10:00
18:30
8th Jan 2022
Saturday
One-day Online Meditation Retreat
$80 $40 $20 $1

Overcoming Obstacles to Exploration

A Day-long Experiential Workshop on Developing Better Exploration Abilities Using Guided Meditation

One-day Online Meditation Retreat
  • Date: Saturday, 8th Jan 2022
  • Instructor: Cedric Reeves
  • Cost: Sliding scale
This event has ended

In this experientially focused online meditation workshop we will work towards healing our deep attachment conditioning with a special emphasis on improving our abilities to explore life and find what is personally meaningful to us. Underdeveloped exploration and self-development are especially relevant to those of us with anxious preoccupied attachment patterns.

Format

  • One-day Online Meditation Retreat: 8 hours, 30 mins total.
  • Live Online Sessions: The live sessions will be hosted on Zoom. An email with the zoom links will be sent to you after you have registered.
  • Q&A: There will be opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A section.

Attendance & Recordings

  • Partial attendance is fine - however you get best results if you attend all sessions.
  • Late Starts: You can join even after it has started.
  • View at your own pace: The event will be recorded and sent out to registered participants for viewing on your own schedule.

Event Date & Time

The retreat runs for 8 hours, 30 mins total. Partial attendance is perfectly fine.

What to Expect

Guided meditation will be the main focus of the program. There will be ample opportunity to ask questions and share whatever you feel comfortable with. There will be no pressure to do so; passive participation is perfectly fine.

This day-long workshop will focus on working through negative early attachment conditioning especially as it relates to exploration and self-development. We will approach this from attachment theory and attachment repair perspectives.

We’ll do this work primarily through guided meditations along with relevant psycho-education

Attachment Theory describes one of the earliest phases of our psychological development. It describes the behaviours of the infant from ages 6 months to three years of age when it ventures away from the caregiver to explore and then goes back to seek safety, affection, and care from the ‘secure base’.  These early experiences imprint on us forming emotional memories (schemas) that go on to condition many aspects of life thereafter.

When the ‘secure base’ isn’t entirely secure our exploratory capacities and self development are undermined. We’ll focus on fixing this conditioning through direct attachment repair work (guided meditations).

The workshop’s structure is set up such to help us heal common aspects of disordered attachment conditioning (emphasis on anxious preoccupied attachment). There will be four guided meditation sessions focused the four Schemas of the “Schema Domain” of “Impaired Autonomy and Performance” These four Schemas all related back directly to the exploration end of attachment conditioning.

According to Jeffery Young “An early maladaptive schema is a pervasive self-defeating or dysfunctional theme or pattern of memories, emotions, and physical sensations, developed during childhood or adolescence and elaborated throughout one’s lifetime, that often has the form of a belief about the self or the world.” Jeffrey Young also calls the schemas “life traps”.

We will work towards healing and dismantling them in this workshop!

The form of meditation that we’ll use is the “Schema Repatterning Meditation”  This meditation uses the “Perfect Nurturers” to reparent our inner, vulnerable child and thereby bring about emotional memory reconsolidation and related positive change.

Retreat Overview

This program is suitable for beginners to meditation and healing work.

Details about modalities

The technique that we’ll be using, the “Schema Repatterning Meditation” is influenced by Jeffrey Young’s Schema Therapy approach, Dan Brown and David Elliot’s Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (IPF), and Bruce Ecker, Laurel Hulley, and Robin Ticic’s Coherence Therapy.

Schema therapy was developed by Jeffrey Young in response to seeing how traditional Beckian Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was ineffective for patients with more serious disturbances like personality disorders. 

IPF was developed particularly to treat insecure attachment.

Coherence therapy is a therapeutic modality that focuses on bringing “transformational change” through emotional memory reconsolidation.

Workshop’s Structures: Schemas, Psycho-Education and Guided Meditations

Schemas

We will do psycho-education and reparative meditations on each the following schemas:1 

  • Dependence/Incompetence
  • Vulnerability to Harm and Illness
  • Enmeshment/Undeveloped Self
  • Failure

Moreover we’ll investigate how each of these schemas manifest as behaviors (schema modes); particularly the coping modes of surrender, avoidance, and overcompensation.  Then we’ll regress back to the vulnerable child mode and feel into the schema, studying how it was brought about through difficult childhood experiences.  Then we’ll reparent the vulnerable child around those difficult experiences.

 

Psycho-Education

We will start with a brief lecture on attachment theory, attachment repair, the Schema Repatterning Meditation using Perfect Nurturers, and Schema Therapy.

Then, before each guided meditation on each schema listed above, we will do a brief psycho-education on that particular schema drawing both from Jeffrey Young’s Schema Theory and Attachment Theory.

