Anti-Fragile Heart Retreat
July 2025
This week-long journey into the heart of being fully alive weaves together emotional processing, mindfulness, and relational practice for life transformation.
The Offering
TBD July 2025: Anti-Fragile Heart Retreat
Discover the power of collective practice. Join us for an intimate retreat nestled in the mountains of Asheville, NC. Limited to 14 participants, this immersive experience offers a unique opportunity to explore the depths of your inner landscape and your relationship with the world, cultivating an Antifragile Heart.
An Antifragile Heart is in touch with truth, beauty, and goodness in each moment, inviting you to meet yourself and others in the fullness of life and shared humanity.Finding Strength Through Challenge
Life hits hard sometimes - relationships end, careers stall, health falters. But these struggles don't have to break us. By facing difficulties head-on while staying connected to what matters most - our relationships, our values, our sense of purpose - we can emerge stronger and more resilient.
Why Consider This Path?
Maybe you're going through a divorce and feeling lost. Perhaps you've hit a wall in your career and can't seem to move forward. Or you might be dealing with anxiety that's holding you back from living fully. These challenges are real, and they're heavy to carry alone. You might be here because:
- Your relationship patterns keep leading to the same painful endings - Work feels meaningless despite outward success
- You're struggling to set boundaries with family
- Anxiety or self-doubt is stopping you from pursuing what matters
- You're healing from a significant loss or life change
Together, we can explore what's really getting in your way. We'll look at specific situations where you feel stuck, identify the thoughts and behaviors that aren't serving you, and develop practical strategies to move forward. This isn't about abstract transformation - it's about making real changes in how you handle difficult conversations, process emotions, make decisions, and show up in relationships. By working through these challenges with awareness and compassion, you'll build concrete skills to handle life's difficulties while staying true to yourself and your values.
History
The Anti-Fragile Heart was designed and developed at the Monastic Academy in Lowell, VT with several facilitators including Daniel, Mitra, and Sofia-Jeanne, amongst others. The first two iterations were run there in 2022 & 2023. In 2024, we ran the first in the Asheville area. The Monastic Academy gave ownership of the program over to us with well wishes to continue offering this program to the world.
Core Practices
Mindfulness & Presence
Learn to stay present and aware in the messiness of real human connection. Through guided partner practices and group work, you'll develop the ability to remain grounded while engaging with emotions, difficult conversations, and intimate moments of sharing.
This isn't meditation in isolation - it's about staying present in the heart of relationship. We practice mindfulness while:
- Having authentic conversations about what's actually happening between us
- Processing difficult emotions as they arise in real time
- Exploring patterns that show up in how we connect with others
- Navigating triggers and reactivity in a supported environment
- Instead of using meditation to escape from feelings or relationships, we use it to dive deeper into them. You'll learn to stay with uncomfortable moments rather than checking out, to feel your emotions fully while remaining centered, and to maintain self-awareness even in charged interpersonal situations.
This practice is especially valuable if you find yourself disconnecting during emotional moments, struggling to stay present in intimate relationships, or wanting to develop deeper authenticity in your connections. By combining mindfulness with relational practice, you'll build the capacity to remain open and aware even when things get challenging between people. Cultivate present-moment awareness and inner peace through guided meditation practices.
Relational Arts
Building Deep Connection & Inner Power
Learn practical skills for creating more alive, authentic relationships while developing trust in your own resourcefulness. Through guided partner and group experiences, we'll work directly with the patterns that show up in your connections - like avoiding conflict, losing yourself in relationships, or keeping people at arm's length - while discovering new capacities for joy and authentic expression.
Through structured practice, you'll develop:
- The ability to stay present during difficult conversations rather than shutting down
- Skills for expressing your needs, desires, and boundaries clearly and powerfully
- Awareness of your habitual patterns as they happen in real time
- Capacity to listen deeply and respond authentically, even when triggered
- Comfort with both giving and receiving while maintaining your center
- Freedom to feel and express joy, attraction, and appreciation without dependency
- Trust in your ability to handle both pleasure and disappointment in relationships
This isn't about abstract concepts of connection or becoming more pleasing to others. It's about working directly with what's happening between people in the room while staying rooted in your own strength. You might notice yourself getting defensive when receiving feedback, feel vulnerable sharing something personal, or recognize how you habitually try to please others. These moments become our practice ground for building new relational skills and accessing more aliveness.
Whether you're dealing with dating challenges, family dynamics, or professional relationships, these practices offer concrete ways to show up more fully while honoring your own needs. Through supported practice with others, you'll develop new ways of relating that feel both more authentic and more fulfilling - learning to bring your full self to relationships while maintaining a strong connection to your own power and inner resources.
