Honoring and Clearing the Mother Path
A day retreat with Gena McCarthy RN, MFT
This is a hybrid retreat. Join us in person at 2929 24th street
OR online via Zoom: http://bit.ly/sfdharma (password: 108108)
As mothers, aunties, grandmothers, caretakers and meditators, we are the core of our families and communities. This workshop is designed to offer a place of rest and transformation within the embrace of our practice and community. By taking time to care for ourselves and witness the gifts we are offering, we will fortify our connection to ourselves, our families and our communities.
We will strengthen our connection with our spiritual and somatic refuges and our own strengths as people and as mothers. We will learn ways of resourcing ourselves somatically. We will have an opportunity to unpack some of the root imprints in our lifetimes or those of our ancestors that are connected with our current mothering issues. Through ceremony, we will have an opportunity to heal and reclaim the parts of ourselves that want repair. We will call in grace and ease to our birth and mothering paths while honoring our capacity for nourishing precious human life. We will deepen our ability to rest in our meditative practice, bodies and the earth. We will be supported to return to our lives renewed.
In this daylong retreat you will have the opportunity to:
- Experience the refuge of being supported by many loving wisdom beings and your earth body through a guided meditation.
-Connect with your strengths through learning an effective and swift somatic connecting practice
- Be witnessed for the gifts you have offered our world through connecting with a memory of them and sharing in dyads.
- Experience a guided meditation within the container of ceremony which repair our paths of birth and motherhood, such as difficult: births of your own or your children, relationships with your mother or mothering, abortions and miscarriages…
- Increase compassion for yourself, your family, your ancestors by reflecting on the connections with your issues and their experiences through a teaching and worksheet on these connections and sharing your observations.
- Develop a supportive, nurturing, and generative community through our sharing with each other with kindness.
Who Should Attend?
This retreat is open to all who identify as people mothering or grand mothering. It is also open to people struggling with issues of motherhood, becoming a mother or in their relationship with their own mothers. It is open to all genders.
Recommended Reading
There is no preparation needed for this retreat. However, you may enjoy reading from any of our recommended book list:
- Return to The Great Mother by Isa Gucciardi, Phd
- Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community by Sobonfu Somé
- The Tibetan Art of Parenting by Anne Maiden Brown
- Mothering from the Center by Tami Kent
- Healing After Birth by Jennifer Summerfeldt MACP
- Momma Zen by Karen Miller
- Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn
- The Mama Sutra by Anne Cushman
- The Fourth Trimester by Kimberly Ann Johnson
- Call of the Wild by Kimberly Ann Johnson
RETREAT SCHEDULE
10:00 -11:30 am Guided Meditations, somatic practices
11:30 - 11:45 am Break
11:45 am - 12:30 pm Teaching and worksheets
Lunch 12:30 - 1:30 pm
1:30 - 3:00 pm Ceremony with guided meditation
3:00 - 3:15 pm Break
3:15 - 4:00 pm Integration Meditation and Completion
This retreat is offered on a dana basis. All classes and sits at the San Francisco Dharma Collective are open to all. No one is ever turned away for lack of funds. Dana (generosity) supports our teachers to offer the dharma and maintains our center infrastructure. Suggested donation for the weekend: $30-60
Gena McCarthy RN, MFT is an EMDR certified perinatal psychotherapist and the mother of a beautiful man. She is the founder and developer of the Birth Spirituality and Healing Network, the Contra Costa County Perinatal Depression to Wellness Network and two local HMO Perinatal Integrative Health Programs. She co-founded the East Bay/ SF Peer Perinatal Professional Ceremony Circle and the SF Bay Tara Mandala Satellite sangha. She has been trained in cross cultural shamanic, Buddhist, Cherokee peacekeeping and healing trauma practices and perinatal psychology. She teaches Perinatal Professional Development Courses such as the Perinatal Ceremony Facilitator Training and Healing Birth Trauma with Bilateral Stimulation which prepare people to enter the birth field from the potency of their wholeness, open to wonder, confident to address trauma. She has offered The Spiritual Path of Birth and Motherhood Retreat at Tara Mandala for the last three years.
