New Year’s: Open Heart, Peaceful Mind

A Pendle Hill New Year’s Retreat with Valerie Brown

December 28, 2023 – January 1, 2024

For nearly two decades, hundreds of people have welcomed the New Year at Pendle Hill with the gift of this retreat designed to rest, reflect, renew, and restore. At these times of high stress and high anxiety, we need now, more than ever, to exhale deeply and feel fully nourished through resilience-building, heart-opening, and peace-making practices. We can’t do this alone. We need a caring and supportive community and space and time to be nurtured and supported.

Many of us live with anxiety, worry, and stress about relationships: caring for aging parents, worry about our children, seeking connection and belonging in an all-too disconnected world. Some of us feel frustrated about social justice issues like climate crisis, gun violence, and social equity that are beyond our capacity to influence.  We can get caught in self-limiting beliefs, cynicism, and perfectionism that sabotage us on the way to real change. This year’s retreat theme is Becoming Your One True Love. We focus on truly loving and accepting ourselves as we are as the foundation for creating meaningful relationships with ourselves, with others, with our communities, and our society.

This retreat includes periods of silence, reflection, group discussion, creative arts, walks in nature, deep relaxation, and mindful movement. Savor guided meditation and extended periods of silence to deepen discernment about how to live your best self as you close the year and enter the New Year.

You will learn how to:

• Choose love when conditions are uncertain and ambiguous.
• Reflect on what matters most with soul-amplifying questions.
• Align your values with your work for a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
• Cultivate body intelligence and body awareness.
• Show yourself real kindness through self-compassion.

Surrounded by a supportive and caring community, you will restore balance and calm, and feel uplifted toward the best version of you, and return home with a Becoming Your Own True Love Plan of Action and other tools to create greater peace and belonging in your life.