Retreats To Up Your Emotional Intelligence
By Jon Terrell, M.A.

Do You Want To Rapidly Improve Your EQ?

Emotional intelligence is the wisdom of feelings.

Emotional Intelligence — EQ for short — is the ability to manage our emotions in a healthy, productive way. Popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman, it focuses on the role feelings play in our lives. The higher our EQ, the better we can handle our feelings and the more fully and joyfully we can live. We offer Emotional Intelligence Retreats to rapidly improve your ability to manage your emotions.

In school, we learned information skills, but who helped us navigate the world of feelings? Many of us didn't get enough education in this area growing up, and we end up repeating old, uncomfortable patterns: suppressing our feelings, or expressing them in ways that hurt ourselves and others.

I believe developing your EQ is the most important life skill you can learn. Feelings are what make life worth living. With higher emotional intelligence, you feel more alive, more loving, more creative, and more fulfilled. Instead of being ruled by your moods or caught up in intense reactions to what people say or do that affects you, you stay in charge of your life.

What Higher EQ Feels Like: Our Emotional Intelligence Retreats

This doesn't mean shutting down or shrinking your feelings. Just the opposite: you learn to embrace uncomfortable feelings, receive their gifts, and lift them up. You can feel your feelings fully without drowning in them.

• Anger: Instead of getting enraged and saying or doing things you later regret, you can say “No” clearly and cleanly to protect yourself and stand up for yourself.
• Fear: Instead of freezing or running, or being afraid to speak up or make a decision, you can express your truth with excitement and enthusiasm.
• Grief: Instead of being overwhelmed by grief or always feeling sad, you grieve well and develop a loving, joyful heart.

Our Emotional Intelligence Retreats

Our unique retreats help you grow your emotional intelligence.

These intensive 3–4-day retreats are ideal for people who feel emotionally blocked, have difficulty with feelings, or get caught up in grief, anger, anxiety, or other difficult emotions.

At the retreats, you learn life-changing Skills of Loving to increase your capacity for intimate, caring relationships. You'll get help with your own uncomfortable feelings, even if you've buried them so deep you're hardly in touch with them. You'll also learn to respond more skillfully to others' feelings.

Denied, Suppressed Feelings

As a child, were you told messages like:

• Boys don't cry
• It's not ladylike to express anger
• Children should be seen and not heard
• I'll give you something to cry about
• There's nothing to be scared of

Growing up with messages like these, we learn to suppress and deny our feelings in order to be accepted and loved. So we swallow them, and they hide below our ordinary awareness, in our bodies.

Sometimes they are hidden so well that we lose touch with our feelings entirely, and we believe we don't have any anger or fear or grief.

I see many clients who have numbed themselves by suppressing their feelings. They can end up depressed and drained of energy. Very often, their bodies become rigidly armored, with tight muscles, digestive troubles, and aches and pains.

As these same clients come alive again, their bodies release what has been held for so long. They feel bigger and more energized, and they look younger, brighter, freer.

Family Dynamics

Were you growing up in a hostile environment? Were you held hostage by a parent's anger, grief, or fear?

When one person holds all the power, it creates an imbalance that, as adults, we need to correct within ourselves to become more whole and healthy.

Sometimes a whole feeling is taboo in a family — banished. Was there unspoken grief? Did a parent or sibling die young, and was it ever talked about and truly grieved? Was one of your parents depressed? Unspoken grief like this can often lead to depression.

As adults, we may need to heal past hurts and grieve what was never acknowledged.

Why Breakthroughs Don't Last

Like many folks, I used to read books and go to workshops and seminars to learn new techniques for breaking through my problems. I'd leave with more insight, often feeling I'd gotten something valuable. But because I wasn't working on my emotional intelligence, those breakthroughs didn't last. It was frustrating and confusing, and I sometimes felt like I was going around in circles.

Now I know that when I feel stuck, it means I have emotional work to do — and fortunately, I have the keys to do it.

Most people put their effort into changing their ideas and shifting their perspective, and that's what most books and seminars are about. That can help, but not nearly as much. If your breakthrough slips away, it was just a “head trip.” You had a brilliant “Aha!” and then came back down to where you were before. You didn't really change; you gained some mental understanding.

Transforming stuck emotions is the missing link in all our efforts to grow, succeed, and enjoy life. Free your emotions, free your life.

Depression and Emotional Intelligence

Many depressed folks come to our emotional intelligence retreats to heal old pain. They may feel unmotivated and low-energy. They may have tried medication and therapy and still feel depleted.

Medication, exercise, and therapy can, in many cases, be helpful. Yet very often depression is related to suppressed feelings that are stuck inside us. As these feelings are worked through — especially grief — the depression begins to lift.

Depression is about depressed, pushed-down feelings. When our life force is squashed, our energy is depleted, and our lives become small.

Whether you've been living a sad story, a scary story, an angry story, or some other story, the retreats help you build emotional intelligence so you can start living a new, more joyful, free story, unencumbered by the past.

“But My Feelings Are So Challenging — Isn't There Another Way?”

This work isn't about being stuck in anger, sadness, or grief. You've already had plenty of those feelings. It's about truly experiencing them rather than suppressing or avoiding them, which only increases the pain. When you embrace uncomfortable feelings, they start to change and reveal their gifts.

Real change comes from shifting from avoiding our feelings to transforming them.

Feelings contain a huge amount of energy and awareness. When you're stuck in a feeling, your awareness and all that energy are caught up in it. You're stuck in a storm.

Transforming the feeling wakes you up, so you're more aware and have access to all that life energy. Suddenly you can make real changes in your life. You feel much more alive, awake, and free. You receive the gift in each feeling, and you live from a more spacious, grounded place.

How the Retreats Build Your EQ

Our retreats improve emotional intelligence not intellectually, but by healing our emotional nature, so we can be fully present and alive to our rich emotional capacity as human beings. In this way, we can be there for others as a loving, nurturing presence.

As we own our anger, fear, and grief, we transform these feelings. We become more fully alive, joyful, and emotionally flexible.

And there's a powerful, positive side effect: we can be more present for others, listen without reacting, and feel less afraid of being controlled or manipulated.

At the retreat, we practice the art of deep listening — of seeing and hearing others and honoring their thoughts and feelings. These skills can change your life, as they have changed the lives of hundreds of others.

Other Ways to Grow Your Emotional Intelligence

The most direct way I know is an intensive retreat. These practices can also support your growth, before or after:

• Meditation and other present-moment practices help you develop a more spacious awareness, giving you room to respond instead of react. Go here to read about types of meditation.
• Massage and bodywork can release habitual tension tied to stuck emotions. Your body holds suppressed feelings, and bodywork helps release them. Click here to my advanced bodywork page.
• Energy healing, such as Reiki or distant energy healing, can also help. 
• Assertiveness — as opposed to aggressive or passive behavior — is a vital skill for keeping our emotions clear.
• Communication skills such as Nonviolent Communication can be valuable.

Is an EQ Retreat Right for You?

We offer two related retreats to help people work through their feelings and improve their emotional skills:

• Grief, Loss and Other Difficult Emotions Retreats
• Breaking Through The Old Story / Shalom Retreats

If you're interested in either one, please contact me using the form below. We'll have a ~20-minute conversation to see whether a retreat is right for you. There's no charge. (I also offer longer phone and Zoom consultations at reasonable rates.)

Free your emotions, free your life.

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