A Powerful Process for Developing and Maintaining Soul Friendships
A Day-long Exploration for Women
Saturday, October 13, 2007, 10AM-5PM, $75, Cincinnati

What is an Intentional Spiritual Friendship?
     Intentional spiritual friendships involve meetings with another person where each is invited and supported in contemplating, exploring, and expressing their deeper selves and their connection to the whole.  These intentional times together provide the opportunity and a safe structure for sharing what is close to the bone with someone you can trust, someone who has no agenda, someone who is not judging, analyzing, or labelling you.
     Such friendships are a sharing of equals and require mutuality.  They take place in sacred space, with the understanding that the inner world can be navigated more easily, for many people, by virtue of the presence of a listening partner, and that seeking to find words for what is often beyond words is a valuable process.
     In these intentional, regularly scheduled meetings, there is the continual opportunity to express to your partner the truth of what you are thinking, feeling, and experiencing as a result of your contemplation.  There is a structure, the time is divided equally, and agreed-upon guidelines of communication create utter safety.
Characteristics of Soul Friendships:
Intentionality: Why do these meetings need to be so intentional?  Can’t they just happen?  We all have brief and unplanned encounters that bring deep sharing of what is in our hearts, and these are a gift and always wonderful.  However, random meetings with friends tend to be more social, more conversational, and don’t address those deep soul needs for sharing our deepest thoughts, feelings, questions, and insights.  For this depth of sharing to occur, we need the sense of safety, luxurious time and space, and sacredness that intentional spiritual friendships involve.  Also, many of us have needs for deeper sharing than the average friendship, and quite honestly, some of our good friends are just not interested in talking about their inner life and spiritual journey.
Mutuality: These friendships are soul relationships of equal exchange, unlike therapy or spiritual direction, where one, by definition, takes on the role of attending to the other.  Wonderful healing can happen in such relationships, as I am sure we all know.  However, spiritual friendships are, by definition, completely mutual.  Time is divided equally and the friends take turns in the two roles of “contemplator/communicator/expresser” and secondly, “attentive, interested, accepting, and listening Presence.”
Priority, commitment, regularity: It is important that the two of you share a similar intensity of longing for this depth of sharing;  this is the only way that you will stick to a schedule on a regular basis.  It is not necessary for your partner to be a close friend in your life, only that they share this commitment to deeper exploration.
Topics Covered on This Day:
 The art of listening/witnessing in Presence
 How to contemplate: Allowing time for interior reflection
 Creating sacred space together
 Co-creating “ground rules” that work for the two of you
 Pitfalls in a continuing soul friendship
 Exploring the potential of the dyad format
 Communication and contemplation dyads
 How to find a spiritual friend
 Tips for maintaining a spiritual friendship
 Moving healthily through the minefield of communication
 Creating vibrant space which invites contemplation and self-expression
 Value of forming thoughtful and pertinent questions for focusing contemplation
 Trusting the process
The Value of Spiritual Friendship: Theresa's Story
     In passing on this powerful process, I feel as if I am sharing a precious jewel.  I have been fortunate to have encountered many wonderful teachers, teachings, and tools during my 30+ years on my spiritual journey.  However, meeting regularly with my soul friends, utilizing an agreed-upon structure, has been a vital source of support for me on this journey.  The weekly or bi-weekly meetings nourish my soul, help me access and clarify my truth, remind me what’s really important, and connect me with what is alive in me in the present moment.
     My first spiritual friendship began about 25 years ago, when my friend Tamara and I met weekly for over a year to explore and contemplate the meaning of “soul” and “spirit.”  Since that time, through various stages and living situations in my life, I have made such relationships a priority.  The main ingredient is a mutually shared yearning for the quality of attention and exploration involved in these friendships.
     On this day-long retreat, I would like to share with you some of my discoveries, learnings, pitfalls, and joys, in the hope that you might find that spiritual friendship can work for you, too.

“When humans meet in a state of presence, this creates a “pool” of presence, and each apparent individual can draw on that and can contribute to that.  It is a two-way process.  There is a sacredness in groups that meet in this field.” 

Many of us have a need to be a part of a spiritual community, where we are supported to explore, experience, and share new ways of being, and where the pace and depth of our own unique process is accelerated by collective intention and energy.  It is often difficult to have this deep need satisfied by our friendships and a spiritual community gives us the opportunity to share what is close to the bone with others who are similarly committed.

At the Center for Personal and Spiritual Growth, instead of concentrating on a particular form or set of beliefs, we feel it is in the honoring of the present moment as the truth of life that authentic community emerges.  A spiritual community is growing at the Center whose primary commitments are:
• to be as present in each moment as possible and
   to embrace true responsibility
• to be honest and authentic with ourselves and others
• to be grateful when we are triggered by others 
   and see it as an opportunity for healing
• to be generous and loving whenever possible
• to be in right relationship (conscious and loving)
   with the ways we are pulled out of presence.

Come join us for a day-long retreat where we will support each other in entering and maintaining Presence.  Areas of focus will be:
• bringing consciousness and love to the ways we are       
  pulled out of presence
• bringing awareness to the ways we become
  entangled with others
• feeling our feelings without getting caught in their
  story 
• releasing ourselves from judgment, blame, and guilt

Connecting with Soul, Renewing the Spirit
A Week in Ancient Forests of the remote Northern California Coastal Region
Spending an extended period of time in the natural world helps us to recover realms of our inner lives, spiritual realms lost to us through the hectic pace of modern life.  A retreat in nature can be a restorative healing encounter with our true self, our inner knowing;  it  nurtures our soul and rekindles our spirit.
Limited to 8 participants
Sign up early to assure your space.
Call or e-mail for brochure.

Three times a year at Grailville Retreat Center in Loveland, Ohio, Theresa provides women an opportunity to retreat for a day, away from ordinary life, away from endless day-to-day responsibilities. Although the themes vary, each day-long retreat offers women a chance to deepen their own development as wise, creative, and empowered spiritual beings. Hundreds of women traveling the path of self-discovery and soul-care have found profound value in these periodic gatherings of like-minded women. Come join this community of women committed to growth, creativity, and spiritual deepening.

"For one human being to love another, that is the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other is but a preparation."
Rainer Maria Rilke

Relationship provides us a great opportunity for enrichment, connection, openness and compassion. Unfortunately, most of the time we are caught in habitual patterns of defensiveness, blame, judgment, dissatisfaction, fear, guilt, avoidance, and submission. This innovative, powerful method, called Compassionate Communication, offers a way to pay attention to four basic areas (see Four Components of Compassionate Communication on article page) that take us beyond our self-alienating habitual reactions to a place of openhearted communication. In this workshop we will spend time helping each participant recognize their blocks to communication that is open, direct, honest, yet kindhearted. We find that people best learn this approach by doing it; we will provide exercises so that each participant has time to fully practice the method. The workshop is for couples as well as individuals. Compassionate Communication works in committed relationship, in friendships, between children and adults, and in the workplace. We truly have a choice about what we can create in our relationships; Compassionate Communication provides a clear and simple road map. http://nonviolentcommunication.com
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