Embodiment
It's easy to think transformation is occurring without truly reaching the depth of experience where transformational change can happen. Embodiment is crucial for deep change, and including it in the curriculum allows us to harness the power of psychological and interpersonal practices within the physical realm, where profound shifts become possible. While talking can lead us to profound realizations, our bodies communicate volumes – often conveying truths we may not consciously be aware of. By tuning into our bodies, we can learn about ourselves. Allowing ourselves to express freely through the body loosens the mind's grip on patterns..
Talks & Discussion
Change requires a new perspective. We need an orientation that frees our minds to embrace a new reality. Sharing our view of the world helps us share a cosmology through which we can engage in collective sensemaking. Understanding how these practices fit together, fit into our lives, and fit into the world allows us to navigate our engagement with discernment.
This Retreat is For:
This retreat is designed for people who sense there's more possible in their relationships and emotional life, but find themselves hitting familiar walls. You might be:
- Successful on paper but feeling disconnected from real intimacy and aliveness in your relationships.
- Aware that you tend to shut down, people-please, or lose yourself in relationships, and ready to build new patterns.
- Seeking more authentic and alive connections, but unsure how to break free from habitual ways of relating.
- Wanting to express your desires and boundaries more clearly while staying connected to your own strength.
- Noticing that intellectual understanding isn't enough - your patterns persist despite knowing better
- Ready to work with your emotional and relational patterns at the body level, not just through talking.
- Want to access more joy and pleasure in your connections while maintaining healthy boundaries.
- Are ready to explore the parts of yourself you've kept hidden - your desires, fears, and deeper truths.
- Feel drawn to meditation or mindfulness but want to use these skills to deepen relationships rather than escape them.
- Those ready to be challenged and supported in your Unfolding journey, willing to let go and surrender your old ways of being.
- Individuals in life transitions wanting to develop the tools for a more meaningful, honest, and good life.
This Retreat is Not For:
- Those primarily seeking comfort, safety, and leisure, who want to steer clear of intensity and discomfort.
- Those resistant to feedback, reflection, and change.
- Individuals easily triggered by external circumstances and unwilling to self-examine their own participation.
- Those seeking a silent retreat.
- Those seeking a play or sex party (this event does not involve sexual contact).
- Individuals looking for someone to "fix" or heal them, or those seeking to heal or fix others. (Our model is educational, focused on learning through relating, experimentation, and presence).
100% Guarantee:
If you’re dissastisifed at the completion of the program, you may ask for a full program-fee refund up to a week after the program ends. We don’t want your money if you aren’t satisfied. However, you must have completed the full program. In addition, we have to cover the costs of lodging and food, so the refund will only cover the program workshop fee, not including lodging and food.
Testimonials
Jared: I can say confidently that the Anti-fragile Heart Retreat was the most transformative experience that I have had to date in my life. Finding out about all these modalities of circling, authentic relating, and biomotive feedback, and all these different things I had no idea about before, and actually practicing them in a container with people who were loving, supportive, well versed in this whole thing.
It was truly magnificent. And I've fully, completely changed the way I was living before, and it's brought so much more aliveness to my life. So much more purpose, meaning depth of connection with others. So I would say if you're looking for more meaning and connection and depth in your life and you aren't afraid to make some changes, come to the Antifragile Heart Retreat.
It's going to really blow your heart wide open.
Before my life was like eating ice cream every day for every meal. It was very much about chasing eyes and when I got a taste of what a real meal was I couldn't go back. The depth of connection that was able to be accessed in that container was a blueprint showing me what the rest of my life could be like. And I wanted that and I found that and I've created that for myself....
I couldn't unsee that. It was like seeing light for the first time, like Plato's cave...and I encourage you to do that because life gets really beautiful and really good. So if you're thinking about it, if you're on the fence, it's worth it.
