Impact

BEAUTIFUL RETREATS TO WORK ON LOVE

One great way to celebrate your love is to experience a couples retreat, where you can connect or reconnect with each other’s minds, bodies, hearts, and souls. We’ve collected a few ideas about some beautiful couples retreats offering workshops this year.

GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT: ESALEN INSTITUTE

Set high on the cliffs, at Big Sur, south of Monterey, California, the Esalen Institute is a spiritual retreat center steeped in the countercultural ethos of the 1960's. It sits on 120 acres, with a deep ravine and river running through its middle and geothermal springs bubble up from its core. The Pacific Ocean tosses and tumbles below.

People come here to find themselves and each other.

With workshops themes such as Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Compassion; Shamanism and the Modern Mystical Movement; Radical Aliveness and Core Energetics, this is a place were you can both dive deep and soar to astral planes as you take personal journeys.

Joan Baez, Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Maslow, and Susan Sontag are among the notables who have experienced the magic of Esalen in the past 50 years since its inception.

While you may have missed two of the major couples workshops offered by the Esalen Institute happening this Valentines Weekend, there is one more coming up next month.

Getting the Love You Want: A Workshop for Couples, led by Rick Brown, is based on Harville Hendrix's best-selling book, "Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, 20th Anniversary Edition ". See more about Harville Hendrix at Omega Institute, below.

This workshop is designed to help couples understand at a deeper level why they were attracted to each other, why they get stuck in endless power struggles, and how to safely begin to work through those stuck places toward a safer and more satisfying relationship.

Couples share privately. They explore:

New communication skills to break destructive cycles of relating
How to channel the energy from arguments to create passion and stability
How the unconscious forces that attract partners to each other are also the source of conflict
New tools for re-romanticizing their relationship to reestablish the passion of their early time together
How to use their relationship for emotional healing and spiritual evolution

Activities include lectures, written exercises, guided imagery, and live demonstrations of communication skills and processes.

Please note: This workshop is for couples only.

03.07.14 - 03.09.14

GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT -- OMEGA INSTITUTE

A Spiritual Path for Couples

The Getting the Love You Want workshop emphasizes conscious relationship through the development of new communication and awareness skills. It aims to help couples achieve wholeness and spiritual growth.

Based on Imago Relationship Therapy, it has helped thousands of couples around the world experience the profound connection that results from the mutual healing of their childhood and relational wounds.

During the weekend, we focus on viewing couplehood as a spiritual path. In the process, we are assisted in discovering and developing the innate spiritual potential of our own relationship.

Couples new and old, in crisis or in love, married or unmarried, are invited to join this workshop with Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. It is open to all people interested in understanding and deepening an intimate partnership.

Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, are cocreators of Imago Relationship Therapy and the concept of the “conscious marriage.” Harville is author of NY Times Bestseller, Getting the Love You Want.

10.10.2014 -10.12.2014

HEALING YOUR SOUL: OVERCOMING BLOCKS TO LOVE THROUGH PAST-LIFE EXPLORATION -- KRIPALU

Join world-renowned psychic and author Ainslie MacLeod for a fascinating journey into your soul’s past. In this workshop, you’re guided back to prior incarnations to remove blocks and heal emotional wounds so that you can create deeper and more lasting relationships.

Whether you’re seeking your soul mate or want to create more fulfilling relationships with loved ones, healing past-life trauma can help you to:

Eradicate fear surrounding intimacy and commitment
Overcome limiting beliefs that block your ability to receive love
Deepen friendship
Heal the effects of rejection and other emotional hurts

06.27.2014 - 06.29.2014

LOVING YOUR WAY TO ENLIGHTENMENT: THE PATH OF OUTRAGEOUS LOVE - KRIPALU

Loving Your Way to Enlightenment: The Path of Outrageous Love

This program is about the search for your beloved. It’s about falling in love with the Divine and everything else.

What does it take to live outrageous love? Through a set of powerful teachings, insights, meditative transmission, movement, chant, and partner work, Marc Gafni and Annie Lalla explore the path of the outrageous lover and teach you how to ignite the experience of outrageous love within yourself.

This workshop offers insights into:

Radical perception and activism
Quivering tenderness
Radical self-challenge and self-acceptance
Artistic self-creation
Radical devotion.

06.06.2014 - 06.08.2014

LUXURY NUDE YOGA RETREAT -- VAILLA MATHIS, BALI

Discover the power of naked freedom and become a part of this enlightening journey at Vailla Mathis, a boutique hotel, surrounded by beautiful rice paddies, situated in the delightful, stylish little village of Umalas, near Seminyak, Bali.

This retreat can take you to a new level of awareness, overwhelm you with positive emotions, and illuminate your soul. You and your lover can experience enlightening workshops and sensitivity explorations -- all au naturel.

05.25.2014 - 05.31.2014

The Tantra Love Guide offers a series of workshops around the country for couples interested in Intimacy Coaching, Tantra Yoga, and other spiritual sensual paths. Participants report intense pleasure, deep sexual connection with their partners, complete openness and overwhelming love.

Enter this week’s BN Competition. Our theme this week is Beautiful Love. Send in your images and ideas. Deadline is 02.16.14.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Cover Photo: by Mike Baird.

1. Courtesy of Esalen. The hills and coast at the Esalen Institute.

2. Courtesy of Esalen. The Big Sur Coastline at the Esalen Institute.

3. by Doug Ellis. Esalen Institute.

4. Courtesy of Esalen.

5. by Ken Wieland. Omega Institute Campus at Omega Lake, Rhinebeck, New York.

6. Photo: Courtesy of Kripalu.

7. by Amy Spears. Kripalu Grounds.

8. Courtesy of Kripalu.

9. by Mikaku. Bali, Indonesia.

10. Courtesy of Khowan. Rice paddies around Villa Mathis.

11. Courtesy of The Tantra Love Guide.

12. Courtesy of Lillage.