2023 Gratitude Grief and Grace RMERC Women’s Retreat

Gratitude, Grief, and Grace in the Face of Global Suffering:  A Women’s Retreat

A Women’s Residential Retreat
With Jean Leonard and Sarah Heffron

• Tuesday September 19 – Saturday September 23, 2023
  At Rocky Mountain EcoDharma Retreat Center | Ward, CO
• Registration is open now here.
• Please contact Sarah Heffron at sarah@openspace-counseling.com with questions.
• Detailed directions to RMERC.
• Retreat flyer.

 

 

Retreat Description:

Within the beauty of this mountain refuge and the teachings of the Dharma, we will co-create a safe and nourishing community of women in which to deepen our connection with ourselves, the Earth, and the more-than-human world. We will take an embodied pause to drink in the majesty of the natural world of which we are a part.  In both meditation and ritual space, we will open and lean in to the losses and suffering of this moment in order to discover boundless space and compassion to hold it all.  We will emphasize equality, acceptance, and belonging as we learn from and support one another.   Drawing from our innate wisdom and imagination, we will shape new stories of resilience, finding our unique contribution to the great paradigm shift toward a world in balance.

This primarily silent retreat offers you periods of sitting and walking meditation outside; nourishing ourselves in Nature; gentle mindful movement; sharing and ritual; writing and reflection; and Dharma talks and support from the facilitators.

This retreat welcomes all who self-identify as women and is appropriate for both those relatively new to practice, as well as more seasoned practitioners who wish to deepen and strengthen their connection to the Dharma in nature.

Download a letter of welcome from your Retreat Support Team (coming soon).

 

Facilitators’ Bios:

Jean Leonard, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and a certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher in private practice in Louisville, Colorado with 27 years clinical experience.  She teaches Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) classes and other mindfulness classes and workshops throughout Colorado, and virtually nationwide, and is a mentor for Jack Kornfield’s and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, supporting students’ development as meditation teachers.

She has practiced yoga for over 30 years and vipassana meditation since 2003, and holds the Dharma as a sacred compass that guides her personal and professional life.  She has completed the Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation Training (MYMT), the Dedicated Practitioner Program (DPP), the Heavenly Messengers (HM) Program, and the Advanced Practitioners’ Program (APP) through Spirit Rock Meditation Center and feels deeply nourished by many years of long retreat practice.    In February 2022 she will complete a one-year Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy Program through the Sati Center with Gil Fronsdal, Susie Harrington, and Kirstin Rudestam, and is trained to offer emotional and spiritual support to individuals and communities impacted by the environmental and ecological crises of our times.  She has a particular passion in supporting women blossoming into wholeness and is delighted to be bringing together her love of psychology, meditation, Women’s Studies, EcoDharma, and nature in facilitating women’s community building in the Dharma.

 

Sarah Heffron, LSCSW is a licensed clinical therapist and began sharing insight meditation in 1999.  Her first degree was in environmental studies and her first refuge was in the natural world.  It was in the whirlwind of defending the natural world, that she attended her first vipassana retreat and then dove deeply into the Dharma, with the blessing of many longer retreats.  Since becoming a mother 15 years ago, she has practiced the more worldly and often messy Dharma of a parent-householder.  Participation in the Community Dharma Leader program and Dedicated Practitioner Program through Spirit Rock Meditation Center greatly contributed to finding grace amidst the grit whether in parenting, work, or activism.  In the past two decades, she has taught Dharma class series, daylong and weekend retreats (Utah, Colorado, and Kathmandu), as well as teaching mindfulness and yoga in schools for five years.  She is currently in the Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy Program through the Sati Center where she feels called to support the great transformation from the current paradigm of social and ecological injustice to a paradigm that respects and nourishes all beings.

 

Katherine Harrell, LMFT (Retreat Manager) – At the end of another heartbreaking Summer of hearing Earth’s cry I feel such honor and privilege in joining our retreat space as your manager. Expanding and harboring in our Dharma community committed to deep listening and wise response feels like a path towards restoration.  I bring my full heart to making our retreat space one that can hold more than we could on our own. As a child and family therapist and eco-chaplain, my passion for enduring and holding our difficulties while recognizing the unceasing beauty all around us in a playfully reverent way will be core to serving you as retreat manager. I look forward to tending the space for the mountains and lands around us to access our hearts so that when we part, we may know that we are infinitely loved, and have all that it requires to love endlessly in response.

 

 

 

 

We want to acknowledge the indigenous people, past, present and future, on whose unceded traditional lands RMERC is located including the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute.