A Three-Day Retreat with Lissa Rankin, MD & Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv

TRANSITIONS & TRANSFORMATION

A Nourishing In-Person Retreat For Health Care Providers Navigating Change

Friday, September 20th - Saturday September 21st - Sunday, September 22nd, 2024
at the Acqua Hotel in beautiful Mill Valley, California

“Transition renews us.” – William Bridges

These are times of transition…

  • Maybe you’re transitioning from working within academia or the conventional medical system to a more creative life of entrepreneurship or self-expression;
  • Maybe you’re transitioning your relationship to medicine because you yearn deeply to be a force for compassion and healing in the face of human suffering, yet you’re struggling with burnout and compassion fatigue;
  • Maybe you’re transitioning your career because you struggle with the moral injury of participating in a medical system that gives lip service to patient wellbeing while ultimately being at the mercy of the financial bottom line;
  • Maybe you’re transitioning out of a long term relationship and needing a sanctuary for healing a broken heart.
  • Maybe you’re transitioning from being a full time parent to having an empty nest.
  • ​Maybe you’re transitioning from practicing medicine to retirement and whatever comes next. 
  • ​Maybe you’re transitioning one spiritual calling to another.

These are also times of deep transformation…

  • Maybe you’re transforming from being a compliant health care provider who does what you’re told to being more of a maverick;
  • Maybe you’re transforming your identity, letting go of martyring yourself for your patients and opening yourself to more creativity, self care, savoring of life, and pleasure.;
  • Maybe you’re transforming the way you show up with yourself and your “parts” on a healing journey.;
  • ​Maybe you’re transforming away from conflict avoidance and passivity towards more activism related to transforming our broken health care system;
  • Maybe you’re transforming your priorities, choosing to make your relationships as important as your career after years of putting medicine first;
  • ​Maybe you’re transforming your relationship to your creative side, no longer willing to suppress creative instincts in order to comply with institutional demands;
  • ​Maybe you’re transforming from rigid scientific materialism to someone who identifies more with your spiritual or mystical side.

This Workshop Is For You If...

  • You’re a licensed health care provider or therapist;
  • You identify as being in transition in some area of your life;
  • You’d benefit from a nourishing retreat aimed at helping you gain clarity;
  • You’re willing to get out of your head and into your heart, your body, and your intuition for a weekend;
  • You’re not allergic to writing, art-making, dancing, singing, meditating, light trauma healing work, and other healing modalities intended to support your transition and transformation.

Health Care Providers In Transition, You Are Invited To Join Us!

Being a health care provider or therapist is always intense, with burnout practically an inevitability at some point in our careers. But times are harder than usual these days. Especially for those of us who view our health care and mental health care service as a sacred calling, staying on purpose in our callings has been harder than ever for the past few years. In times like this, we need time to reflect, to reground, to regroup, to come together, and to consider transitions, transformation, and sometimes next steps for what's next. That's our intention for our first live, in person health care provider retreat since the pandemic.

Let’s honor what we’ve all been through during the years of the pandemic, acknowledge how many of us are navigating times of transition, welcome in transformation, and come together to fill our cups, let off steam, and bond together in a beautiful setting in nature in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Marin County at the beautiful Acqua Hotel, right on Richardson Bay in Mill Valley, at the watery foot of the glorious Mount Tamalpais.

We’ll slow down so we can feel ourselves, get in our bodies, and connect with one another and with our ourselves. We’ll be doing some writing to help you find your way to more clarity with that which is transitioning. We'll acknowledge what we've been through and digest what's happened, how we're feeling, and what's next. We’ll practice a bit of light Internal Family Systems (IFS) work to tend to the “parts” that might have different feelings and points of view about the transitions you might be navigating. We’ll make connections with other creative, trauma-informed health care providers who care about healing and transformation.
 

