- Inner Healing Clinics: Depth Exploration of Inner Child, Anger, Sexuality,Family Addictions, Relationships, Fear, Losses
- Grief and Healing
- Healing Family Wounds: Miscarriage, Abortion, Adoption, Still Birth, Suicide, Homicide, Traumatic Death, Divorce, Separation and Relationship Losses
- Healing Family Relationships: Let Go and Move On
- Healing Broken Relationships: Mending a Wounded Heart
- Healing Spiritual Shame and Guilt
- Healing the Inner Child
- Healing the Father Wound: How to Heal the Absent Father Syndrome
- Healing the Mother Wound: How to Heal the Absent Mother Syndrome
- Healing Self-Esteem
- Healing the Whole Person
- Healing Our Bodies: Understanding Our Symbolic Woundedness
- Healing Sexuality: Becoming at Home with Our Humanity
- Depression and New Strategies for Healing
- Effective Parenting: For Couples and Single Parents
- Helping Those Who Have Been Abused: Exploring Verbal, Physical and Sexual Abuse
- Spirituality of Diocesan Priests and Those Who Love Them
- Mandala Assessment: Why Am I Stuck and How Do I Get Free?
- Mandala Symbolism and Prayer Moments
- Sandplay: Discovering Hidden Treasures
- Enneagram Clinics: Depth Exploration on Anger, Intimacy, and Conflict
- Introduction to a Spirituality of Mercy
- Canon Law: The Rights of the Laity
Retreats, Workshops, In-service Training for Pastoral Staff and Religious and Diocesan Convocations.
Additional information of each program design can be made available through a phone call. Adaptations of schedule and length of time can be negotiated.
Spiritual Direction and the Quest for Holiness
This conference provides an exploration of the psychology and spirituality of personal growth and development. This retreat and/or workshop can include lecture time, small group sharing and a review of the benefits of spiritual direction that have emerged throughout history. What is particular to the role of a spiritual director and how to avoid dual relationships or false conceptions of the directee relationship will be discussed. Individual spiritual direction, group spiritual direction, guided and directed retreats, supervision and issues of liability, short term and long term spiritual direction relationships, spiritual companions versus spiritual directors will also be explored. Experiential learning opportunities are provided throughout the conference and we will explore topics as:
- Individual Spiritual Direction: Some Guidelines for Beginners
- Group Spiritual Direction and other options to Faith and Spiritual Formation
- Discernment
- Theology of Evil
- The Human Condition and God’s Presence in All This Mess
- Supervision and Issues of Liability
- Short Term and Long Term Spiritual Direction Relationships
- Spiritual Companions, Spiritual Mentors, Inner Healing Providers, and Pastoral Counselors: What’s the Difference?
- Movement and Countermovement: When God Prays through us Both – Director and Directee
- Experiential Learning Opportunities Are Provided Throughout the Conference
A Design for Wholeness: Praying Our Well-Being
This retreat provides time and space to prayerfully reflect upon our quest for healing, wholeness and well-being. Exploring moments of mercy and understanding the call of the Creator of “deep calling unto deep’ will lead us to ponder, dwell, remember and offer our life experiences of blessings and burdens. Praying our human condition will put us in alliance with the humanity of Christ who is our source of grace, life, and liberty. Personal and pastoral exercises may include:
- The Seven Habits for Highly Effective Ministry
- Prayer for Reconciliation and Prayer for Departed Souls
- Contemplation – Silence – Solitude
- Conscious Celibacy
- The Work-Addiction Risk Test
- Intimacy Inventory
- Rules for Being Human
- The Spirituality of Celibacy
- The Four Archetypes of the Spiritual Life
- Exploration of the Scriptures
- Various Prayer Disciplines and Exercises Throughout the Retreat
Today’s Pastoral Minister as Leader, Teacher and Healer
Personal Leadership Styles – Personal Growth and Healing
Each person who accepts the challenge of public ministry will need to continually explore better ways to lead and facilitate the people they serve. Leadership styles evolve from our personality strengths and weaknesses. This convocation will provide us with time to explore various leadership styles and come to understand our personality strengths and weaknesses through the use of the Enneagram. Learn how to heal our personal woundedness and compulsions and fine-tune our awareness of prayer encounters through a better understanding of consolation and desolation will be discussed. Each of us will come to a better understanding of our skills of intimacy, conflict resolution, team building and coping with stress.
