Retreat Options
#1 Explore the erotic! What does the sex you are having say about your relationship? What do you want it to say? Your personalized retreat will weave together relational science, Tantra and mindfulness practices and invite you to expand your capacity for pleasure and connection. This retreat is appropriate for couples who feel their sex life is non-existant or soon to be extinct as well as for couples who enjoy sex together and want an erotic upgrade.
#2 In a new relationship and want to create a roadmap for your future? Who are you? What are you about? What are the values and agreements that will keep you safe when the weather is stormy inside and/or outside the relationship? Set aside a chunk of time and allow me to support you in establishing critical frameworks for your shared future.
#3 Are you stuck ? Is regular relationship/couple therapy not doing the trick? Or, if you aren’t already in therapy, do you want to take a deep dive and see if you can shift your relationship into a connection and growth? A longer retreat and a fresh perspective can help you both see things differently.
Join me for three hours, four hours, six hours, two days or three days of intensive relational work.
Together we will create a personalized retreat to meet the needs of your relationship. You will be astounded by what you can accomplish together when you have a solid block of time, clear intentions and the necessary clinical support. I am happy to assist clients from out-of-town with finding a lovely place to stay for retreats lasting more than a day. I am the in-house sex and relationship therapist for Saratoga Arms Hotel and they offer my clients a custom rate during the off-season.
Saratoga Stress Reduction Program
Selma Nemer, Pierre Zimmerman and I taught an 8 week courses in mindfulness meditation for twelve years until I left to focus on my sex therapy practice. Pierre is still teaching thank goodness because as far as I am concerned stillness and compassion are two of our most powerful remedies in this ever busy, stressful world. The program teaches mindful eating, walking, sitting meditation, gentle yoga and embodied awareness practices as ways to slow down, wake up and participate meaningfully in life as it is. Many of our graduates say the program has helped considerably with chronic pain, anxiety and sleep disturbances as well as navigating life's stressors with grace. I am including this material here in hope that you will consider a meditation retreat someday, somewhere, with a teacher that calls out to you.
www.saratogastressreduction.com
From Our 50th Class Retreat, January 2018
Years of meditating and we have now taught 50 cycles of the Saratoga Stress Reduction Program since 2005. All that and I am pretty much the same Caroline: quick to anger, quick to laugh, easily burdened, easily enchanted. What’s different is how I think about love. Practice love.
I knew I had a busy, racing, judging mind – it only took about 30 seconds of meditation to recognize that – but I didn’t appreciate until I had been meditating and teaching for a while how much this whirling dervish of a critical mind was distancing me from love. How closed off and far away I often felt even though my care and interest ran deep and the people and issues I was invested in were inches away. Or how avalanched in my own pain I could be and not be able to lovingly attend to myself. Perhaps you know what I am talking about: this way of staying busy, striving to do well, fearing loss and judging the hell out of everyone and myself in the presence of pain feels like a solitary, loveless prison. How it feels like a wall around the heart.
Meditation and sitting with all of you has begun to chip away at this wall. Life changes and pain too have begun to wear away this brittle barrier. Teachers of mine have used words like porousness, receptivity, and openness to describe the resulting experience. Yes. All of these words feel true. And love. I use the word love. When the boundaries between heart, mind and body, between you and me, between me and the world beyond soften there is love. This isn’t an idealistic, romantic love. It’s a quiet, open-eyed, muscular, tender and patient attention that can handle the truth of how things are, who people are, who I am and all that I feel in any given moment. This is what I now call love. This is what I am rooting for. That there can be this kind of love in the presence of joy, hate, pain, fear is no longer an ideal. Deeper and deeper I fall—or rise as Pierre likes to say -- in this kind of love with the planet and the human race—myself included. On Tuesday nights during class and after retreats like this I am abundantly full of this love. This is what has changed most about me and this is why I continue to practice and teach.