We’ll also have some fun. We'll make a group art project together and engage in rituals intended to help you tune into your inner guidance system, so you can make wise decisions from the most grounded, creative, mature aspects of your being, the wise Self that cannot be harmed, no matter how burned out you might be. We'll dance, we'll sing, we'll do some creative practices together, and we'll chill out by the Bay with wine and cheese -or tea and cookies- if you're needing to blow off some steam.
We'll bond and connect, network and brainstorm, put on our thinking caps about how to best handle our transition periods and pray to the Gods of intuition for guidance and Self-led decision-making during times of transformation. Most of all, we'll support one another, make friends, vision a better future in health care, and engage in community conversations about how we can still fulfill our truest callings without selling out our integrity, our health, our relationships, and our own "parts" that are burned out and dreaming about change.

Our intention is to send you home revitalized, recharged, and connected with new friends in health care who might support your transition and transformation. We hope you'll not only take home tools to support your journey, but also inspiration to fuel your vision quest as you navigate finding and fulfilling your calling in trying times, as you reconnect to your calling in creative ways that don't require you to deplete yourself in order to serve others. You'll meet others just like you and remember that you are not alone as a maverick in health care, dreaming of a healthier health care system and creatively trying to find your own unique way to help others who are sick, traumatized, and suffering.

As one student once said, many of us feel like we've jumped off the mothership of mainstream medicine, but we feel lost, adrift, like we're floating in a vast ocean of uncertainty. But there are many of us- and we're gathering for a metaphorical weekend cruise, so we come away feeling less lost, more connected to ourselves and each other, and more lit up with passion and purpose, fueled by the breath of inspiration and the bonding of our fellow journeyers.

Your Hosts

Dr. Lissa Rankin

Dr. Jeff Rediger

Why We Need A Sanctuary For The Broken Heart

The tragedy of relational trauma presents itself as a fragmenting of the wholeness of the soul. It unravels us more deeply than mere betrayal and cuts into us as a primal wound, one that leaves us feeling far less than the wholeness that is our natural state, our birthright. To dare to move beyond this kind of wound, to reach out to the wounded child in ourselves and to stretch a hand towards a trusted other, to say to the heartbroken inner child, “Come, sit, stay for a while, let us rest here together,” to trust enough to heal the broken heart and start to live,requires profound courage and knee-trembling risk.
The absence of trustworthy companionship, the feeling that one is existentially alone, the chronic unmet longing to be seen, heard, understood, validated, and most of all, loved and accepted for all of who we are, lies at the healing heart of all trauma. To offer up even a moment of unconditional positive regard to the inner child inside, to see and mirror back our hurt parts in their beautiful wholeness, to hold our own vulnerability safe, to remind ourselves that they are not and never have been broken, to show our respect for our own autonomy by allowing ourselves to have our sovereignty not only respected, but appreciated, to withhold judgment and offer up admiration for the ways we have managed to survive in a world that has not always been kind, to dare to love instead of transact, this is brave stuff. To refuse to sell ourselves out to someone else’s oh-so-conditional agenda while making it clear what’s okay and not okay in the field between two individuals, to learn also to do this for ourselves- this lies at the core of all healing.
But we cannot heal in isolation. Trauma that happens in relationship must be healed in relationship. The primary attachment relationship starts within our own hearts, where we celebrate a long-overdue reunion between the soul that cannot be broken and the broken-hearted little child who didn’t get loved enough. When those two reunite, when the bereft little child sees that we are here to rescue them, to hold the hurt inner child with the tenderest care, to be the parent to that little one who can finally redo what went wrong and make things right, harmony can be restored in the sanctuary of our own hearts. 
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography
Then we have to risk trusting other trustworthy beings. To become a place of refuge for ourselves, to make ourselves vulnerable to another fellow journeyer, to allow ourselves to receive solace inside our own hearts and then to risk reaching out, to seek that same solace in the arms of another, to build a container of trust and safety, to allow all that enters that field to become available for transformation without requiring it to be so, to dare to open our hearts without collapsing our right to have wants, needs, fears, and boundaries that keep us separate but still in the field of love, this is the promise of healthy, bilateral relationships that help you live a life your body will love, one that opens the door to the intimacy we all crave without erecting walls or engaging in “power over” or “power under” dynamics that foreclose intimacy.
It is the paucity of intimacy, the starvation of real, nourishing connection, that makes trauma survivors so lonely. In the absence of the intimacy we crave, we settle for transacting, and sometimes we get the raw end of the transactional deal, if we’re the giving tree, doing most of the giving. Because transactional relationships will never fill the void we yearn to fill with real love and intimacy, this way of selling ourselves out makes us even more lonely.
We wall up to protect our broken hearts, but then we’re encouraged to open up, to be vulnerable, to spill our guts and bare our souls, to divulge our secrets, to unguard our hearts. Yet not all who wish us to be open wish us well, and without good boundaries all around, openness can be masochistic. We may splay ourselves open, but at what cost?
We wall up to protect our broken hearts, but then we’re encouraged to open up, to be vulnerable, to spill our guts and bare our souls, to divulge our secrets, to unguard our hearts. Yet not all who wish us to be open wish us well, and without good boundaries all around, openness can be masochistic. We may splay ourselves open, but at what cost?
Souls are more robust than hearts. They can’t be broken and are never damaged. But Stanford chaplain and physician Bruce Feldstein, MD warns that the soul can become sore when we experience too much heartbreak, especially spiritual heartbreak. This “soul soreness” needs the kind of medicine no drug can provide. Only safe, intimate relationships- with ourselves and our inner children, with other safe enough people, with nature and the Earth, and with whatever we might call “God"- can nurture and heal the broken heart at the core of soul soreness.
“The soul can become sore when we experience too much heartbreak, especially spiritual heartbreak. This “soul soreness” needs the kind of medicine no drug can provide. Only safe, intimate relationships- with ourselves and our inner children, with other safe enough people, and with whatever we might call “God"- can nurture and heal the broken heart at the core of soul soreness.” -Lissa Rankin, MD