- Our Skills of Intimacy
- Conflict Resolution Skills
- Team Building Skills
- Coping with Stress
- Relaxation, Creativity and Play Skills
- Empowerment of Others and Shared Leadership
- How to Care and Support the Leader
Conscious Celibacy: Truth or Consequence
The greater the meaning and purpose you have for your celibate way of life, the greater the chance you have of remaining celibate. Meaning and purpose, values and beliefs have a great impact on our theology and spirituality of celibacy. Can you take your struggles with celibacy and bring them into your prayer, your support network, and your spiritual director/companion relationship. Are you comfortable disclosing your moments of joy and despair while trying to achieve conscious celibacy? Would your life, ministry and effectiveness as a “Bearer of the Mystery” be any different as a non-celibate? Is celibacy an integral dimension to the spirituality of a Diocesan priest? Assessing our meaning and purpose of celibacy, exploring a spirituality of the diocesan priest and redefining priestly identity as we cope with the paradigm shift will be some of the prayer content of this retreat experience.
This is an intensive review of the psycho-sexual-social development of celibate integration. Exploration of the stages of initiation into celibacy, a review of our personal meaning and purpose of celibacy and the latest research into the biological implications of celibate living are discussed. The opportunity to complete the Conscious Celibacy Assessment Inventory will be made available.
Other areas of exploration may include:
- Male and Female Celibates are like water and oil
- The Power of Estrogen and the Volatility of Testosterone
- Understanding the Power of Psychosexual Energy – Libido
- Unhealthy Compensation and a profile of the unconscious celibate
- Detoxing Sexual Symbols and Fantasies so as to achieve balance and proportion
- Healthy Intimacy, Personal and Professional Boundaries
- Fatal Attraction Syndrome, Detoxing Infatuations and Repulsions
- The Spirituality of Celibacy: Praying the Humanity of Christ
- Time for Shared Dialogue where we exchange the collective wisdom of our Blessings and Burdens of Conscious Celibacy
The Beatitudes and the Call to Simplicity:
The Archetypal Dimensions of Poverty
Jesus offers us a way of life through his proclamation of the Beatitudes. Through a prayerful consideration of the nine Beatitudes we will explore the universal truths that invite us into a way of simplicity and discover how we are blest. The invitation to deepen our social, psychological and spiritual conversion pulls us into the archetypal motifs that lead us into a deeper awareness of how we are intimately connected to our neighbors, the world community and the body of Christ. We will mediate on:
- Personal Power – abuse, misuse, or empowerment
- Necessary Losses
- The Call to Holiness and Soul Making
- Moments of Mercy: Sharing Blessings and Burdens
- The Practice of Presence
- Peacemakers and Bridge Builders
- Persecution or Self-Sabotage
- The Search for Ecstasy and Joy without addictions and Compulsions
Obedience: Listening with the Soul
Obedience in all its degrees and dimensions invites us to listen with the soul so that we may not overlook God’s pleasure and design. The art of deference puts the ego in check so that we may not be overwhelmed by presumptions. Tempering our conclusions will help to confront the power shadow that would otherwise lead us to become isolated, rigid and punitive. Humility opens the door to inspiration and will help us cope with the hairpin curves and unpredictability of God’s movement in our life. Personal assessment of our capacity for trust, vulnerability, deference and humility will be made available through art expressions.
Jesus – Man of Power & God of Love (A Men’s Retreat)
Each of us has been given power from above to use in the building of the Kingdom of God. Our home, family, workplace and ministries all demand proper use of power. Come explore the way that men are called to use power appropriately. Learn how to avoid the abuse and misuse of power. Understand the power shadow and how each man single, married or consecrated adopts a “Fathering Style” to share his gifts with others. Unearth your hidden treasure of play, intimacy, trust and friendship. Each participant will deepen their faith and love as they learn to let God pray through them for the sake of another.
