Some changes need more than weekly sessions. A marriage ends and the house lives in echo. A parent dies while the children still need tending and the trash still has to be taken out. A company sells, and the person who built it has to find out who is left. A body begins to say that it is entering elderhood, and the person living in it has been given no guidance for how. These are thresholds, and they ask for a different kind of room. A personal retreat gives the crossing its own days, its own ground, and a witness who knows you well enough to know what it needs.
Why People Come
Something wants to be let go of, or something wants to be called in. Often it is both in the same era of a life. A personal retreat is time set apart for that unfolding, with the whole of your attention and mine on it.
For one person it may be a grief that has waited years for a room big enough. For another it may be the end of a marriage and the question of who walks out the other side. Some come to step into elderhood on purpose, with ritual and with witnesses, rather than drifting into it. Others come to mark a recovery, a calling that came late, or a life they are ready to build from the ground up.
What people leave with is the freedom of setting down what no longer serves them, and a ceremony their body can believe. Often there is a sense of returning home to themselves, perhaps for the first time.
Designed Around You
No two retreats are alike because no two lives are identical. Most of the making happens before you walk through the door. I spend weeks with what I know of you, contemplating, meditating, listening for the shape this experience wants to take. I choose the rituals, the order of the days, the rhythm of work and rest, the places on the land, the food, the music, the experiences. You do very little of the planning. I bring you ideas, and your responses help me shape an experience that means something to you. By the time you come, the space has been prepared the way a table is set for a loving friend and honored guest, someone long awaited.
That preparation draws on the work we have already done together, which is why I offer personal retreats only to those I have come to know. I need to understand who you are, what you carry and what you are ready for. Some retreats I hold entirely myself. Others call for a gift that is not mine, a particular kind of sound healing or bodywork, a ceremonialist with a lineage I do not hold. When a retreat calls for that, I bring in trusted collaborators, practitioners I have worked beside, and weave their offerings into one experience. You meet them inside the design, with no separate booking and no separate bill.
What a Retreat Can Hold
Your retreat may include any of these, in the order that serves you.
- Tarot, tea leaf reading and other divination practices
- Neoshamanic Internal Family Systems parts work
- Embodied movement and authentic movement
- Energy work and energetic cleansing
- Nature walks and time on the land
- Time in silence and solitude
- Medicine and tea ceremony
- Ancestor and elder work
- Bodywork and massage
- Sound healing
- Somatic breathwork
- Therapeutic art making
- Fire and water ceremony
- Ritual and rite of passage
- Journaling, writing and storytelling
- Psychotherapeutic Touch sessions
- Dream work and shamanic journeying
- Authentic Relating and presence practices
- Life design and the first steps of the next chapter
Medicine, as I use the word, is anything that heals: movement, breath, tea, sound, deep relationship and, where it is legal and right for you, the plant teachers. Personal retreats are deeply personal, ceremonial and spiritual work, held beyond the bounds of psychotherapy.
Everything Is Included
A personal retreat takes a great deal of time, thought and energy, and the fee reflects that. It is not a small investment. It holds the days of design before you come, my presence from the first hour to the last, every collaborator I bring in, your stay at Soul Medicine Sanctuary, and all of your meals. Travel is the one cost left to you: your airfare and any rental car.
Meals come from my own kitchen, from a caterer in the Sanctuary’s circle of trusted collaborators, or from a restaurant I choose for an evening out together. A retreat can run a long weekend or the better part of a week, shaped by what you are meeting.
If a personal retreat is beyond what you are able to invest right now, I offer group retreats when my schedule allows.
How to Begin
Personal retreats grow out of relationship. If we already work together, you do not need to ask. A time may come when it becomes clear that something more dedicated wants to happen. And if we have not met, the way in is through sessions, and Inner Work Journeys is where that begins, with parts work, the body’s own knowing, ancestors and guides, and the passages that psychotherapy alone is not big enough to hold.
Kind Words
“After working with Sabrina for over a year, I had some deeper work that really needed to be done live. Sabrina created an individualized retreat to meet me right where I was at. The medicine was exactly what I needed and she created a really touching ritual that helped me to release all the old pain I was holding onto. It was worth every penny.”
Entrepreneur, 42