“Crawl inside this body, find me where I am 
most ruined - love me there.” - Rune Lazuli

 We Will Guide You Through

  • A series of experiential exercises to help tend to the state of your heart and optimize it for daring to risk love again;
  • Rituals to guide you into a portal of realistic possibility, in case you have hopeless parts that have simply given up daring to hope;
  • Psycho-education about the predictable patterns we can learn to avoid by spotting them early;
  • How to spot the green flags of healthy relationships, so you can avoid investing too much time in ones that are full of early red flags;
  • The basics of the IFS model, so you can learn how to foster the heart-opening, gobsmackingly effective Self-to-wounded child reunion- as an ongoing practice you take home with you;
  • IFS guided meditations to help you find the sanctuary within your own heart- one you can return to whenever you need refuge;
  • ​Embodied writing practices to move the broken-hearted energy through your body, into your hand, and onto the written page, which will be the repository for your pain and also an alchemical transformation of heartbreak into beauty;
  • ​Dancing to shake it all out and get your groove on!
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography

Schedule

Day One
Friday, September 20th, 2024
In this opening circle, we begin with getting to know each other through a community ritual, so please bring from home a small object that represents your transition or the transformation you’re yearning for. Then we’ll break into smaller groups, do a little writing, get clear on our intentions for clarity or transformation, and support one another with compassionate witnessing.
After dinner, you’ll have your choice of creativity stations, where you can participate in a group “Healing Blanket” art project or follow Write To Heal IFS-informed narrative medicine writing prompts and share what you’ve written with your fellow journeyers. Or try both!
3:00 pm Doors Open
3:30-5:30pm Opening Ritual
5:30-7:30pm Dinner Break 
(Wine & cheese in the hotel lobby, dinner on your own, restaurants are within walking distance)
7:30-9:00pm Creativity Stations

