EMBODIED RELATING
Explore the inner landscape that shapes the way you connect, honor yourself, and belong.
One-Day Experiential Retreat | Saturday, October 24 | 2–6
Full-Weekend Experiential Retreat | October 24–25 | 2–6 each day
Yellow Farmhouse Inn | Waitsfield, Vermont
The Foundations of Embodied Relating
Much of what shapes our relationships happens beneath conscious awareness. This immersive experience invites couples, individuals, partners, and pairs of family members or friends, to slow down and explore these deeper dynamics, and discover new possibilities for connection, authenticity, and choice.
Guided Experience
Brief teachings and experiential practices invite insight to emerge through direct experience, allowing understanding to become embodied and deeply integrated.
Embodied Awareness
Discover how sensations, emotions, beliefs, attachment patterns, and protective responses shape your relationships, creating greater awareness, flexibility, and choice.
Supportive Environment
Every workshop is grounded in respect, consent, curiosity, and choice, creating a space where authentic exploration can unfold at your own pace.
Experienced Facilitation
Facilitated with warmth, clarity, and over two decades of experience integrating somatic psychology, attachment theory, mindfulness, and experiential learning.
The body often knows before the mind understands. Relationships begin to change when we learn to listen.
What You’ll Experience
Embodied Relating begins with an exploration of attachment, the nervous system, parts work, and present-moment awareness, discovering how our experiences shape the ways we relate to ourselves and others. Together, we'll explore how protective relational patterns develop over time and continue to influence how we reach for connection, create distance, or protect ourselves in relationship.
From there, we'll move into guided, mindfulness-directed practices that deepen awareness of your own experience in the moment. Through partner and group exercises, you'll have opportunities to notice relational patterns as they naturally emerge. Rather than trying to change these patterns immediately, we'll first learn to recognize, understand, and meet them with curiosity and compassion.
As the retreat unfolds, you'll continue to strengthen grounding, internal resources, and awareness while revisiting familiar relational experiences in new ways. As these capacities grow, you'll begin to notice greater presence, flexibility, and choice in how you respond to yourself and others.
Throughout the afternoon there will be opportunities to move, pause to reflect, share observations, and integrate what emerges. Learning unfolds not only through your own direct experience, but also through witnessing the experiences and perspectives of others.
Midway through the retreat, we'll enjoy a nourishing break with tea and refreshments, including options that accommodate common dietary needs. We conclude with space for reflection, integration, and practical ways to carry the day's insights into your everyday relationships.
Continuing into Day Two
For those joining for the full weekend, Sunday builds on the foundations of Day One with a closer exploration of attachment, parts, and the subtle present-moment cues that shape our relational experience. We’ll move into more layered embodied and relational practices, with opportunities to explore these patterns in pairs.
The weekend culminates in a paired practice exploring your vision for how you most want to be in relationship with others—translating that vision into somatic language and experiencing it through the body, rather than only understanding it intellectually.
Retreat Schedule
Designed to unfold at a thoughtful pace, the workshop weaves together teaching, experiential practice, and relational exploration. Each experience builds upon the last, allowing insight to deepen naturally through curiosity, reflection, and connection.
Arrive and Welcome1:45pm
Foundations and Exploration2:00pm
Nourishment Break3:50pm
Deepening the Experience4:10pm
Closing and Departure6:00pm
A Place to Slow Down
The October Retreat will be held at the Yellow Farmhouse Inn in Waitsfield, Vermont, a beautiful and spacious setting surrounded by the landscape of the Mad River Valley.
The farmhouse offers a variety of spaces throughout the afternoon, giving pairs room to spread out and find privacy for their work together. Seven guest rooms have been reserved exclusively for our retreat; those not booked for overnight stays will become additional private spaces for paired exercises. Participants staying at the farmhouse may use their room as a private space for paired practices.
Between experiences, you're invited to step outside, wander the gardens, visit with the animals, settle onto a porch, or find a quiet place on the hillside to take in the views.
For those who would like to extend their experience overnight, guest rooms are available to retreat participants at a special discounted rate.
Meet Your Facilitator
HEATHER PARKER, LCMHC
For more than twenty years, I’ve worked with individuals, couples, and groups, with a particular interest in the patterns that shape how we relate to ourselves and one another. I’m drawn to the transformative potential of relationship as a place for healing, growth, and deeper connection.
Embodied Relating brings together the relational, somatic, and experiential approaches that have shaped my work, including attachment, parts work, nervous system awareness, and mindfulness. Rather than simply talking about relationships, we’ll explore them experientially—creating opportunities for greater awareness, choice, and embodied connection.
I facilitate these retreats with warmth, curiosity, and respect, creating space for people to explore at their own pace while feeling supported and welcomed.
Is This Workshop Right for You
Embodied Relating is an experiential learning workshop, not a psychotherapy group. While meaningful emotions may naturally arise, the experience is thoughtfully paced to support awareness, exploration, and growth rather than intensive trauma processing, working with significant relationship conflict, or crisis support. Together, we'll gently explore the edge of familiar relational patterns, where new awareness, flexibility, and choice can emerge without pushing beyond your capacity.
Because the workshop is experiential, participants should have the capacity to use their own grounding or self-regulation practices if emotions become activated. If you're currently navigating an acute emotional crisis or are unsure whether this workshop is the right fit, please reach out before registering.
Some exercises may include opportunities, using touch as part of learning about connection, boundaries, and nervous system activation and regulation. Though touch can be an important part of the somatic process, it is always consensual, and every exercise can be adapted without physical contact. Personal choice is foundational to every aspect of the workshop.
Experience a New Way of Relating
A four-hour experiential retreat for couples, individuals, family members and friends, seeking deeper connection, greater self-awareness, and more intentional relationships.
Join the October Retreat
ONE-DAY RETREAT
Saturday, October 24 | 2–6 PM
Early Registration: $150 through September 20
Regular Registration: $175 beginning September 21
FULL-WEEKEND RETREAT
Saturday & Sunday, October 24–25 | 2–6 PM each day
Early Registration: $275 through September 20
Regular Registration: $325 beginning September 21
Yellow Farmhouse Inn | Waitsfield, Vermont
Registration is per person
A four-hour experiential workshop for individuals and couples exploring attachment, the nervous system, and embodied awareness to cultivate greater authenticity, connection, and choice in relationships.