"The Anti-Fragile Heart Retreat is a deep reset in releasing subtle emotional weights while also learning how to abide in the enormous freedom of the present moment. Highly recommended for anyone looking to contact their fullest self." -Mariah Rose McKay, Spokane, WA
“This retreat feels made by, and made for, people who really care. The facilitators are all extremely experienced, and it's clear that they embody their practice. Within the environment they created, I was able to reach a level of vulnerability in a group setting that I normally can't even reach on my own. It was also really lovely to just spend time with everyone. All of the attendees were curious about bettering themselves and the world, and the discussions and dynamics which arose out of that were fascinating. As far as retreats go, this one felt very "human-centric". The priority of the retreat was the people, rather than a set of teachings or a certain mind state. I left the retreat feeling a much deeper love for myself and my desires, as well as the capacity to hold those in relation to other people. Overall, this retreat was absolutely invaluable — I want more.” - Adam Luck
"This retreat was wonderful. The relational skill of the facilitator team was extremely high, I felt very held and empowered by them. This retreat was both crunchy and incredibly gentle. It was crunchy in all the right ways -- being challenged at my edges, being humbled, being asked to reveal more and more of my experience. But it was all contained within a field of remarkable love and care. You should come to this retreat, you won't regret it." - BHH
“The retreat has infinite potential for awareness and wisdom to unfold. The facilitators are sincere, warm, open and intentional in their life missions. Part of what makes the retreat is the vulnerability that we each brought.”
Meet Your Facilitators
Our experienced facilitators will lead you through a unique retreat experience unlike any other encompassing a variety of modalities. Our team spans decades of experience and training.
Xuramitra Peter Park
Xūramitra Peter Park is a Relateful facilitator, mindfulness teacher, and Unfolding coach. He was the Executive Director and spiritual teacher at the Monastic Academy where he trained and taught for seven years. He began teaching relational practices in 2015. He has completed several rounds of Circling Europe’s 6-month SAS facilitator program and also was a TA for Relateful’s LevelUP immersion programs. He has completed Aletheia Level 1 training and is currently training in Level 2. His superpower is helping people feel safe and included.
Sofia-Jeanne Caring
Sofia-Jeanne Caring has trained in three core spiritual practices: meditation, circling, and embodied relational cultivation. She began training in meditation with Keith Porteous in 2011, continuing with Soryu Forall in 2017, which was foundational for her orientation to relational practice. While it was challenging, but not impossible, to find peace on a cushion, the way people related to each seemed hopelessly entangled with messy dynamics and a lack of meaningful connection. Fueled by this motivation, she began practicing Circling in 2016, certified through Circling Europe’s SAS, and has facilitated hundreds of individual sessions as well as numerous week-long retreats. In 2018 she met her primary teacher Kraye Grymonnt, with whom she has trained extensively in embodied relational cultivation ever since.
Sofia-Jeanne currently teaches the interweaving of these practices, and she is passionate about transforming our social fabric into collective liberatory praxis. Alongside her spiritual and psychological development work, she holds an MA in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior at UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Process to Join
1Application
Apply for a spot in the retreat.
2Clarification
We will meet with you to clarify your desire, providing a touchpoint before committing.
3Pay
After clarification, we'll send you payment information to secure your spot.
4Retreat
Join us July 2025 in beautiful Asheville, NC for the retreat!
Reserve Your Spot
You'll be joining an intimate cohort of up to 16 people. Please fill out the application to express your interest and find alignment with what we are offering.
Pricing
Scholarship Program
$1,600
Room & Board Included
Full Program Workshops
Recommended
Standard Program
$2,000
Room & Board Included
Full Program Workshops
Premium Program
$4,000
Room & Board Included
Full Program Workshops
Eight 1on1s with Facilitators
- After the intensive, we'll schedule up to eight calls with a facilitator to help integrate and take forward the insights and changes from the retreat into your everyday life.
Contact Us
Feel free to reach out with any questions.
Are you unable to join the retreat at this time but interested in joining a future one? Join the waitlist to stay in the loop around upcoming opportunities.
FAQ
Cancellation Policy?
Until June 1, 2025: Full refunds offered.
Until June 30, 2025: 50% Refunds offered.
After June 30th: No refunds offered.
Our 100% guarantee means if you do attend the full program and are still unhappy with the experience afterwards then you can ask for a full program refund (not including the cost of food and lodging).
Travel?
The venue is located near Asheville. You will be responsible for figuring out your own ride situation. We'll make a ride-share spreadsheet for all the program participants to hopefully carpool together.
There ought to be ample parking if enough people carpool together.
Start & End Date-Time?
Each day, we will have breakfast, lunch, and dinner available. There will be different workshops guided by the facilitators. You are welcome to choose your own adventure, everything is optional.
Accommodations & Food?
We want everyone to stay together for this week. We've found that a lot of the transformations and momentum comes from being together outside of the workshop times. We ask you set aside your regular busy lives during this time. However, if you have to take a call or deal with work, please take care of yourself.
Everyone will likely share a room with at least one or two others.
We will do our best to accommodate your dietary restrictions to the best of our ability including gluten-free, vegetarianism, and veganism. Please let us know in the application form.
Our Accomodations
Location TBD
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