Guided Meditations

Guided meditation will be the primary means for working through the schemas. We will be taking an attachment theory based re-parenting approach in the guided meditation. These meditations will give us corrective emotional experiences. The “perfect nurturers” will reparent our inner, vulnerable child in the meditation. These meditations will help us remap the ‘internal working model of attachment’

We will apply each of these meditations to each the five schemas listed above:

  • Schema Repatterning Meditation, a meditation in which our “perfect nurturers” reparent our inner, vulnerable child.
  • Tong Len, a Tibetan Buddhist compassion meditation. This will help us cultivate compassion generally and also particularly around the schema in question. Moreover, by considering how others suffer with the same schemas we will see how we are not alone in our difficulties. This helps to normalize the painful experience of the schemas. Moreover, compassion around our shared difficulties further builds solidarity and a sense connection with others.
  • Positive Opposite meditation will open up our imagination to see how we can move past our schema “life traps” and open up to the positive opposite of our schemas. Thereby we see new and better possibilities for our lives. That helps us actually change the behaviors towards the positive;
  • Mentalization exercises. Mentalization, also known as metacognition is the ability to reflect on your own and others’ mental states. This helps us understand the motivations that drive behavior. Weak mentalization abilities are correlated with poorer functioning in life, and psychological disorders like personality disorders, depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse disorder. Strong mentalization is a hallmark of robust mental health. Understanding your own and others mental states helps to develop confidence in making sense out of the world and your experience of it. All the guided meditations will be peppered with instructions that encourage looking back at one’s own mind state and the mind states of others. This will improve our mentalization abilities.

 

Miscellaneous Notes

There will be time for Q&A and spot coaching.

We will be doing deep work. For that reason please feel free to take a break at any point.

Walking Meditation / Breaks / Journalling

Most hours will consist of a 20 minute walking meditation session and a 40 minute seated guided meditation session. The walking meditation sessions will serve to help integrate the previous guided meditation session. Brief walking meditation instruction will be offered. Alternatively these 20 minute sessions can be used to journal or to just take a break. All three will help you integrate the previous guided meditation session.

Who is this for?

This program is for those of us who...

  • Want to become more joyous
  • Want to enjoy meditation more
  • Are looking to improve our psychological health, especially those who have tried other healing modalities with disappointing results.
  • Have problems with exploration and self development, relationships and emotional regulation
  • Want to optimise our psychological health
  • Want to understand the early foundations of our psychological development

Healing Together

  • Shared interest and social support can make meditation practice, study, and healing much easier.
  • Make friends in the course on the slack channel and invite friends who you think could benefit to participate in the course.

Benefits

These are some of the benefits you will have by the end of the program

Theoretical Understanding

  • A basic understanding of attachment theory and how to start doing it.
  • A more coherent understanding of the role your childhood experiences had in producing your adult personality.

Psychological

  • A better sense for the importance of your personal explorations as a source for meaning in your life and more clarity on how to proceed in life towards those explorations and goals.
  • A full day of attachment repair meditation that will start moving you towards a secure attachment conditioning and a greater ability to do self-development and explore what is personally meaningful to you.
  • A very effective way to do emotional regulation on the spot in your daily life with ‘micro-hits’ of Schema Repatterning Meditation.
  • A better ability to observe your mind with metacognitive awareness as a result of the mentalization exercises peppered through the guided meditations.
  • Better understanding of your own relationship shortcomings and how to remedy them.
  • Less identification with your psychological maladies and quirks (ego-distonia with your maladaptive schemas).
  •  

For your relationships

  • Greater understanding and compassion for psychological problems and vulnerabilities that effect yours and others.
  • Less blame of self or others.
  • A sense of camaraderie as a result of seeing how our psychological difficulties are rooted in common experiences that affect us all.
  • Better appreciation for the importance and value of interpersonal collaboration generally and especially as it relates to supporting you do the explorations that.

Support Structure

  • Opportunities to find accountability partners to meditate with
  • Slack group with which to discuss and share experiences and consolidate what you are learning

Frequently Asked Questions

About Participation

Are there any prerequisites to attend?

Is the course compatible with therapy/counselling/psychotherapy?

Technical Questions

How do I access the online event?

I’m having technical issues accessing the event

What is the refund policy?

My payment didn’t go through / I’m having payment issues

I don’t have Paypal / Card / are there alternative payment methods?

In what format are the recordings?

I have technical issues accessing the course or recording. What should I do?

Who should I contact if I have further questions?

Testimonials

This is what participants of prior Retreats have to say:

M.

Thank you for this beautiful retreat. Feels like this is what I needed in the moment.

J.

Cedric I would just like to say thanks for your wisdom and knowledge of attachment issues and repair. The work you are doing really helps me and I have never come across anything as transformative for me as your meditations. Thank you so much.

J.

Great retreat, thank you so much Cedric. There is something special about Tonglen and using it with the schemas feels so healing. I feel hopeful and inspired to keep working with Tonglen.

Registration has closed.

Leave a Reply

Please note: This program is offered for educational purposes only and is not group-therapy, counselling or any kind of other psychotherapy, nor is it a substitute for the aforementioned. The instructor Cedric Reeves is a meditation teacher, not a psychotherapist, counsellor, or otherwise therapist.