Day Two
Saturday, September 21st, 2024
8:30am Doors Open
9:00am-9:45am Morning movement Practice using NIA “Move To Heal”
9:45-10:45am Internal Family Systems Meditation and “parts work” to support different voices chiming in about the transition you’re facing, followed by movement practice for integration support 
10:45-11:00am Coffee/Tea Break
11-12:30am The Four Pillars of Healing from Jeffrey Rediger’s CURED research, tailored for those in transition 
12:30-2pm Lunch on your own (restaurants are within walking distance)
2-3:30 pm Intuitive Art & Mastermind to support transitions & transformation
3:30-3:45pm Coffee/Tea break
3:45pm- 5:30pm The Six Steps To Healing Yourself from Lissa Rankin’s Mind Over Medicine
5:30-7:30pm Dinner 
7:30-9:00pm Open Dialogue About The Future Of Medicine- lead by former Whole Health Medicine Institute (WHMI) Graduates

Day Three
Sunday, September 22nd, 2024
9:00am Doors Open 
9:30-10:00am Morning IFS practice
10-11:30am Entrepreneurship & Creative Medical Careers
11:30am-12:30pm Group Embodiment Celebration 
12:30-1:30pm Q&A with Lissa, Jeff, & WHMI graduates over lunch
1:30-2:00pm Book signing with Lissa & Jeff
Preparing The Heart With Internal Family Systems
10:45 am - 12:00 pm PT
Prepare for a dive into the sanctuary of your own heart, using a gentle version of the Internal Family Systems model. We will help you touch lightly into the pain at the root of the child who did not get their needs adequately met. With our wise, loving Self preparing the sanctuary for reunion, we can connect with and welcome the broken-hearted child that might cause us to choose relationships in adulthood that retrigger the wounds of the broken-hearted child. We will take that pain and get it out of our bodies and onto the written page, where it can be alchemized into beauty, healing, and medicinal art. Offering medicine to the wounded parts through the unconditional love of our own Self energy can be a balm for parts that may feel sad, lonely, rejected, and hopeless. The best antidote we have lives right inside. To prepare the heart to love someone else again, we have to start with loving even the most unlovable parts inside. IFS makes it easy to do this, and when we invest the energy in doing so, we prepare ourselves to be easier to love, warmer, less needy because we’re meeting some of our own needs inside, more available to both give and receive, and more attractive to those in our outer world.

Preparing To Better Protect The Strong But Fragile Heart
Lunch Break
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT
We’ll review some psycho-education about how to protect the fragility of the heart, so you don’t wind up letting old childhood traumas cause you to be reckless with your tender heart. We’ll review some of the basics of understanding narcissism and codependence from a trauma-informed, IFS lens, including what causes those painful dynamics, how to relate differently, and how to heal from past relationships that might have fallen into the narcissism/ codependence pairing. We’ll help you explore why you might have a backwards compass, one that thrusts you towards danger and pushes away safe people, setting you up to be retraumatized again and again. And we’ll help you get in touch with an inner guide, a healthy protector inside who’s got your back, so you can feel more confident preparing to love more openly, knowing you have wise protection anchored in, preparing to keep any vulnerable inner children safer, so you don’t splay those most vulnerable parts open for people who have not earned the right to that openness.
Doing The “YOU-Turn”
9:00 am - 10:30 am PT
We’ll introduce you to the “YOU-Turn”- a practice of unconditional love, nurturing, and support for the broken-hearted child who didn’t get loved enough- or got approval as a poor substitute for love. If you’ve been conflict avoidant, passive aggressive, or “spiritually bypassing” in your relationships, rather than holding others (or yourself) accountable and navigating real repair, the YOU-Turn is the antidote. We’ll help you navigate a healthy repair process with your own hurt parts first- since you can’t repair with others if you can’t bond and reunite your hurt parts with the unconditional love of Self energy. Then we’ll review what healthy repair requires, to help prepare you to face the inevitable imperfections of yourself and other people you choose to love. The YOU-Turn will help rebuild trust between the broken-hearted child and the mature, adult caregiver your wise Self can be now, which also helps you figure out who you can trust on the outside- with more clarity, less naivete, and greater discernment. We’ll also review some basics of healthy boundaries, so you can advocate for your parts to get core needs met in present time. We’ll use some creative practices to anchor in this act of radical self-nurturing and trust-building with the child inside who can be liberated from the burdens of the past to unleash magical child energy that can be used for healing.

