“When Barbara described the intensity of the weekend to me last month, I discounted how intense the experience could be. I thought to myself, "It's just deep breathing. How intense could that be?"

I now have a new definition of "intense" that spans the depth of emotion I experienced. It was incredible in the truest sense of the word: I would never have believed anyone about what was to come. John Sandberg ~ Computer Programmer

The seminar is designed around the question 'What is it that is missing in our relationships today?’ We look around and see people who have done plenty of personal growth work, but somehow can’t bring that learning into their relationships. Many people have gotten so good at taking care of themselves that they have forgotten how to be intimate and close, or else they forget everything they knew and fall back to old co-dependent ways when they are in relationships.

We believe that it IS possible to keep passion alive in relationships. The seminar is designed to help you ask the right questions and develop the skills and tools to do that for yourself. Through this work we can begin to create a new paradigm for relationships and create new ideas about what is possible for all of us.

Part of what we do is look at our dark side, our shadow, the parts of ourselves that we are afraid of, angry about, or are not aware of. And not just our personal dark side, but we explore the dark side of men, and the dark side of women, including what have we inherited from our mothers and fathers that is beneath our conscious awareness. We have all been immersed in collective beliefs about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. What about those beliefs work for you and which ones don’t?

The dark side is defined here as what you are afraid of; it is different for everyone. For some people it is anger and rage, for others it is fear and weakness, for still others it’s being powerful or happy, or even just being quiet and still. There is space for you to explore that which you personally have been avoiding, embrace it, and find more freedom and choice.

We start on the surface at the beginning of the seminar, and slowly peal away layers. We go deeper and deeper and the workshop keeps pushing and pushing until we hit a breakthrough process where you will have the opportunity to do some deep healing. The seminar itself is very confrontive; it is designed to push your buttons. There is something in it that will piss just about everyone off and trigger your reactions. It is MEANT to. But it is not meant to just leave you hanging, it is intended to help you get beneath those buttons, your triggers, your anger, pain or hurt or fear, and keep going until you find the source of the pain and do some deep healing.

We do judgment processes, deep breath work, a process about life and death, and more. It can be deeply emotional for most people and there are plenty of opportunities for emotional release and clearing. Each process is designed to support you in feeling your own pain, hurt, self judgment, anger, and fear of other’s judgments or your own, in such a way that you can push through it to the other side and find more freedom and choice for yourself and in your relationships.

After the ‘breakthrough’ process, we begin to build back. What does your life mean to you? How do you want to integrate with what you have experienced and how do you want to show up in your life from now on?

At one point we break up into groups of men and women and look at our conditioning and what we have learned from our mothers and fathers. We then come back and have a dialogue about what goes wrong in Male / Female relationships. By that point there is safety in the room, and people are honest, real and vulnerable and willling to tell the truth on a very deep level. The information is shocking in a way, yet so simple and obvious and we all know it. It is really hysterically funny the picture that gets painted, but it is also amazingly enlightening and freeing.

From there we teach some specific skills, practice what we have learned and then do some work to integrate what has occurred in a wonderful and spiritual way.

The environment is very structured. We have very controlled rules and agreements. By setting up a tight structure we create the space to open the door on chaos, on your darkest demons, and on the places in you where you feel the most out of control and run by the darkness in order for you to heal at the deepest level. The agreements create the space of safety for you to be able to confront what you are most afraid of.

Sometimes you will work in the whole group, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in small groups, and sometimes on your own. The group is fairly small, about 24-28 people, so there is room for everyone to participate. There are about 25-35 assistants; these people are not trained facilitators, but rather graduates of the seminar who got so much out of TBW that they want to give back. The Bonding Weekend is not therapy, but rather a space for you to shake up your beliefs, to dig in deep, do some great healing, do your own work in, and to choose to take a new level of responsibility for how you live your life. We don’t pretend that we have all answers, we don’t teach from that place, but rather, we are really good at asking the right questions and helping you find your own answers.

TBW is NOT a lecture! Although the hours are long, you won’t be sitting in one place or be bored. Masen and Barbara spend about an hour talking on the first day (Thursday) to set the weekend up, to let you know what we are doing and why, and they teach some specific skills on Saturday. The rest of workshop is experiential. You will be up, moving around, participating, learning, stretching, and growing. Time passes quickly, and because it is experiential it feels like lifetimes pass it just a short period of time

Our intention is that you leave the seminar with new understanding and/or a deeper understanding, more healing and freedom from your past, and practical skills and tools that you can use in your life. We don’t want you to just leave with a seminar ‘high’, although you will likely have that, but rather, we want you to leave feeling grounded and ready for new beginnings.

The work begins when the seminar ends. You will leave the seminar knowing what you need to do to change, you will have the tools to do it, and you will have the inspiration and motivation and suppport to make it happen. It is then up to you to make those changes and truly create your relationships and your life in a new and more empowering way!

 

 

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For more information, email barbara@bondingweekend.com or
call (805) 899-1970