Seeing with Your Heart means learning to be fully human. This begins by releasing oppressive structures of guilt, shame, and fear that sequester your truth, squeeze the juice out of life, and lock you in patterns of self-betrayal.

You can cease being the rebellious (or obedient) child, black sheep, sacrificial lamb, or peacemaker – these are all inherited family binds that keep you from drinking from the fountain of your own life. Your body is your life source and clearing generational traumas and unhealthy patterns allows you to receive all the gifts your lineage bestows.

Healing your inherited wounds is just the first step. What comes next is alchemy of the heart which transforms the decay of trauma into the food that nourishes the full flowering of your life. Instead of struggling with internal and external obstacles, you learn to open your body, heart, and mind to new pathways of creativity, purpose, passion, and community (with the living and the dead!).  

The Seeing with Your Heart Alchemical Constellation experience gives a newfound strength to the inner center. Not one that comes from self-improvement, but from reawakening to evolution’s eternal truths which have been nearly exterminated by cultural, societal, and family traumas. From this, we begin to understand the fundamental questions about our lives informed by direct experience of own inner wisdom. We learn to see with our hearts and thus see ourselves and the world in new light.

The Seeing with Your Heart Retreat will bring you into the primal mysteries of human consciousness to release the burdens, blocks and restraints that hold you back, call in the ancestral and spirit resources that infuse magic into the everyday, and teach tools for living in alignment with the foundational architecture of your human life and soul’s truth.

Retreat leaders, Emily Blefeld and Dan Cohen, are internationally renowned Systemic Family Constellations’ trainers and facilitators who are adept at traveling the unconscious pathways of hidden intergenerational patterns. With their guidance, you will gain insights into your family, your work, your doubts and dreams. Together, we will dive into the deepest parts of human experience where you can feel, in an entirely new way, how the living and dead remain in relationship and can together contribute to a deeper assertion of life. 

This is neither the time to forge your path alone nor to sacrifice your sovereignty. You are here to fulfill your unique blueprint. Held by a loving, supportive, and nurturing community and resourced by ancestors and a council of spirit guides, your deepest intentions for self-fulfillment, relationships, and purpose can be achieved. 

Unite Worlds & Bridge Realities with a groundbreaking experience where the boundaries between the virtual and physical realms dissolve, creating a truly immersive and dynamic event.

With Menla’s audio-visual tech team and Seeing with Your Heart’s leadership team of Systemic Constellation Facilitator’s, we’ve reimagined the retreat experience, allowing you to embark on a journey of self-discovery and growth, no matter where you are in the world. Whether you choose to join us in person or participate virtually from your home, you will experience the magic of a unified event and be part of an international community on a shared quest for personal transformation.

Through a harmonious blend of the convenience and accessibility of virtual gatherings with the excitement and engagement of live, in-person experiences, we bridge continents and touch the edges of each shoreline. Geographical barriers are a thing of the past; this event is accessible to you, no matter where you are.

• Global Community: Forge meaningful connections with like-minded individuals from around the globe, whether you’re physically present or participating virtually.
• From Dawn to Dusk: Our daily schedule is designed to immerse virtual participants fully in the retreat experience, with Break-Out rooms for exercises and Integration Sessions facilitated by Seeing with Your Heart’s leadership team.  These will take place during the live retreat’s meal and sleep hours so that you do not miss any of the live-streaming, but have time for integration, personal sharing, and constellation work to support you.
• Unparalleled Content: Whether you’re joining us virtually or in-person, our retreat content is curated to inspire, educate, and transform limiting patterns that are holding you back. Discover takeaways that will enrich your professional and personal life. With access to recordings post-event, you can revisit your favorite sessions whenever it suits you. (The workshops will be recorded for participants and recordings will be provided for those who cannot attend live. You are welcome to leave your video off if you prefer not to be recorded.)

Constellations are a unique and powerful method of unearthing the systemic roots of the issues we face in our lives. The process is powerful, almost magical, and helps us see and understand in an entirely new way. 

Many of us recognize that what is unconscious will continue to permeate our lives until it is made conscious; however, have you extended that idea to include what is unconscious in your family lineage?  What was unresolved, repressed, and irreconcilable in our grandparents’ and great grandparents’ lives finds its way into our unconscious and wreaks havoc on our everyday pursuit for happiness, health, passion, and purpose.  

While yearning to embody a vibrant, regenerative, creative, and loving self, we find ourselves living the resounding echoes of an incomplete past (near and distant).  As our higher self reflects on the suffering of our present situation or relationship, we greet an awareness that in some way we have sought out the characters in the drama of our life to bring healing and transformation to generational burdens with intention to liberate not only ourselves but those that stand behind us and those that come after us.   