Softening The Edges Of The Heart
10:45 am - 12:00 pm PT
When we’ve been hurt, we can understandably get prickly, closed-off, cynical, hopeless, or all of the above, and this can push people away before they even get to know us. We can also get desperate, clingy, frightened, and needy- and this can scare people off before they get a chance to bond. When we begin to tend to the sensitivities, needs, longings, and desires of our own hearts, we can soften these edges and make the heart more ripe for connection. We’ll share some neuroscience about why we harden up, and we’ll engage in some experiential exercises intended to help us soften our hearts- together, in community.
Lunch Break
Preparing Possibilities For Loving More Openly
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT
We’ll close out the workshop by visioning what you yearn for- allowing ourselves to be with the vulnerability of longing, desire, hopes, and dreams. We’ll engage in some juicy “as if” imagining- and explore what comes up when we dare to let ourselves feel into what we truly want- and maybe what we haven’t really had. If we can’t dream it, it’s hard to actualize what we truly want! We’ll use Intentional Creativity, music, writing, movement, and sharing to create the field of possibility, of hope, of realistic optimism, of visioning. But we’ll also focus on some practical tools that can help you do more than just vision, putting into practice trauma-informed ways of relating, including realistic expectations of yourself and others- that have the chance to protect your beautiful heart more as you prepare to love again.

TESTIMONIALS

Lissa, I really value your work. I've attended several of your workshops and appreciate your honesty and openness about who you are, as well as the insight you offer to relationships and and health. Adding your IFS perspective is also valuable to me as a IFS therapist.

I have loved this. I will go in quiet and stillness. Love to you all! Collaboration has indeed been lovely. My system is so glad to have been here and thankful to both the facilitators and all my fellow students for your leadership, vulnerability and sharing.

Lissa, IMHO, you are one of the clearest voices in our world who truly understands and therefore is able to clearly and directly articulate what trauma is. Your ability to describe its origins, how it presents and impacts people and therefore, societies, and how we can bring awareness and healing to.

You are masterfully subverting the dominant paradigm and I am confident you will succeed in overthrowing it!  
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography

“The unruined heart is something that we all carry. You can feel like you’re completely wrecked… But there are essential things—the soul and the heart—that cannot be harmed or killed or ruined.” 
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Bonuses

Relationships as the Guru
Audio Recording
When You're Single and Wish You Weren't with Katherine Woodward Thomas
Audio Recording
When Others Don't Want You to Wake Up with Joan Borysenko
Audio Recording
Spiritual Bypassing & Transformation Through Intimacy with Robert Masters
Audio Recording
Expectation Hangovers-in Relationships with Christine Hassler
Audio Recording
Sacred Sexuality 
with Rachel Carlton Abrams
Audio Recording
When Death Doesnt Part You 
with Kristine Carlson
Audio Recording
Spiritual Surrender & Conscious Break Ups with Tosha
Audio Recording
The Soul's Prison or an Alchemical Crucible with Anne Davin
Audio Recording

TRANSITIONS & TRANSFORMATION

A Nourishing In-Person Retreat For Health Care Providers Navigating Change

Early Bird Special • Save $200
$850 only $650
*Includes program and coffee breaks

*Accommodation and transportation to and from the venue is not included. Please reserve your room at the Acqua hotel as they might sell out. Meals are not included. Restaurants are conveniently located within walking distance. The cost of the workshop is non-refundable. Please review our refund policy before purchasing.

