended a Grief and Loss Retreat and worked through her grief. -
Emotional Intelligence Retreats
Oct 16, 26 11:54 AM
Our emotional intelligence retreats focus on helping people who are stuck emotionally, or are caught up in and overwhelmed by grief, anger, anxiety or fear.
What Past Participants Say
"I'm still keeping everything I absorbed over the weekend right with me. I'm still crying, but the tears feel different, like they're supposed to be there, and I'm no longer concerned about depression. Metaphorically, I had not chosen life. I was alive but not living, not on the inside. With this jolt of awareness and sharing, I know I can come back. I certainly don't have it figured out yet, but I'm feeling less lost.
What I experienced while there, I would never have expected or imagined. I took a piece of everyone out of that room, which I think is important to my own healing.
You did a great job, Jon. I watched as you directed and then helped us all figure out the bottom line. I have gone over and over in my mind my guilt for not having the words I needed when my husband faced the end of his life. It doesn't matter that we shared loving words every day... it was that day that mattered. I can't do it over, but exposing that sorrow in front of witnesses somehow lifted some weight."
— Cindy Gilstrap, Burlington, VT
"Thank you so much for the retreat. I feel amazing: strong, grounded, happy, and confident."
— Kaia, Hadley, MA
To read what many more past participants have to say, visit our testimonials page.