Healing Retreats for Women
Women’s Retreat NSW
William Shakespeare declared that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
The three acts of a theatre performance correlate with the three adult development phases.
Similarly, the female journey is that of maiden, mother and crone (male equivalents being the buck, father and sage).
Developmental psychologist Bill Plotkin argues that 80% of humanity is stuck in the adolescent phase of maiden or buck.
Dorothea Dooling contrasted the mythic view of life with the anaemic counterpart of conventional success or dry rationalism, saying:
A human being is born to set out on this quest, like a knight of Arthur’s court… how terrible to think of not being the hero of one’s own life; this is the role for which each of us is cast, no matter how unsuccessfully we play it. And if the part seems too big, if we picture the hero as being indeed “more than life sized”, it is because our own daily life has dwindled, become less than real, and only pygmy proportions seem natural to us.
Novelist Julian Barnes captured the emptiness of mainstream living in his book The Sense of an Ending with the elderly protagonist saying:
What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.
It could be argued that the path of the feminine helps us enlarge our existence to incorporate that of higher purpose, the poetic, the path of the heart, exploration of the soul and a mythic orientation.
One of the great tragedies of a patriarchal culture dominating for so long is that the feminine approach has been devalued and overlooked.
Female Retreats
Our Maiden to Mother retreat provides an initiation into healthy adulthood in order to prepare for our golden years, that of eldership or cronehood. It is designed for those aged 19-40.
In addition to this program, we offer a number of retreats designed to help you navigate each developmental phase leading up to elderhood.
LEARN ABOUT reconciling with your childhood RETREAT
LEARN ABOUT OUR reconciling with your adolescence Retreat
LEARN ABOUT OUR navigating the midlife passage retreat
LEARN ABOUT OUR healing our mother & father wounds retreat
LEARN ABOUT OUR gestating retreat (finding presence through silence)