In Praise of Woman (A Weekend Retreat for Women)
The four feminine archetypes help a woman understand her strengths and weaknesses in such areas as: parenting, conflict resolution, relationship, intimacy, friendship, trust, prayer and team building. Each woman has been given adult life skills from her mother and father. If you are missing any of the adult life skills from your mother or father you may feel like you have a hole in your chest. Come learn how to retrieve and replace those life skills that will help you live life to the full. The scriptures, handouts and lectures will affirm you as a woman of praise designed by God to radiate love, health and well-being.
In His Image: A Journey With St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross
St. John of the Cross invites us into a dynamic journey and teaches us how to adventure the pathways and prayerways up the mountain to the Ascent of Love. During these spiritual awakenings, St. John reveals how an intimate relationship with God can be borne from human suffering and transformed into redemptive suffering. We will then explore the Seven Dwelling Places of St. Teresa of Avila. Each dwelling place offers the spiritual pilgrim opportunities for conversion, radical encounters with transforming grace and mystical experiences that will lift us into a heavenly language and divine knowledge of God’s presence in our life. This retreat is not for the faint hearted or beginners. Intensive prayer, humble self-disclosure and a readiness to meet God’s unpredictable ways are included in this opportunity for inner exploration and the quest for holiness.
Grief Workshop
Designed for people working through losses including: death of someone close, divorce, and loss of work. We will explore how to care for a co-worker, parishioner, or loved one as they journey through the grief process.
Healthy Families
Names the characteristics of a healthy family. Explores the nature of family as a domestic church. The characteristics parallel a healthy work environment and can assist in team building.
Stress, Burnout and Spirituality
An examination of the development of stress in our daily life, the root causes of our capacity to endure stress, and the relationship between stress endurance and boundary issues. Ways to develop healthier boundaries are introduced as well as spiritual solutions to stress management.
Growing in Wisdom and Grace: Spirituality for Everyday Living
With the dawning of each new day, we are invited to imitate Jesus and thus to grow in wisdom and grace. This mission retreat will focus on the spiritual, psychological and emotional aspects of what it takes to walk faithfully on this journey to wholeness and holiness. Some of the topics presented will include new tools for growing in self-knowledge, living a balanced life, being good stewards of our personal and family gifts, naming our losses and learning to let go, forgiving ourselves and others, and designing a health care plan to live life to the full. There will be one conference every morning and evening so as to give ample time for reflection on the materials that will be provided.
There’s A Hole in My Chest: Healing Personal Pain Due to Father and Mother Wound.
How do you heal that chronic feeling of emptiness, loneliness and detachment? Have you tried to fill that hole in your chest with food, drugs, alcohol, religion, relationships, power, control or work? Would you like to get rid of the aching feeling that nothing is ever good enough? Through personal assessment you will be able to name those adult life skills that are missing and establish a health care program that will enable you to create a life choice designed for recovery, well-being and integrity. Learning the skills to become a second chance father or mother will help to heal our world community by offering healing presence to those who are suffering from ritual grieving due to the hole in their chest.
Areas of exploration may include:
- How Men Father and How Women Mother
- Father’s Contribution to Adult Life Skills
- How Do I Heal My Father or Mother Wound
- Mandala Assessment and How Do I Get Unstuck?
- Ritual Grieving – How to Say OUCH Honestly and Consciously
- The Human Longing for Dad’s Strength and Mom’s Touch
- Facing the Fears, Claiming the Losses, Telling the Story
- Retrieve It, Replace It, or Release It
- Prayer for Reconciliation and Prayer for Departed Souls
The Functional Family/Organization/Church: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Dysfunctions, Compulsions and Other Harmful Patterns
What are the qualities to a functional family, healthy organization and vibrant, life giving church? The three laws to a dysfunctional family/organization are: Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust and Don’t Feel. If these are encouraged in any way within your family, organization or church, then this workshop is for you!
- Patterns of Addictive Behaviors and Enmeshed Relationships
- Self and Group Sabotage
- Triangle Communication and Critical Negative Incident Supervision
- Poorly Defined Personal and Professional Boundaries
- Dual Relationships and Personal Unmet Emotional Needs
- Qualities and characteristics of a Healthy Family, Organization, Church
- The Care of Souls and Other Pastoral Care Dynamics
- How to Offer Tough-Love and Straight Talk and Other Invitations to Health, Sobriety and Well-Being
- A Willingness to Take Our Personal Inventory and How We May Contribute to Dysfunction, Compulsions and Other Harmful Patterns
- The Four Styles of Pastoral Leadership
Refounding and Animating The Founding Charism and Vision:
Innovations for Consecrated, Monastic, and Apostolic Religious Life
Every religious organization will experience historical periods of refounding, reorganizing and revitalizing its original founding charism and vision. The process of change has measurable steps that can help or hinder the strategies of innovation and the change process. Understanding the present paradigm that shapes and limits your organization will create a template for the possibilities of renewal, visioning the future and refounding and celebrating the original innocence of your founder/foundress(s) charism and vision.
