2024 RMERC Women’s Retreat

Cultivating the Courageous Heart

 

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

 

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance. Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.”

                                                                                     ~ Brené Brown

 

Retreat Description:

Daily we are faced with our growing vulnerability and the challenges of being alive in this complex world, as well as possibilities for transformation, personally and collectively.  More than ever, we are seeing our common humanity and how interdependent we are with each other and the more than human world. This is an opportunity to meet the moment, ourselves, and one another with care, clarity and compassion.

Courage is described as “the ability to do something that frightens one” and “strength in the face of pain or grief.”   Cultivating the Brahma Viharas – the heart qualities of kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity – develops the inner resources and resilience needed to consciously engage with suffering.

Finding deep refuge in the beauty and wisdom of the land and the teachings, we will rest and replenish, tend our nervous systems, and cultivate the courageous heart through silent meditation, nature-based practices, sharing and ritual.  We welcome all who self-identify as women and both seasoned practitioners as well as those relatively new to practice.

Download a letter of welcome from your Retreat Support Team.

Teachers’ Bios:

Jean Leonard, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist, dharma teacher, Buddhist Ecochaplain, certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher, and Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program mentor  in private practice in Louisville, Colorado.  A longtime meditator in the Theravada tradition, she holds the Dharma as a sacred compass that guides her personal and professional life.   In her teaching and mindfulness-informed therapeutic work, she supports individuals through sacred accompaniment in meeting the circumstances of their lives and themselves with more gentleness, grace and good humor.  She believes that with more access to clarity and compassion, we can remain in connection – with ourselves, our communities, and the Earth – finding ways of coming back into right relationship with the natural and social world to be a steward of transformation for the well-being of all.  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  Sarah Heffron, LCSW is a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain, lover of our planet, meditator of 30 years, and licensed clinical therapist dedicated to collectively reckoning with the immense suffering of this time and deepening our capacity for awakening into our fullest potential of wisdom, compassion, and joy amidst it. She has shared meditation and wisdom in the insight tradition for 24 years and has a private therapy practice in Moab, Utah. Mothering, gardening, exploring/hiking, engaging creatively with climate change, learning from Indigenous wisdom and the more than human world, and silence sustain and nourish her purpose.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

“Courage is heartfelt participation in life.”

 

                                  – David Whyte