The intention behind this retreat is to help you keep yourself company by bringing your awareness to your experience and your needs on a regular basis within a clear structure of community practice and personal exploration. Through reflecting on our experience briefly every 15 minutes for 3 hours, we develop a more intimate understanding of our emotions and our needs than is usually accessible to us in our everyday life. We learn about how our emotions are always changing and that we can support ourselves lovingly through noticing and tending (self-compassion) rather than ignoring (self-avoidance) or criticizing (self-criticism).

Who Is This For?

We’d love to see you at this retreat if you have some self-compassion skills in your toolkit already from doing any of the HeartWorks programs or any other self-compassion training.

Somatic Self-Compassion Resources

This retreat is a template for holding your whole day in a way that develops the 3 resources of Somatic Self-Compassion:

Affectionate Awareness: Kindly noticing and naming our felt experience;

Courageous Connection: 1. Acknowledging if there stress in our experience, and then giving ourselves space to uncover what our need is in that moment, or 2. Acknowledging something pleasant in our experience and setting an intention to savor that;

Radical Response: 1. Responding to our needs, perhaps in ways we don’t habitually respond to ourselves when we are feeling stress, or 2. Intentionally savoring our pleasant experience for as long as the neurochemicals of wellbeing are present in our felt experience.

Engagement

This retreat invites us to engage with our experience more than we usually would in our daily life, with more structure than we would usually find on retreat. This structure offers a container of safeness where we are bringing in our ability to give words to our experience regularly to help ground our experience in language and meaning. The retreat will be held mostly in silence to support our connections with ourselves, with opportunities to reflect in a structured and supportive way in the group about our experience.

During this 3-hour retreat, you’ll be invited to combine your daily activities with periods of guided meditation while also reflecting every 15 minutes on the three Somatic Self-Compassion (SSC) explorations:

• What am I feeling? (Affectionate Awareness)
• What do I need? (Courageous Connection)
• What can I do? (Radical Response)

Structure

You’ll be held within the online container of a supportive community and a supportive structure of:

• The online community in the video conferencing platform, Zoom;
• Written and verbal guidelines for holding your daily activity experiences;
• Meditation offerings by Kristy Arbon at regular intervals through the 3-hour retreat;
• A bell to invite you to record your explorations each 15 minutes; and
• A worksheet to record your responses to the three SSC explorations at 15 minute intervals.

The retreat will be from 2pm-5pm US Central Time on Saturday April 27. To support yourself through this retreat you might like to give yourself 3 hours of unstructured time and plan some simple activities for our non-group time during like reading, meditating, cleaning, spending time with 4-legged family members, taking a nap, movement activities, preparing food, or other creative activities.

If you’re interested in this retreat but are unable to attend at the time it is offered (or you’d like to do it again at your leisure) the retreat video will be recorded and shared with participants.

Please note that this retreat will be limited to 15 participants.

If you have any questions, please email kristy@heartworks.training.

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