The future of most religious congregations will discover that their success lies not in not in what is already working, rather that which leads to the cutting edge and provokes alternative applications to their chosen way of life, apostolic work and community living.
Only those who dare to risk what is will be able to discover what could be. Holding on to the present guarantees no assurance for a secured future.
Topics for Staff Development, Retreats or Workshops
Building a Cohesive Team: Includes the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which helps participants explore their personal work profile and team profile and increase their knowledge of the differences in working types, decision making, conflict resolution, giving and receiving appreciation, exploring hidden potential and how to use the inferior function. Time needed: 4-6 hours. Includes the showing of two videos.
Working With Difficult People: Will explore how to manage the angry person, develop skills for straight talk and tough love, understand the five dysfunctional patterns in both families and the work place, how to encourage health and recovery and creating a health care plan for personal recovery. Time needed: 4-5 hours. Includes the showing of two videos.
The Art of Self-Care: How to avoid ministry burn-out, understand work addiction, create a vibrant health care plan, explore your mercy life-line, develop a life giving social atom and assess personal self-esteem. Achieving recovery for the whole person includes self-care strategies, a dietary program that feeds our bodies and a spirituality of mercy that allows us to receive God’s presence in our everyday life. Time for personal prayer and small group sharing will be included in the design of this retreat.
Time Needed: 4-6 hours. Includes the showing of one video.
Also available as a one-week retreat with additional content and videos added to the program design
A Design for Wholeness: A retreat that prays our health and well-being and explores the many graces we have received while providing ministry to others. Learn about the Seven Habits for Effective Ministry and explore the prayerways and pathways to personal healing, wholeness and well-being. Time needed: 4-6 hours. Includes the showing of one video. Also available as a one-week retreat with additional content and videos added to the program design.
Other topics for retreats or workshops
Leadership Models and New Paradigms for Parish Ministry
Healing of Memories and Other Life Losses
Communication Skills: Enhancing Our Abilities to Connect With Others
Family Life and Inner Child Explorations
- Storytelling & Genogram – Discovering our Family Blessings and Burdens
Exploration of the Genogram and naming the five-typologies includes the five-symptoms and five remedies
- Focused Genogram, Attachments, Bonding, Culture, Emotions, Family Rituals and Traditions, Religious Orientation, Socio-economic Status, Temperament and Touch
- 9 Pathogenic Attitudes helps to understand how each of us coped with our family system and how we can unlearn our childhood frame-of-reference.
- Discover through art and mandala expressions how to release your creative inner child and retrieve your childhood innocence
Body Stories - Listening to Our Body Wisdom
Reflections & Meditations on Pope John Paul II “Theology of the Body”
Body stories will help to unlock past hurts, reveal blocked libido and provide a surge of healthy and honest energy. Understanding the inner wisdom of your body and seeking the truth of your physical symptoms will reveal your potential for health and well being.
Breath and bodywork is an invigorating opportunity to become at home with ourselves and explore the personal and professional persona we each need to maintain for healthy boundaries. How we can wear ourselves out loud for others to come to know us and love us for who we really are will be demonstrated.
Intro to Breathwork will help to defrost frozen feelings and help animate emotions that may be stifled due to the family rules of “Don’t talk, Don’t feel and Don’t trust”. A continuation of breath and bodywork will be provided with an emphasis on boundaries, setting limits, revealing secrets and burdens.
Healing of memories provides a sacred space for us to invite God’s presence that will lead us to the prayer of forgiveness and reconciliation. Various experiences of inner healing will lead us to resolve and heal shame, fear, anxiety and grief.
