2025 RMERC Women’s Retreat

Coming Home to Refuge, Reverence & Wise Response

 

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

 

“Warriors for the human spirit– that’s us– are awake human beings who’ve chosen not to flee.  They abide.” ~ Margaret Wheatley

 

Retreat Description:

In these times of rapid change and immense suffering, it is easy to lose our center and to find ourselves in fight, flight, freeze, or faint. This retreat is a coming home to what sustains us and offers us refuge. We will replenish ourselves through rest, silent practice in nature, and deep reverence for the Earth and being alive. The cultivation of our hearts and minds gives rise to a resilience that steadies and clarifies, illuminating wise response and a capacity to care. In this retreat, as we face the unknown together, we are invited into a vaster purpose and perspective, where the sacred fuels our action and our actions deepen connection to the sacred.

This retreat will include silent sitting and walking meditation, nature-based practices, nervous system regulation, sharing and ritual. We welcome all who self-identify as women and both seasoned practitioners as well as those 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.

 

 

 

 

Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

L. R. Knost