Seeing with Your Heart restores the long evolved human capacity to engage with the organ of perception that evolved in the human species over millions of years. The Retreat experience will consist of large group and smaller guided Constellations, Knowing Field exercises and meditative ceremonies to help you heal the embedded generational wounds and personal traumas that flatten your expression. Together, this hybrid group will share what is alive and access the ancestral and spirit resources that are the source of true liberation.

Seeing with Your Heart restores the long evolved human capacity to engage with the organ of perception that evolved in the human species over millions of years. The Retreat experience will consist of large group and smaller guided Constellations, Knowing Field exercises and meditative ceremonies to help you heal the embedded generational wounds and personal traumas that flatten your expression. Together, this hybrid group will share what is alive and access the ancestral and spirit resources that are the source of true liberation.

Menla Retreat

Join Us in a Breathtaking Glacial Valley in Phoenicia, NY

Menla is a hidden oasis set in a secluded valley beside an enchanting stream in the heart of the Catskill mountains. A truly unique venue, Menla is a project of Tibet House US – the Dalai Lama’s cultural center in North America.

330 acres of private wilderness are at your feet. Clear your mind. Let nature reignite your creative passion and life force. Menla is an official Audubon bird sanctuary, and the calming sound of birdsong is with you from dawn to dusk.

Stay in a range of deluxe accommodations or shared cabins set in fragrant woods and gardens with murmuring streams and trails nearby.

Menla’s Facilities Include:

• Deluxe private and standard shared accommodations (camping and commuter option available) ranging in price from $167-$304 per night (meals included)
• 9 Meals: Gourmet vegetarian farm-to-table organic meals straight from the gardens
• A world-class Tibetan destination and day spa offering a full menu of services and specializing in ancient Tibetan and Ayurvedic therapies (additional fee)
• A meditation sanctuary
• Outdoor pool, tennis courts, and fitness room
• Nature Trails
• Lounge Space

Your lodging cost includes three meals per day, as fresh as it comes. Menla’s vegetarian farm-to-table menu features organic dishes straight from Menla’s gardens.

Participants will Be Given Access to a Private Website Page to Book Reservations with Menla at 20% Discount. In the meantime, click here to learn more about Menla Resort and Dew Spa: https://menla.org

Transportation:
The closest airports are Albany International Airport in Albany, NY, Stewart Airport in Newburgh, NY, and LaGuardia Airport in NYC.

Discover the Ancient Restorative Therapies of Tibet at Dewa Spa

Menla’s world-class healing spa is one of the few places in the West where you can experience the Tibetan Ku Nye massage. The Dewa Spa also offers a wide range of Eastern and Western spa treatments including personalized well being massages, deep tissue, Ayurveda, Shiatsu, acupuncture, reflexology, herbal baths, energy healing, customized facials, sound therapy, intuitive readings, as well as saunas and steam rooms to stimulate and detoxify your system.

Dewa’s selection of treatments and journeys are a unique experience that will leave you feeling thoroughly renewed and regenerated.
You can book your appointment online! 

Retreat Facilitators

Emily Blefeld, LICSW,  co-founder of Seeing with Your Heart, is internationally known as a trainer, Systemic Family Constellations facilitator, and psychotherapist. She specializes in supporting change-agents, visionaries and entrepreneurs to dismantle the old paradigms, outdated narratives, and ancient codes that hold them back and open to the full expression of their life’s purpose and soul’s path.  Her intuitive gift of sight and knowledge of the hidden pathways of consciousness help clients trace inherited family and soul trauma through multiple generations or incarnations to release the burdens and blocks that interfere with living their truth, expressing their love, and embodying their passion.

Drawing from over two decades of experience and training, she combines expert psychotherapy, coaching and mentoring with Constellations and practical rituals to help free clients from the traps of limiting beliefs, patterns and habits. Emily holds a Masters of Social Work and is certified in multiple therapeutic modalities including Systemic Family Constellations, Compassionate Spirit Release, ADHD treatment, Core Energetics, Women’s Mystery Traditions, etc. In addition to her private practice, she regularly travels throughout the US and internationally, including presenting training and workshops in Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Hawaii, Hungary, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Brazil. 

Dan Cohen, PhD, co-founder of Seeing with Your Heart, specializes in helping individuals, couples and families heal the effects of inherited trauma and fulfill their desires for having more love and deeper impact in their lives. Combining a near-encyclopedic knowledge of world history, mythology and culture with an uncanny psychic awareness, Dan offers clients profound and transformative healing while expanding understanding and restoring peace of mind. Prior to obtaining a PhD in psychology and training with Bert Hellinger as a Constellations facilitator, Dan was internationally known for his work in violence prevention and conflict resolution. Since 2000, he has become a leading voice for incorporating personal, ancestral and spirit consciousness into therapeutic practices. Dan holds a PhD in psychology from Saybrook University and an MBA from Boston University. He is author of I Carry Your Heart in My Heart: Family Constellations in Prison and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. Dan has led Seeing with Your Heart workshops and training courses in 18 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, South America and throughout the United States.