Inner explorations will continue through guided imagery, storytelling and imagination. Finding your healthy self, encourages each of us to live out loud the person God created us to become. -
Encounters With Sacred Living, Loving and Being
We will explore the nature of the ego and the psyche, and practice the four levels of prayer
Authentic living demands that each person have a personal and professional persona and are able to maintain healthy boundaries. Establishing a working knowledge of how to wear our personal and professional persona out loud in appropriate and life giving ways will be explored.
The Mercy Life Line helps us to remember how much God’s love and tender mercy has been part of our lives. The power of storytelling helps us to reveal and then integrate the many gifts we have already received.
Walking the Labyrinth provides us with an inner exploration that leads us into a depth of interior knowledge waiting to be named and integrated.
We become who we love! Understanding projections, detoxing repulsion’s and infatuations is critical to the helping profession. Learn how to manage fatal attraction syndrome and begin to bring into consciousness your unloved potential.
The Serenity Prayer invites us into a way of life; a choice to let go and let God. Peacemakers are generous in providing and provoking non-violence and advocate the care our world that is the cosmic Body of Christ!
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator
Personality and Prayer
Understanding personality preferences, the four functions, and the four attitudes will begin the adventures into your preview of personality and prayer. We will review the 16 profiles and the particular strengths and weaknesses of our personal profile.
Explore the dynamic of Personality Type through the life span. Understand your potential and the ways in which your inferior function (shadow) reveals itself in interpersonal relationships, communication, and conflict. God usually breaks through our inferior function in the dark love of desolation. Understand how to surrender to this unlimited gifted potential and move through the dark-night by welcoming the grace of change and conversion.
Looking for God with our Dominant Function and achieving integration is the natural by-product of our growing awareness of our body, mind, and spirit. Transitions are opportunities to usher in a period of integration including an understanding of spirituality and how it relates to Typology, or as Carl Jung would say, “ broadening our spiritual outlook.”
Understanding how Personality Type is experienced in Consolation and Desolation (dominant and inferior functions) helps us understand the human response to God’s visitations and the consequences of those hairpin curves and unpredictable divine surprises. We will explore how to savor consolation and how to allow desolation to reveal undiscovered truths about ourselves.
We will look at play, work, and Typology in an effort to achieve balance within our life. Time will be spent on reflective exercises to help each person determine their work/play, balance and restorative activities for “living life to the full.” (John 10-10)
Anger Workout
Resolving Grief, Fear and Anxiety
How did your family manage anger? What were the family’s rules about anger that you had to live with? Do you have good anger management skills for both personal and professional relationships? We will explore family rituals of anger and emotional expressions. Through the use of Mandala Assessment we will explore the root causes of your fear, anxiety, grief and depression. Exploring the House of Anger helps to recall those life losses that may be lingering and limiting your choices today. The three options to anger and grief resolution: retrieve it, replace it or release it will be negotiated through the loss letter and other forms of ritual grieving Each person will discover which anger role they use to manage the powerful expressions of anger: Victim, Constrictor, or Reactor. In summary we will discuss how to create meaningful rituals that help us resolve grief. We will explore your family, cultural and religious rules for grief and ritual grieving.
Dream Explorations:
Sacred Symbols, Rituals and the Presence of God
Introduction to Dream Work provides simple tools and techniques to help glean the rich information and resources of our nighttime dreams. How to open up the wisdom of dream symbols and understanding the four masculine and four feminine archetypes can be a life changing experience. Simple Gestalt techniques can help to break open the life lessons that most dreams offer us and help us make those needed changes within our physical, spiritual, emotional and social aspects of our life. A brief introduction to working within a dream group will be provided. We will also explore sacred symbols and the symbols of libido and interpret the meaning of numinous dreams, visions, holy encounters, nightmares, shadow content, the anima and animus and praying our shadow potential.
Life Transitions
Six Stages of the Spiritual Journey
The individuation process offers a particular understanding of psychological, social and spiritual development. Using Bankson's Six Stages of Spiritual Development, we will understand a pattern of transition that allows you to move with the process and avoid unnecessary obstructions.
The first sign of Stage One is resistance to the idea that we might be called to a larger purpose in life. We resist giving ourselves to the unknown and cling to what we know. Feelings of forgetfulness, numbness, anxiety and/or confusion are hallmarks of this first stage.
