Retreats For Emotional Pain

Reclaiming Our Aliveness, Joy and Passion

With Jon Terrell, M.A.

We offer retreats for emotional pain. We all come into the world full of life, free, wild and open. We are present, fully alive, fully passionate–and have access to core feelings...joy, sadness, fear and anger. We cry, laugh, are frustrated, etc., and change moment to moment. We don't have any self control.

Very soon though, we start to lose that aliveness.

As babies start to learn the many abilities and skills that make us human our wildness gets tamed. We develop an ego, a sense of self, which is necessary to navigate in the world, to express ourselves and grow.  We learn to modulate our feelings and interact in the world with the people around us, our family.

We start to suppress our feelings. This is good and necessary, as we grow up. But, in this process of growing up we can lose a huge amount of that aliveness and freedom that we were born with.

When you compare an adult to the same person as a baby we see tremendous amounts of physical and mental development, but often a huge drop in vitality and aliveness.

Where does all that life energy go? It goes underground. It's suppressed below awareness into our bodies. It gets locked up in "the story of our life."

And many of our stories are heavy, sad, tiring. Others have angry stories of all the things done wrong. Others have scary stories of all the ways they were hurt and victimized.

Our retreats for emotional pain help people transform the power and light they have suppressed to live more fully alive and joyfully in the world. In just a few days hundreds of people have experienced a return of their Light , their power. and their love.

We lose access to much of our life force as we learn how to survive and live in the world. This journey goes something like this:

We suppress our grief when it is not acceptable to our parents and others. Boys especially learn to suppress grief so they won't be shamed as a "cry baby." And in some families everyone suppresses their sadness and grief–it's just not accepted–and so it becomes banished from consciousness. 

We suppress our fears because we’re told that being afraid or scared is bad and we should "be brave." Many of us have banished our fears...and then later we may find that we are anxious and we don't know why.

We suppress our anger because it’s rejected by our parents, our friends, our teachers and by most everybody. Almost all of us have banished anger. although a few of us are the designated family angry person.  Unfortunately, along with anger we suppress a lot of our vitality, sexuality and power. With our anger banished we can become a victim of others and of life, or experience a lot of hostility towards others without knowing why.

When we suppress our feelings, we suppress our power and our light as well. We can find ourselves depressed, living a narrow life without joy, and having trouble in close relationships.

We become tamed, and in this process we lose the life energy and sense of self that we need to be fully functioning and whole.

We reject aspects of ourselves, especially feelings, that were unacceptable to our parents and others around us. We build our personalities to reflect what is acceptable to our parents and siblings and soon this becomes who we are. 

But we are more than that. The work of our retreats is to help you reclaim all of you, to come more fully alive and present again.

While our rejected feelings are pushed below our awareness, they are not gone, just underground. We feel stuck! The feelings are right here, in our bodies, and at the retreats we can help our bodies bring the banished feelings up into awareness so they can quickly evolve and be owned as essential parts of ourselves.

We learn how to accept our feelings, welcoming them home.

Retreats For Emotional Pain

Many people come to our retreats for emotional pain because of a specific tragic event or loss. Others attend because their lives have become unmanageable or stuck. Reasons for intending including:

• death of a loved one
• divorce or separation
• feeling depressed or stuck
• caught up in anger, anxiety or grief
• Being trapped in their heads and not feeling alive, joyful, happy
• Needing to heal trauma

At our retreats for emotional pain participants come alive again by accepting the parts of themselves, especially feelings, that they have rejected. They learn how their bodies hold those suppressed feelings as pain, tension and tightness. And they learn to transform grief, anger and fear back into pure aliveness, joy, inspiration and passion.

For many it is a whole new start, a reboot, a new chance at life.

Below are links to our retreats for emotional pain:

Go To Grief, Loss, and Difficult Emotions Retreat

Go To Florida Grief, Loss, and Difficult Emotions Retreat

Go To Emotional Wellness Retreat

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