A healing retreat – also called an emotional healing retreat – is time out of your normal life to discover, release and process emotions from your past that may be interfering with your present.  Turiya Hanover, co-founder of Path of Love healing retreats, explains what they’re all about

Why do we need emotional healing retreats?

In today’s world, we tend to be disconnected from our bodies and disconnected even more from our feelings.  Everything is focused on performance and pleasing others: we learn from early in our lives to bury our feelings, to deny them, so they don’t get in the way of us being the way others want us to be.  And that’s sad because it makes us less alive.  It’s being in touch with our feelings, and trying to understand them, that lets us live in a way that’s true to our own spirit.

And what happens to the feelings we bury?  They don’t disappear.  Instead, they make us behave in ways we often don’t want to behave, and they make our actions seem mysterious to us.  We’re anxious, or we’re angry.  We project everything that’s bottled up inside us onto the world, so it seems a dangerous place.  And then, often, we take medication to deal with it all – and that takes us even further away from what matters most, our deepest feelings.

What are the benefits of an emotional healing retreat?

All of this pain and difficulty is what a healing retreat, like Path of Love, aims to help us deal with.  It’s about starting to put right the damage that’s happened in our emotional lives.  A healing retreat helps us be honest with ourselves and about ourselves, to delve into our past, and to express and understand what’s really going on.  It’s about uncovering things that have wounded us in the past, so we can understand how they play out in our life and behaviour today.

At an emotional healing retreat like Path of Love, every person’s feelings are respected: whatever you need to talk about, you’ll be given the space.  You won’t be judged.  You probably have never been able to be so open with yourself before in your adult life.  On a healing retreat, you’ll make big discoveries about yourself that will change your life going forward.

An emotional healing retreat like the Path of Love is all about daring to be open with yourself. And when you are open with yourself, you stop feeling unworthy or ashamed.  You stop hiding your true self – and what you find when you go back into the world is that this positively changes your relationships.  Emotional honesty, being ourselves, is key to a happier and more fulfilled life. A healing retreat is all about allowing yourself to be honest about how you feel.

Should I go on an emotional healing retreat?

If this resonates with you, it could be that you’re ready to go on a healing retreat like Path of Love.  Perhaps something has happened in your life that’s taken you by surprise and reopened past trauma.  We get very good at covering up our deepest pain, but then something happens in our life that blows it all open.  A family member dies; we get divorced; someone we love abandons us.  For many people, that is the trigger to go on a healing retreat, because how do you go on, how do you live with the deep pain that’s now tearing you apart?  An emotional healing retreat like Path of Love will help you move forward.

But it’s not always about a crisis.  Many of us, in the depths of our hearts, have a yearning, a longing, that we know is there but don’t know how to handle.  It’s a longing for a different life, a feeling that there’s something deeper to life if only we could access it.  A healing retreat helps you work through this deeper longing, to work towards a life that’s more fulfilling and meaningful for you.

What happens on an emotional healing retreat?

A healing retreat gives you space away from your normal life to reconnect with these longings, and your deepest feelings.  On a Path of Love healing retreat, we work hard to make sure you’ll feel safe and well-supported, and to give you everything you need to help you work things out about yourself.

On a healing retreat, you’ll disconnect from your normal life. You’ll give up your mobile phone and your laptop.  You won’t drink alcohol or take drugs (other than medicinal drugs) and you won’t drink caffeine.  You’ll be silent, and talking only in a group with trained therapists, who will help you access those feelings and parts of yourself that have been buried for so long.  To work things out, you’ll need the support of others around you – and a healing retreat will give you that.

On the Path of Love, we also do a lot of physical stuff – active meditations and dancing – because to be in touch with your feelings, you need to be in touch with your body as well.  Your body is the home of your feelings, so you have to respect it and understand it.

A healing retreat is an intense experience, but it delivers real and lasting results.

How much does an emotional healing retreat cost?

It’s not cheap to go on a healing retreat, but most of the people who attend the Path of Love tell us it was well worth the money.  We spend so much money and time on our outer selves, buying clothes and make-up and paying for gym memberships.  A healing retreat involves spending, but spending for our inner selves, which is even more important.

Healing retreats are expensive mostly because they involve a lot of staff, including highly trained facilitators.  But this large staff of trained professionals is why a healing retreat works.

How long do the effects of an emotional healing retreat last?

For most people, an emotional healing retreat, like the Path of Love, is the first big transformation in their life…it changes their life forever.  Many things will change for the better when they return to their normal lives because now they’re able to reveal more of their true selves and others around them will respond to that.  When you’re able to reveal your true self, others respond with love and that has a positive effect on your relationships.

A healing retreat may make you realise you want to change your life. You may realise you want to do more deep inner work or explore certain aspects of yourself through individual therapy. You may want to keep the fire of transformation going through an ongoing programme, and the Path of Love supports its graduates into the future.