Feel. Connect. Expand. - An Immersive Experience - Retreat 2018

In this day and age we are bombarded by information. People are eager to tell us what it is, and what it isn't - to give us the answer - what we should do to live a better life. We are of the mind that change happens when we don't look to others for an answer - it happens when you drop into your experience and feel it fully.

Feel. Connect. Expand. is an invitation to abandon the city and engage with nature for an immersive weekend experience as we bring our unfiltered selves forward. We will feel from our depths and engage with others in the richness of connection. As we expand further into our hearts - we transform ourselves - grounding into our own inner wisdom.

During the course of the weekend, you will have the opportunity to participate in Circling, Somatic Movement and Expression, Relating Games, Dancing, Connection Explorations and more. This wide spectrum of activities, along with small circle sharings will help you welcome, reclaim and integrate your experiences.

So why would you want to drop into your experience instead of avoiding it and hiding it from yourself & others? Why would you want to try to feel and express it fully with others?

Well, you may...

Gain access to deeper relationships (friendships, intimate, professional).
Improve your ability to communicate with others without filtering yourself.
Start to express your boundaries and have them heard.
Feel more comfortable with expressing your sexual desires.
Experience more passion and vitality.
Honor your desires before others.
Avoid unsatisfying or disappointing relationships.
Stop hiding from friends and family.
Gain clarity with big decisions in your life.
Feel more understood by others.
Move from a perception of scarcity to one of abundance.
Gain a deeper connection and trust of your feelings.
Reconnect or deepen your connection with your spouse or partner.
Reconnect or deepen your connection to your job.
Reconnect or deepen your connection to the modern world we live in.
Gain clarity towards your purpose in life.

If any of these sound appealing to you (and we hope they do), then perhaps our weekend immersion is right for you. The sessions and exercises available to us at Feel. Connect. Expand. will give access to increased self awareness, emotional expression, deep presence and inspiration to gain the tools and clarity we all desire to come into deeper connection with our power.

Praise from 2016 Participants

"The leadership team was excellent, very present and trustworthy."

"As someone who had huge personal expectations, my mind was blown apart by the overall experience. Very well done!"

"FCE made me feel myself."

"I loved the experience and felt I connected with many people during the week-end.

The leadership team was excellent and provided a safe environment as well as opportunities for us the participants to get out of our comfort zones."

"I loved it all! And I intend to pursue Circling on a regular basis."

In responding to "How much do you think you achieved your intention for the weekend?", 69% said "I thought I did well", 8% said "There was some progress" and 23% said "I killed it.", no one chose the "Not so Much" response.
In responding to "Did your experience meet your expectations?", 8% said "I'm not aware I had (or I purposefully did not create) any expectations", 38% chose "My experience met my expectations" and 54% chose "My experience well exceeded my expectations", no one the chose "fell short" or "didn't even come close" options.
The majority of respondents chose 9/10 for their rating of their overall experience. 8 and 10 were tied for second.
77% rated the financial value of the weekend a 5/5
85% said they would register for the exact same event again and we also received a lot of great feedback which we will be incorporating into this Fall 2018 weekend.
The average praise across the board for the venue (food, accomodations) was a 4/5 (Very Good)

What to expect at Feel. Connect. Expand.

Experiences

Circling

Circling is an organic, in-the-moment intersubjective process that's equal parts art-form, meditation, and group conversation - all designed to allow a visceral experience of connection and understanding of another person's world, celebrating who and where they are right now. It is said that change often happens by accident, and that the practice of circling makes us more accident-prone.

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Somatic Movement and Expression

Who would you be if you didn't hold yourself back? How would you feel if you allowed yourself the permission to express your impulses? Through slow and safe experiences, we will explore moving out of our habitual patterns to see who and how we could be in relationship. These sessions will be aimed to include and integrate the body into the process of relating throughout the weekend.

