Emotional Transformation
At Our Retreats

By Jon Terrell, M.A.

At our healing retreats, participants experience major changes in their consciousness, from being stuck, sad, and grief-stricken, angry, fearful, or anxious to experiencing emotional freedom, well-being, and joy. This emotional transformation also includes clearing out old mental thought patterns and fixed, limiting perspectives. 

We learn new ways to be in the world and practice new Skills of loving that enable us to begin to live into a new reality.

Our awareness expands, becoming more open and flexible. The retreats are true mind-expanding events. People come hoping to get relief from pain and end up opening to much more, to a new way of living. To the joy of living.

This shifting takes place over three or four days.  People feel much better, and they don't necessarily realize the full extent of how they have changed until they get home and friends comment how different they are, how different they look.

We enter a new world, where people see and hear each other better, where the language of love is spoken and heard. It's a different reality.

And then, sometime after the retreat, most participants experience a contraction, a gradual shift back into the world experience they came in with, minus a lot of pain. The pain is gone or greatly diminished, but also the world appears more limited, and we don't see or hear each other quite at the same depth as we did at the retreat. 

What is this shift in reality? And can we keep from coming down?

It's more than a change in worldview, although that is part of it. It's more than different thoughts about ourselves or others. It definitely includes an emotional transformation–from a stuck place of pain to more freedom, joy, hope, ease.  And the shift goes much deeper than that.

When I speak to people after the retreat, they report radical changes in the way they feel and see. The Client Comments section is filled with reports of these shifts. 

We like to say the retreats take you to the next place on your journey. Most often it is to a more expansive, happier place. But sometimes it can be to another difficult emotion that was hidden, suppressed, and now needs to emerge and evolve. I've seen people shift from a sad, meek identity into the assertiveness of anger, and even stay in anger for a while, not recognizing that it, too, is a stage that must be transformed. But more often than not, the shift moves us into a bigger, better, more expansive reality.

It takes a certain level of awareness or mindfulness to recognize the emotional transformation that occurs at our events. And it takes even more to recognize the background shift in our consciousness, to a different reality, into a bigger world.

Some of the characteristics of this different reality we experience at retreats are as follows:

• Boundaries between yourself and others seem to be less thick and more permeable. 
• You feel more connected and loving with everyone. You are fascinated by others and most everything they say.
• The world feels safer and friendlier, and can look brighter and more colorful.
• You have more compassion and less judgment towards others and towards yourself.
• You experience a spacious, timeless quality. 
• You feel less busy and pressured.
• You feel joy, peace, harmony, ease.

But as Tom Petty says in the song Learning To Fly, "coming down is the hardest thing." For some participants, the retreat experience begins to feel like a nice dream after a few days, like something unreal or imagined. We put it in the past–"that retreat I went to." 

My experience, after years of noticing and living this shift in reality over and over, is that actually, the "real world" experience is the more dreamlike, unreal, imaginary life.

We shift partly back into the consensus reality of the world we live in, with its walls between people, its friction and harshness–the world the TV, movies, and newspapers tell us is real.

Yet it is not as real and solid as the world of Love and radiant Light. When we take our blinders off, when we wake up, as some mystics put it, the world is more fully alive, free and filled with love.

Those who have attended several retreats learn to live more and more in that freedom, joy, safety, and timelessness and believe less and less in the cramped reality of their former lives. They're learning to fly. That is why I recommend that people attend a few of these events, to more fully transform the old story into a new one, a new reality.

Emotional Transformation At My First Grief Retreat

My first retreat experience of this kind was in 1998. It was a dramatic high, although I did gradually come down after a few days.  But I never dropped back to where I started, and I am very grateful for that! Over the next few years, I returned to participate in numerous more retreats for my personal emotional transformation. My self-image, and the story I tell myself about who I am, changed dramatically.

Somewhere in there, and I don't know exactly when, the shift became much more permanent–I changed and knew it. Repeated exposure helped me live into my new story and break down old viewpoints, thought patterns, and stuck feeling states.

Go From Emotional Transformation To Grief, Loss And Difficult Emotions Retreat

Go To My Bio

Go To Home Page

Legal Documents for those who want to attend our retreats: Go Here