Why?

You don't have to be clear about why you might want to come to this retreat. You don't have to know how you have come to the point in your life where you are reading these words on this website about a burnout retreat. Take a few moments to notice how you are feeling (not thinking) right now. How is this for you to tune into the emotional side of your life?

There is a challenge in writing or describing the burnout experience. It is a widespread phenomenon, but each of us has our own deeper story about it. I think about burnout quite a bit and it is always coming through my personal filter of what I know and feel. Each of us has a unique experience with burnout, just as we are unique individuals. This is why standard advice about healing burnout does not always apply. The information we need is already inside us, the answer always right next to the question. In this retreat you are supported in listening to your inner voice.

The “secret”, if it really is a secret, about how to deal with burnout is to know your own experience and process. Don’t try to apply your burnout to a description of it provided by someone else. Delving deeply into what you know and feel and think is how to tap into the energy to transform it. I call this composting the burnout itself. It is the temperature that is generated and so necessary in a compost pile that changes the weeds or leaves or grass clippings into the black moist humus that can enrich a garden for new plants.

I can provide the loosely designed container for gathering this compost. You bring the most important content to it. I can give you some possible contexts for it. I can respond to you by listening both from the perspective of inside my own burnout and from outside of it, simultaneously. This is how the burnout retreat works. I never know exactly how it will unfold.

Transformational "assignments" will have you contemplatively working alone part of the time and also in pairs, then coming back together to share with the group. You will be reading, journaling, taking a gentle walk in the forest of the big trees in Sequoia National Park. You will be creating mandalas, which are meditative circles (you don't have to see yourself as an artist to make these.) Using innovative exercises you will begin to metabolize your burnout, creating a framework, for welcoming your authentic work, that is organic, fluid, and alive with beauty.

The retreat is intentionally offered as a "retreat" so that you are removed from the stressful rat race you are living daily, trying to balance work, home and family obligations and finding precious little time left for you. The most potent healing or transformational aspect of this presentation is in your showing up. The natural landscape surroundings in the location of the retreat support you as you begin to experience your process working outside the proverbial box.

I understand burnout from both a personal and professional perspective, and it is my life experience, along with years of study and contemplation, that have given birth to this retreat. After 40 years of caring for patients, I now find myself assigned to care for anyone who finds themselves in a "burnout" place. I heartfully welcome this task. I look forward to sharing renewal and respite with you.

...Elsah