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Connection Lab

We have a variety of relational "experiments" (aka games) that involve exploring someone else's world and/or speaking your truth. They help stretch various "emotional muscles" such as curiosity, awareness of self and awareness of other. These containers provide a excellent context from which to notice impact as we play mirrors for one another, often focused in the present moment (or the here-and-now).

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and more...

There will be over 20 hours of scheduled sessions over the course of the weekend, during which we'll use the above practices along with others such as T-Group and Active Meditations, family check-in's, along with conscious and contact improvisational dance in the evenings to further integrate your experience.

A quick note on scheduling and transport

Our Opening Circle will take place after dinner (served 6:30, break until 8:00) at 8:00pm. Participants are expected to be present during this session. That said, we will open the venue to arrivals, on-site registration and warm-up games starting at 5pm.

In closing the weekend, we expect to wrap-up the closing circle by 4:00pm on Sunday.

For those driving to the venue, or looking for a drive to and from the venue, we'll open up a discussion on Facebook and Meetup around the 15th of November to help attendee's facilitate this process.

Facility

We've chosen the beautiful and clean Ecology Retreat Center in Mono, Ontario again as our venue for 2018.

Located just outside Orangeville, and only a couple miles from the Hockley Valley resort, access via car is only about 60-90 minutes outside the GTA. As we near closer to the event date, we will invite those who are seeking and offering shared transporation to join a facebook group designed to help link those people together.

Pricing is based on shared accomodation (minimum of 2 per room). We have exclusive access and there are 20 rooms total hosting upwards of 70 people in total. Rooms are simple, and clean. In the Lodge there are 15 rooms and most have 1 double bed and 2 twins in each, along with a night table, lamp and closet. The Lodge has Men's and Women's washroom facilities, 4 showers each, 5 toilets and 7 sinks. In the Bunkhouse there are 5 rooms, 2 bunks per room. Each has a shared night stand and lamp, wall hooks and hangers. Washroom facilities are shared, 2 showers, 2 toilets and a sink.

The lodge has a large lounge area with several sofa's and chairs.

A total of 6 meals will be served, Dinner on Friday, Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner on Saturday and Breakfast and Lunch on Sunday. The retreat center's catered meals start at vegetarian. Special dietary requests (such as meat protein and/or diesease and/or allergies), can be honored at a modest surcharge per meal. A form will go out to registrants a couple weeks in advance of the event date to collect that information.

Leadership

Joanna

Joanna is a Relationship Coach, ART Council Co-Lead and ART certified Circling, T-Group, Connection Lab facilitator, course leader and developer. As a coach she focuses on the relationship with self first in order to better integrate relationships with others. Her aim is to make herself obsolete in her clients' lives by empowering them with relational tools to move forward with trust. She has been an ART member since 2012 though it took her six months before she gained the courage to attend an event. Once she did, her life shifted dramatically and now she's made it her mission to not let others wait as long as she did.

Taylor

Taylor's journey with personal development began in 2013. Post-divorce and in a new dating relationship (with Joanna) the introduction to Authentic Relating and Circling through Authentic Relating Toronto (ART) was immediately transformational. This quickly led to a leadership path within ART, joining the council and completing trainings and certifications for the various AR/Circling modalities. In 2014, longing to deepen his relationships and share what he had learned, he assembled and lead a men's group. During a transitional period in ART, Taylor decided to take over the reigns (with Joanna) and adopt ART into a purposeful business. Through this process he developed and co-developed several relational leadership and faciliation training courses between 2015 and 2018. Taylor's also recently co-founded Emergent Developmental Concepts, a corporate workshop and leadership consultancy company to bring his decades in the professional sector together with new capacities in cutting-edge leadership practices and theory.

Sanjay

Sanjay is passionate about helping people be authentically themselves and re-claiming their full energy and aliveness. He specializes in working with the mind-body connection and he strongly believes that when we own and express our feelings, we come into deep contact with ourselves and the whole world. He is a Bioenergetics Practitioner and in his final year of training at the Radical Aliveness Institute, a program that trains leaders to lead powerful transformational groups.