Leadership Team

Sarah Rehfuss Bastian, MS is a Subtle Energy Practitioner, Systemic Constellation Facilitator, Sacred Art Practitioner, artist, writer and Ancestral Researcher. For the past twenty-six years, she has trained in various modalities that are complementary to whole-body transformation. Sarah has been spirit-led in the past ten years to focus on intuitive, soul and ancestral healing and wisdom practices. Her keen interest in genealogy, genograms, Systemic Constellation work, ceremony and an animistic cosmology provide her a strong foundation to help others connect with, honor and rewrite their own past in a way that reveals truth, and creates flow and harmony in their present and future. She believes transformation is a whole-body process that extends both backward to our ancestors and forward to our descendants. By nurturing and living our highest potential in the present we honor the lives of all those that came before and provide an inspired and strong foundation for all of those yet to come. You can find out more about Sarah at www.awakenedheartandmind.com

Erik Anderson is a certified counsellor and facilitator of Inner Part and Systems Constellations and a registered member of the Systems Constellations Association of South Africa (SCASA). With over 20 years experience in Systems Constellations, more than 7 of which he has facilitated group and one on one constellations with people locally and around the world.

Integral to his practice, Erik continues to work with meditation groups using the tools of Kabbalah, Awareness meditation and Kriya Yoga. Erik prefers to work with Energy-Fields in a direct manner and finds guidance in the innate wisdom and intelligence of the Energy-Fields in which we all live. His practice has therefore taken on a shamanic approach.

A number of skilled mentors have played a key role his development in Constellations: Guni Baxa, Stephan Hausner, Francesca Mason-Boring, Tanja Meyburgh, Karin Huyssen, Dan Cohen and currently Catherine Geils. Erik spent many years in regular meditation with Ivan Kaplan and received a certification in Ivan’s integral approach to facilitate groups in meditation, Kabbalah and Kriya Yoga in 2007.

Erik served on the faculty for the African Constellations Experience in September 2018 and, along with Tanja Meyburgh, co-founded REAL Academy – an online resource for embodiment practices and ancestral learning.

Erik has lived with Muscular Dystrophy most of his life and uses a power-wheelchair to get around. He lives with his wife and son in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. Www.erikandersen.co.za

Gozde Turkmen is a transformation facilitator working with individuals, groups and organizations from around the globe. Since 2015 she has been guiding many to find their own rhythm in life. Beginning her professional career as an engineer, she always held a deep interest in human consciousness and a curiosity to study the orders of the cosmos. Through years of trainings, workshops and life’s events, she forged her masterful way of weaving ancient knowledge with new wisdom.

Gozde is naturally connected with the wisdom of Anatolia, the cradle of mysticism in the tradition of Sufism and Wise Women. Earth is her temple. She offers clients systemic constellations, rituals, and a wide range of somatic and energy medicine modalities. In her multidimensional perspective, journeying into consciousness are the path to connect with true desire and gain freedom from oppression, worn-out beliefs, and hidden loyalties. Like a modern-day doula, Gozde guides clients through levels of descent that lead toward the birth of one’s true self.

Gozde holds engineering degrees from Leeds University and King’s College London, as well as a BA in Finance. While working in industrial projects in Europe and Africa, she received energy medicine attunements that guided her towards many new fields. She later studied Life Coaching at Cambridge University and Yeditepe University in Turkey. She trained and participated in NLP, Systemic Constellations, trauma, consciousness and healing workshops with many masterful teachers including Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld, Vivian Broughton, Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert, Cecilio Fernandez Regojo, Meghan Kelly, Sonia Gomez, Dr. Peter Levine, and Illi Adato.

Rotger Heilmeier is a Registered Nurse, Psychologist (M.A.), nonmedical practitioner (German Heilpraktiker), Homeopath, Systemic and Family Constellation Facilitator and Trainer, and Shamanic Practitioner. He innovates new ways of working with homeopathy, shamanic practice, and constellations to connect with spirit, soul, and Mother Earth. Rotger is especially adept at connecting with sacred ground through spirit animals, sacred stones and medicinal plants in their natural and homeopathic form.

