Trail’s End Healing Retreat
Lake Palestine, TX
“What I am after isn’t flexible bodies but flexible brains. What I’m after is to restore each person to their human dignity.
”
A Quick Introduction Video For You
THE JOURNEY
Four rich days of movement towards health and restoration. Each day is sequential, building to an apex of agility and ease.
Somatic Movement Sessions to Heal Physical and Emotional Pain
Brain Re-patterning for Ease and Agility
Reorganize Habits that Keep You from Peace, Contentment and Delight
Practice Guides for Maintaining Your Gains
Integration Time for Self-Reflection and Rejuvenation
Nourishing Meals
RETREAT MISSION
Trail’s End Healing Retreat is a beginning journey into the vastness and potential of well-being through deep personal healing, physical restoration, and creative renewal. Through intentional developmental movement practices, participants will nurture and ignite physical agility, mental acuity, emotional stability, and spiritual connection.
Immersed in the remote womb of nature unadulterated by “getting and spending” where “we lay waste our powers” (William Wordsworth), you will emerge a truer version of yourself. Allowing the necessary and often detrimental adaptations of culture to be gently recognized and discarded at will.
This experience is for anyone looking to heal from pain and symptoms, a dysregulated nervous system, somatic wounds, or movement restrictions to your athletic or functional performance.
Retreat immersion experience
— Learn how to increase the fluidity and efficiency of your movements (addressing pain and symptoms).
— Recognize how unconscious beliefs disrupt your body’s internal system functions.
— Experience a deeper knowing of your “True” self which leads to humility and gratitude.
— Access more agency (choice) in your beliefs.
Our ability to non-judgmentally observe and experience our physical body, emotional body and spiritual body is the gateway to address physical pain and symptoms and regulate emotional processing. Our young, “adaptive” self learned how to perform for survival. And we have all had moderate amounts of success so that these strategies (being good enough, quiet enough, pretty enough, strong enough, successful enough) have become habituated. We will explore how we can be free from ways of thinking, being and doing that no longer serve us.
Retreat Promise
You will heal physical and emotional pain and find more peace, contentment and delight utilizing your genius nervous system. Each workshop session you will learn, move, feel, and connect. Specific neuroscience and physiology will support novel movement explorations to reorganize brain patterning.
“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO:
Relieve chronic pain and symptoms or tightness?
Address stubborn injuries that never quite heal?
Calm a dysregulated nervous system?
Upgrade your flexibility and functional capacity?
Avoid surgery and pharmaceuticals?
Maintain a healing lifestyle?
“We are perfectly suited for an environment in which we no longer live.”
Retreat Agenda
Much is offered, and it is all done with peaceful ease.
Day 1
The Riches Within: Your Genius Nervous System
Reorganize Movement Patterns That Cause Pain Or Symptoms
Each day we will move through a sequential library of guided movement lessons using bio-mechanical connections based on early childhood development. These lessons help us recognize and reorganize faulty movement patterns adapted to protect us from physical and emotional pain. They are not exercises, based on performance standards, but novel explorations initiated from curiosity. Exploring functional movement in gravity helps us return to sensing our “True Self” vs an “Adaptive Self” organized around surviving vs. thriving.
Day 2
How You Do Life and How You Do It Better
Increase Somatic Awareness to Reduce Stress and Other Health Drags.
As we daily increase our ability to connect with our “True Self”, we can more easily recognize internal and external, conscious and unconscious, nervous system triggers that drive cardio-vascular strain, digestive disruption, immune system sensitivity and mental anguish.
Day 3
Growing Your Adaptive Child to Be Present with Agency
Update Subconscious Beliefs That Interfere With Physical & Emotional States.
Discovering our agency over unconscious habitual ways of thinking, being and doing creates an easy outlet to stream innate, unique visions and intentions in satisfying and sustainable ways.
Day 4
Supporting Your Generative Drive
Meet A Deeper Sense of Self
Once you recognize your innate somatic capacity, resilience, and intelligence, unencumbered by the false narrative of subconscious self-talk, the indomitable spirit of reconciliation and gratitude arise without compulsion. Your deep sense of owning your human potential motivates compassion and altruism.
“The characteristic of somatic education is its assumption that the human being has evolved as a self-regulating, self-correcting and self-improving organism. ”
In addition, each movement session will include a parallel mental and emotional pattern that partners with the movements. During key sessions we will work on personal feedback, questions and revelations and realizations. There will also be supporting videos and handouts used intermittently during the sessions.
Bonus Activities
Swimming
Sauna
Paddle Boarding
Kayaking
Enjoying screened-in Boat House
Meditating in Nature
“It is the imagination that can channel the unconscious, and the unconscious that stewards the full scope of our capabilities.
”
Learn more by listening to these three short videos.
Cortical Field Re-Education (CFR) is based on the work of Moshe Feldenkrais. It is a system of pain and symptom relief. Nascent neural pathways forged as a child for functional movement are distorted through insult and injury. Rediscovering these early movement patterns redirects forces and loads away from overused tissues that “age” or “don’t heal”. CFR also helps you recognize choices and beliefs that keep you trapped in emotional suffering. Reorganizing these out-dated frameworks begins the restoration of function on all levels of consciousness.
Melissa Krikorian
Melissa is a physical therapist with over 25 years of experience and a Cortical Field Re-Education® (CFR) Trainer. She uses the most current neuroscience research to inform how she works with groups and private clients to restore physical function and emotional ease.
Melissa has been working with the human body for 35 years starting as a Physical Trainer in the 80’s, licensed as a Physical Therapist in the 90’s and providing Continuing Education for California Physical Therapists until 2020. She has presented at UCLA Physical Therapy Outpatient Department and at UCI Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute. She teaches internationally, at Esalen Institute and has her own private practice in Tyler, TX.
LEAH DWIN
Leah Dwin is a certified CFR practitioner and Pilates Instructor. After graduating with a degree in Kinesiology and Exercise Science, she worked in Physical Therapy Clinics integrating her skills into medical practices. Over the past 5 years, she has extensively studied Byron Katie’s “The Work” utilizing core principles to identify thoughts and beliefs that cause suffering - physical and emotional. Leah has taught for over 20 years; continues to explore with curiosity ways to create environments where students can learn more deeply about themselves and take steps to gain strength and satisfaction in all aspects of life.