We need to show up as our best selves: creative, resilient, compassionate, and whole. But the pace and pressures of life can make that difficult. 

You owe it to yourself and those around you to step away from the incessant noise that keeps you from living the whole, contributing life you yearn for.

We offer one-time retreats or retreat series that focus on calling and purpose, renewal and nourishment for the common good, and leadership development. 

We also offer retreat design consultations or retreat facilitation to help you to tailor an experience for your organization’s needs and purposes.

See below for more details on our retreats. 

Our Retreats

Birch Forest - Courage and Renewal Retreats

Courage and Renewal® Retreats

In these retreats, we invite you to reconnect what you do with who you are. You will enhance your vocational, emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing to tackle the challenges you face.

These retreats utilize the Circles of Trust® approach developed by author and educator Parker J. Palmer and the Center for Courage and Renewal. (For more information, please see the Center’s website and Palmer’s book, “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.”)

These retreats are commonly scheduled for late Thursday afternoon-Saturday afternoon, and include overnight lodging. Quiet and loosely structured, these retreats allow for healthy introspection and nurtures a sense of community.

We include a mix of interactive learning, individual reflection, small-group sharing, large-group dialogue, and free time to explore practices that deepen participants’ growth and sustain communities of ongoing mutual support.

Journey Toward an Undivided Life

Explore Your Life’s Calling in a Time of Transition

Who am I? What is my calling?
As one season of life gives way to the next, do I feel something is missing?

No matter where we are in life, questions like these don’t go away. In fact, as we move through life, these questions can take on new meaning and urgency. Especially in turbulent times or during tremendous challenges (and hope), it is crucial we make time to renew our spirits and to re-connect what we do with who we are.

What does the world need that wants to live through me? How can I live, work, and lead with more intention, authenticity, and purpose?

“Journey Toward an Undivided Life” is a rare opportunity to explore your own most profound questions of identity, purpose, and vocation. You will nourish the deep connection between soul and role and renew your capacity to live, work, and lead from a place of wholeness.

Milkweed ChangeMaker Corps

Rekindling Your Calling and Sustaining the Courage to Lead®

This unique and transformative experience brings together a cohort of adults across the course of a year for three weekend seasonal retreats (fall, winter, and spring/summer), supplemented by monthly peer-learning-circle video conferencing sessions and individual clearness consultations with a member of The Milkweed Group.

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The world needs more people, no matter their context, role, or “official” title, to lead with courage and integrity. The Change the World program nourishes the heart and soul of leadership by helping young adults to:

  • discern and clarify their callings

  • develop trustworthy relationships

  • listen more deeply to the voice of true self, and to the contexts in which they lead, work, and serve

  • nourish key “habits of the heart” (outlined in Parker J. Palmer’s book, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit) for fostering leadership

  • learn about, and cultivate capacities and skills of, adaptive leadership (see, for example, Sharon Daloz Parks Leadership Can Be Taught and Ron Heitetz, Leadership on the Line)

  • foster practices to sustain themselves and inspire others for the long haul

    work together to transform the institutions and communities they serve.

In large group, small group, and solitary settings, we will explore the intersection of our personal and professional lives, making use of stories from our own journeys and insights from poets, storytellers, scholars, artists, sacred texts, naturalists, musicians, filmmakers, scientists, and various wisdom traditions. Clearness Committees, a high-integrity and strictly confidential process of asking open and honest questions around a difficult issue within a small group, is often a key component.

Between and beyond the retreats:

  • Peer Learning Circles: Participants will convene by phone or web-based video conference in small (4-5 person) peer learning circles, which will meet for two hours each month between retreats. The Milkweed Group provides training and materials on how to conduct these circles, and once the circles are established they will function autonomously in the skilled hands of the cohort members.

  • Individual coaching/consultations: Each member of the cohort will also have access to individual coaching/consultation and spiritual accompaniment with Chris or another member of The Milkweed Group, monthly between the retreats (and, for a modest additional cost, for six months beyond the end of the series).

Additional Resources:

  • You’ll receive a bibliography of suggested reading and websites including suggestions of tools helpful in monitoring personal growth and clarifying values.

  • You’ll also receive a quarterly e-newsletter from The Milkweed Group, with information and resources to reinforce the learning, suggest healthy habits for self-care, and target focus areas of growth.

  • You’ll have access to optional Change the World alumni events (e.g., reunion retreats), and support from The Milkweed Group to implement ideas that come from your cohort.

Other workshop offerings include:
  • Big Questions Retreat for First-Year Students
  • CALM: Creating a Life of Meaning (for sophomores)
  • Coming Awake, Coming Home: Reclaiming Our Callings and Connection with the Earth
  • Explore Your Life’s Calling in a Time of Transition
  • Explore Your Life’s Calling in the Third Chapter of Life
  • Growing into an Undivided Life — a spring Courage & Renewal® retreat
  • Home: Leaving, Staying, Returning: A Winter Sabbath Retreat
  • Journey Toward an Undivided Life: An Introductory Courage & Renewal® Retreat
  • Living on Purpose: Seeds, Seasons, and the Undivided Life
  • Relax, Reflect, Remake: An Annual Spring Sabbath and Renewal Retreat
  • Seeds, Seasons, and the Undivided Life: A Courage and Renewal® Retreat for Young Adults
    (also versions for mid-life/mid-career, and for 3rd chapter of life)
  • Soul Sustenance for Change-makers
  • STOP retreat (Sophomores Thinking On Purpose)
  • Turning to Wonder: Awakening to the Spirit of Place
  • Wintering Through: A Courage and Renewal® Retreat to Explore Your Life’s Calling in a Time of Transition