Since 2009, Rotger has been in private practice as a nonmedical practitioner offering homeopathy and psychological counseling. Through many years of experience in the medical profession, he has cultivated the ability to find simplicity in complex situations. A patient’s disease process may have crude and destructive symptoms, but he has found that underneath almost any disease there are good intentions. Finding that base line, stimulates awareness of the simplest truths that often reach through centuries. When these are identified, remedies and rituals may successfully redirect the disease out of the body.

He teaches nursing and homeopathy students, and offers consulting in health management to companies and organizations. Together with his wife Antonia he offers circles, workshops, and trainings for Systemic and Family Constellation facilitators internationally.

Rotger designs living, breathing, and joyful rituals for people, landscapes, and nature. He sees these practices as modern expressions of the ancient traditions of witchcraft which deserve honoring. jester-counseling.com

Ginny Vinson nurtures positive change through courage, love, and meticulous attention to the ecology of individuals and organizations. In 2001, in the prime of her life, Ginny was rear-ended by a tractor trailer which left her as a quadriplegic. The life she knew was over, but she soon realized the utility of the two things she had left under her control: her mind and her voice. Like an oak tree, Ginny grew into a powerful, stable being with a benevolent spirit and mind. She is both light and shade, omnipresent for those who seek the wisdom of her insight and the comfort of her compassion.

At the rehabilitation hospital, she learned to advocate for herself, set boundaries, and reframe negative thoughts. She listened deeply for the positive intention behind every exchange to assist the nurses, doctors, and therapists who cared for her. Soon, this made a profound difference in her own life and in theirs. She not only survived the devastating accident but learned to thrive despite her physical limitations.

Ginny is the founder of Transitions, a coaching and consulting company which provided seminars, workshops, and personal services. She practiced for 25 years as a facilitator for Family Grief, a program specializing in support for sudden and traumatic deaths. She is trained in many modalities including Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) as a Certified Master Practitioner, Rape Victim Advocacy, Family Constellations with Bert Hellinger, Hunter Beaumont, Lutz Wesel, and others, receiving a Facilitator Certification from Sneh Victoria Schnabel. More recently, she completed multiple programs with Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld.

Fabiola Robinson embraces modern and ancient knowledge in her unique synthesis of family constellations, mindfulness, energy healing, and meditation to assist clients in finding positive forward movements in their lives. In her coaching practice, she leads mindfulness and compassion processes and facilitates family constellations. Her gentle approach and deep listening help others connect to their hearts.

Fabiola is president of a software company where her compassionate management style encourages creative approaches to cost efficiency, problem solving, improved customer satisfaction, and overall business growth.

She trained in family constellations with Dan Cohen and Emily Blefeld, Mark Wolynn, and Leslie Nipps. After beginning her career as software designer and engineer, she completed numerous trainings in meditation, mindfulness, positive neuroplasticity, awakening joy, and the Buddhist perspective on death.

As a child Kimberly Daniels experienced premonitions and out of body experiences. In early adulthood, a near-death experience further confirmed the knowing in her heart of the connected consciousness beyond our physical world.

Believing in the power of just one person making the difference in a child’s life led to a career in teaching elementary children the past 36 years. A family issue in 2013 brought Kimberly to attend the North American Constellation Conference where she met Emily and Dan. A deep desire to heal herself for the sake of her daughters and live in the wisdom of love led her to complete the Seeing With Your Heart Program and the Empowered Empath Program Sage Soul programs as well as trainings with Sarah Peyton, and one led by Elena Veselago, who facilitated a life-changing constellation for her. Kimberly has years of group work experience with Compassionate Listening and Nonviolent Communication.

Ever learning and growing, she is currently receiving wisdom in the year-long International Systemic Facilitator Training. Kimberly is dedicated to constellation work. She is driven by a need to build community, contribute, live in love and spread joy.

Program Schedule

Morning afternoon and evening circles will be livestream events from the Menla Retreat Centre. Virtual participants will have private dedicated online circles for integration, community and practice.

All sessions will be recorded and shared with participants. (You are welcome to turn off your cameras). 

Check your timezone here: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com

Thursday, November 2, 2023 (Check-In Day)

3-6 pm Arrival and Check-in

6 – 7 pm Dinner

No Program Schedule This Evening (Folks will be traveling from all over and arriving at different times, so we will enjoy a casual meet and greet)

Friday, November 3, 2023

8:00 – 9:00am Breakfast

9:30am – 12:00pm Morning Circle

12:30 – 2:00pm Virtual Circle for Virtual Participants

12:30 – 1:30pm Lunch for Live Participants

2:00 – 5:30pm Afternoon Circle

6:00- 7:00pm Dinner

7:30 – 9:00pm Evening Circle

9:00 -10:00 Open Space Moonlight Session