By the Rivers of Babylon...reflections of Psalm 137
Stage Two involves Reclaiming patterns, memories, gifts, and healing that are necessary for going further in the process. This is a time of validation of who we are and healing of the wounds that may have been a part of our history
Stage Three is an opportunity to say "YES" to the unseen world of Revelation. We also have the power to say "NO," to deny what we have seen and stay with old ways. This stage is a struggle between caution and custom, between what we “know" and a brief glimpse of something larger than us
The first three stages of this journey, we can keep our private sense of call secret and separate from others who might object or oppose what we are feeling drawn to do. It requires crossing the Poison River. Stage 4‑Risk‑the journey shifts from a private conversation with God to a public form.
When we change from the inside out, everyone around us is affected. Stages 5‑Relate and StageSix‑Release, bring the journey to its completion, readying to begin again. Freedom, love, accomplishment, and wisdom are some of the fruits of this work and necessary to begin the process anew.
Healing Through Art Expressions
The medicine wheel serves as both an individual and collective Mandala that reflects what is in order and out of order within our life. What is the balance and proportion we long for? We can begin our quest for health by starting at the center - the opus - the sacred space we visit that takes us to our center. Each medicine wheel is construction through the use of collage making and free art expressions. The Medicine wheel reviews our journey of where did we begin our journey, where are we know and where are we going. The very nature of the medicine wheel provokes memory, storytelling and personal reflection time.
Praying the Winter Season of our Spiritual Life. The four seasons permeate our spiritual life. Winter invites us into a profound stillness that takes us “deep calling unto deep”. Daily reflections will be provided each morning and each evening that will call our attention to the wisdom of the winter season. Some of the reflections will include: deep calling unto deep, stillness, waiting, resting, restoration, the dark night and evening stars, the fireplace and other images to ponder.
Praying the Spring Season of our Spiritual Life. Springtime abounds in images of new life and rebirth. Understanding the growth cycle of nature offers each pilgrim a challenging understanding of what happens to us when we choose the pathway to holiness. Daily reflections will be provided each morning and each evening that will call our attention to the wisdom of the spring season. Some of the reflections will include: in the beginning, called into being, waking up, breaking through, tenderness and tough love, growth and pain, growing in the right soil, patience and peace, innocence and other images to ponder.
Praying the Summer Season of our Spiritual Life. The summer season welcomes us into a theology of the earth that takes us into the Old Testament and sacred land. Some of the reflections will include: holy ground, altars of sacrifice, understanding the manure in our life, trimming and pruning, weeds amongst the wheat, the four waters of Teresa of Avila and subtle balances.
Praying the Fall Season of our Spiritual Life. Harvest time and gathering are essential elements of the spiritual life. The fall season provokes remembering and taking the time for thanksgiving and gratitude. Some of the reflections will include: prosperity and plenitude, the call to simplicity, blessings and burdens, color and beauty, sacrifice for the sake of others, harvesting pleasure and stewardship of time, talent and treasure as a way of life.
The Four Ways of Prayer –Deepening Our Intimacy with God
Experiential exercises with the Prayer of Focus, Prayer of Senses and Prayer of Remembering. In the heart of stillness and solitude we make space for God’s visitation. The Four Ways of Praying can contribute to our human attempts of connecting with God so that we can be infused with grace, serenity and contentment. You are encouraged to wear comfortable clothing and bring walking shoes. You will learn how to access the four levels of prayer and the three prayer experiences with focus, senses and remembering.
Meditations on the Mother of Jesus. The life and mystery of the Mother of Jesus offers us a deeper understanding of God’s presence mingling in and amongst the messiness of our lives. Mary’s entire life and her adventures with God point to a holy wisdom that deserves our prayer time and mediations.
Meditations on the Life and Wisdom of Mary, the Mother of Jesus
Come away for a time and “being still and know that I am God”.
“ You want me to do what? If it pleases you my God, thy will be done”
Listening and responding to the voice of God with Mary, Elizabeth, Joachim and Anne and Joseph.
“ My Son, why have you done this to us?”
Caring for our children with Our Lady of Good Counsel
“ And a sword will pierce your heart.”
Waiting with Our Lady of Sorrows and making sense out of suffering.
“Waiting with the apostles in the upper room.”
Each shall be given power from the Holy Spirit. |