If the cost of this workshop presents a financial hardship, we hope you will contact us for other options . Please write to support@lissarankin.com 

Dr. Lissa Rankin
Lissa Rankin, MD, is a mind-body medicine physician and author of 7 books, who researches radical remission, trauma-informed medicine, and spiritual healing. She teaches memoir writing for therapeutic purposes, in addition to being an educator of Internal Family Systems (IFS). Lissa is currently co-writing her eighth book, YOU-Turn, with her partner Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv about the link between narcissistic abuse and medical illness, focusing on how healthy boundaries and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy can help reverse diseases related to nervous system dysregulation caused by relational trauma. 
Dr. Jeff Rediger
Jeffrey D. Rediger M.D., M.Div. is a distinguished academic physician with many years of experience in medicine, psychiatry, and spirituality. He serves as a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and is also the Medical Director of the McLean Southeast Adult Psychiatric Program and Community Affairs at McLean Hospital and the Chief of Behavioral Medicine at Caritas Good Samaritan Medical Center. His work has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey, Anderson Cooper 360, and Dr. Oz shows, as well as on TEDx.
TRAVEL INFORMATION
If you stay at the Acqua Hotel, on the water at the base of Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley, CA, where the retreat will be hosted, you can enjoy a full gourmet breakfast buffet and evening wine and cheese out by the water. Hotel guests have access to free bicycles that you can ride on the bike path around Richardson Bay. 

Coffee and tea will be provided for all retreat guests, but meals are not included. Several wonderful restaurants, including a sushi bar and an Italian restaurant are a brief walk or drive from the venue.

Many flights fly directly into SFO. If you fly into SFO, the Marin Airporter can drop you at the Manzanita stop in Mill Valley, where the bus driver can call you a cab or you can Uber less than a mile from the luxury airporter. You can also fly into the Oakland airport, but there is no direct airport shuttle from Oakland to Mill Valley. You can, however, fly to Oakland and rent a car or take an Uber. You're also welcome to rent a car from SFO if you want wheels. You'll have free parking at the Acqua Hotel if you're coming to the retreat, whether you're staying there or not. So if you prefer to stay in an Airbnb, another hotel, or with friends, you're welcome to do so.

If you wish to extend your visit, you'll be within an hour drive of Napa Valley and Sonoma County wine country. You'll be a short Uber to the ferry to go into San Francisco. You can Uber to the Angel Island ferry if you want to walk or bike around the scenic island off the coast of Tiburon. Or you can Uber into Sausalito to walk along the San Francisco Bay. Lissa and her team have lived in the Bay Area for many decades collectively, and we're happy to offer travel recommendations. Just email support@lissarankin.com.

We'll be setting up a private Facebook page for retreat participants, so if you want to share a room with another guest, you can self organize to do so. 
Should I Book My Travel Arrangements?
We ask that you wait on booking flights or other nonrefundable expenses until July 20, when we confirm a thumbs up on the event. But please reserve your room as the hotel might fill up for this weekend. If we cannot fill a bare minimum of students, we reserve the right to cancel the event, in which case you will receive a full refund. If you register, we will email you no later than July 20 to confirm that we’re a go! Please review details here: Refund Policy
How do I contact customer service?
Please contact us by sending an email to support@lissarankin.com
The Venue
The Acqua Hotel is a 49-room modern boutique hotel situated on the picturesque shores of Richardson Bay in full view of Mt. Tamalpais. You’ll appreciate both the peaceful natural setting and our prime location in the heart of the Bay Area. Acqua Hotel information is here. Onsite parking is free of charge.
Reservations 
Reservations at the Acqua Hotel can be made here
Arrival
The Acqua Hotel is located at 555 Redwood Hwy, Mill Valley, CA 94941. Airports: SFO San Francisco International Airport (1 hour) and OAK Oakland International Airport (1 hour). Onsite parking is free of charge.
© 2024 Lissa Rankin INC ·  All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

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If  the cost of this program presents a financial hardship then we hope you will contact us for a sliding scale option. Please write to support@lissarankin.com