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Alderroot Healing & Renewal
Wintering: A retreat series for leaders who need seasonal rest and spiritual renewal
November 2024 - February 2025
In person- Sign up for part 1, part 2, or both
for those who identify as female, non-binary, or trans
Sessions will take place at The Yoga Refuge in SE Portland, a cozy studio location where we can spread out, make tea, move our bodies, reflect together, and share beautiful space (7831 SE Stark).
Part 1: November, December
4 sessions focused on slowing down and cultivating more calm and purposeful seasonal & spiritual alignment during late fall.
Saturdays, 7:00-9:00pm at the Yoga Refuge
November 9, 23 & December 7, 21.
$250 or 2 payments of $125
(with options to add 2-4 individual mentoring sessions with Heather to deepen your experience)
Part 2: January, February
4 sessions focused on creating new year intentions and practices that support slowing down, rest, and spiritual renewal in alignment with the winter season.
Saturdays, 7:00-9:00pm at the Yoga Refuge
January 4, 25 & February 1, 15
$250 or 2 payments of $125
(with options to add 2-4 individual mentoring sessions with Heather to deepen your experience)
Wintering is a small group retreat series that is designed to offer you more groundedness, inspiration, connection, and rest during the winter months.
Emerge renewed and inspired after a season of slow, restful, transformative guidance around how to really slow down and make space in your life for spiritual and seasonal alignment. We can be more impactful leaders, educators, and change-makers when we feel rested and resourced, when we can approach our work from a grounded and soulful center.
This retreat series offers actual space to rest, and space to explore nourishing body and earth-based practices. We'll also meditate, reflect, and engage in ritual and storytelling within a small supportive community of practice. We'll learn how to expand our Self-leadership* by slowing down and tuning in.
Bring groundedness, confidence, and slower pace to your leadership and change-making work by wintering, learning to be in deeper connection with the season and with your own wisdom.
*Self-leadership is a term from Internal Family Systems theory and refers to the energy of our core, who we really are as interconnected earth beings. Self-leadership is calm, creative, confident, clear, courageous, connected, compassionate, & curious.
Learn more about why I created Wintering
Why Wintering?
Winter is the season to turn inward, to slow down, and to re-connect. We know this, or often hear this and yet….there is no space in our dominant culture or leadership practice for living in our animal bodies or for cultivating the wisdom that comes from aligning with the season and the needs of our spirits.
Even if we want to create more slowness and ease during the winter season, it’s hard to do so alone…it’s like swimming against the current. We need structure and support to grow as leader-collaborators, to change entrenched patterns, and to nurture ourselves so that we can be the fractal-change makers that this world needs.
Wintering is like an eddy, an opportunity to rest from the demands of the fast-moving current, and to make intentional time and space for alignment. When we get intentional about slowing down, resting, and connecting with the earth and our inner voices, we can access more wisdom.
With more wisdom we’ll take steps away from our dominant cultural patterns of overdoing, overcommiting, overwhelm, and anxiety, and we’ll lead with more patterns of Self-leadership--more calm, clarity, creativity, courage, compassion and confidence to do the work that is uniquely ours to do, to support others, and to live out our big leadership visions with more ease.
With more wisdom we can show up for leadership challenges like uncertainty, decision-making, collaboration, and visioning with new energy and clarity.
What will Wintering sessions be like?
Sessions will include a combination of guided relaxation and resting, purposeful reflection and discussion, and practices that will nourish your spiritual self.
You are invited to come just as you are and to bring the specific tensions, difficulties, and questions that you struggle with in order to tend to them.
I facilitate in ways that make it safe to honor our true selves and that build nourishing relationships within small groups. I share my own vulnerabilities alongside my experience and expertise because I am always growing and learning too.
Sessions will include the following:
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Check-ins
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Bodyfulness--relaxation, movement, breathing
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Simple rituals & ceremony
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Observation (of mindset, thoughts, emotions, patterns)
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Rest practices
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Earth connection and seasonal practices
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Reiki energy healing
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Meditation & Visualization
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Reflection & Discussion
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Reflective writing
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Mapping and imagining
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Poetry
This is for you if any or all of these apply:
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You want support! You want to engage in a well-facilitated soulful community of practice and be nourished regularly without having to do a lot of extra stuff
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You identify as a change-maker or leader (no matter what your job is). You might be a non-profit leader, an entrepreneur or wellpreneur, an educator, a higher education professional, a healer, a therapist, a parent, an activist.
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You would like guidance and support in connecting to the earth as a source of support and deep connection in your leadership and life journey
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You would like guidance and support in connecting to your spiritual self as a source of wisdom
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You want to grow your ability to show up as a wise and grounded leader-collaborator who affects positive change in the world
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You are tired of being busy and tired
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Your work situation is draining you and leaving little energy for other relationships, hobbies, earth-connection or spiritual nourishment
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You can commit to trying out new practices centered on rest, reflection, and connection
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You struggle with anxiety and/or overwhelm and you’re not sure how it could be possible to rest or renew within your current work structure
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You feel disheartened by the state of the world and want to reconnect to purposeful leadership
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You value community experience and the wisdom of a collective
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You need some structured time and space to slow down, get support, and be nourished.
About me:
I’ve been guiding leaders for several decades. One of my gifts is designing transformative experiences that help leaders like you to grow, heal, and change.I design experiences that are highly experiential and participatory, inviting your whole self into the experience. I ask good questions, feel your energy, and really see you in your struggle, inviting you to participate just as you are. And I understand how hard it can be to deepen your soul-led leadership within dominant systems that primarily support urgency, individualism, production, and profit. I am a values-based leader who has experienced burnout and recovery from burnout, and I understand how to support genuine renewal.
I can help you unravel from feeling stuck on the treadmill of production or from feeling burned out or disenchanted, and to discover new possibilities rooted in trust, rest, connection, and wholeness.
What do I mean by leader? I mean leader as collaborator, leader as host, leader as an emerging changing bad-ass human who also guides or teachers others. I mean leader as change-maker and as a deeply caring and creative person who brings visionary solutions into the world. I mean leader as relationship-builder, earth advocate, and spiritual seeker.
How do we heal and learn together? We center relationships and process; we embrace experience and emergence; we invite imagination, emotion, intuition, and embodiment; we tap into our deep (inter)connectedness and belonging.
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