From Heart Fatigue to Heart Warrior
With Rev. Therese Bimka, LCSW, Kim Schneiderman, MSW, LCSW, Ben Brown and Celeste Cipriano, LCSW
March 28 - 30, 2025
A DHARMAKAYA CENTER STILL PROGRAM FOR VETERANS
It is no secret that—throughout history—all those who have experienced combat bear deep invisible wounds. They return home not just drained, but profoundly affected by the impact of war which is by nature very complicated and traumatic. We know re-entry can be difficult. Veterans wrestle with grief, guilt, survivor syndrome, and other forms of mental trauma. The pandemic only magnified these issues by initiating an epidemic of loneliness that remains a mental health concern, especially for veterans who can often isolate.
This free program—held in a safe and restorative environment—offers those who have given heroic civic duty the space and the tools to process trauma and to restore their inner balance.
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
This retreat provides a diverse set of health and wellness trainings for veterans, using Evidence Based Skill Building for stress reduction, which fosters inner resilience and equanimity. The weekend will offer a combination of knowledge and lived experience through meaningful activities.
- Downregulating the Nervous System: These tools teach us to skillfully navigate the terrain of the mind, helping us reduce reactivity and increase response-ability. In this segment we will learn evidence-based techniques that support resiliency, increase focus, reduce stress, and help de-activate the nervous system. These capacities bring us into contact with our aliveness and help us grow embodied presence so we can learn to be an embodiment of calm in the middle of the storm. These are practical and portable life skills that veterans will learn and be able to practice at home and in community.
- Understanding Trauma: Understanding trauma is the necessary first step to shifting from reactive to pro-active. In this segment, we will learn how trauma functions within our bodies and how we can down- or up-regulate our systems when the four F’s of trauma appear: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fall Asleep (distractions). This session will provide the tools to attune to our inner landscapes, including an assortment of easy-to-incorporate embodiment techniques that will help us respond to the world with greater ease and empowerment.
- Cultivating Resiliency: It is essential that we create and fortify our internal container so that it can help us navigate the turbulent waters of these times with more ease and capacity. Resilience has historically been defined as the capacity to withstand and recover from challenges. However, recent research shows that resilience can also encompass Post-Traumatic Growth, a positive psychological change that some individuals experience after a life crisis or traumatic event(s). In this session, we will mine our stories of adversity for growth and uncover examples of resilience.
- RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture): In this powerful mindfulness practice, we recognize our experience, allow it to be as it is, investigate it with curiosity, and nurture it with self-compassion. It is a useful took for emotional self-regulation in real-time as challenging emotions arise.
- Nonviolent Communication: The tools of NVC are accessible and help increase our emotional vocabulary; through them we learn to identify and name what we feel, and, in turn, articulate clear requests to get our needs met. These skills tap into what Marshall Rosenberg (founder of NVC) calls Universal Needs and Universal Feelings.
- Heart Meditations: A few heart meditations will be taught over the weekend. These are useful as they help unleash compassion, self-compassion, equanimity, and loving-kindness. The heart can offer a place of refuge, rest, connection, and wisdom as opposed to the mind – which can be steeped in fear, scarcity and separation. It is in the heart space that we can experience more spaciousness and embodied resiliency. These heart meditations help generate a sense of inner peace and increase our ability to connect with ourselves and with others.
Further, the retreat setting provides an opportunity to experience restoration through the calm and beauty of the campus, the excellent food, the beauty found in nature and having access to experienced facilitators and wonderful healing practices. These combine to create a synergy of healing that can only be found in a multiday immersive retreat setting.
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
- Intimate setting with personal access to the teacher
- Interactive sessions with question and answer periods
- Shamatha and guided meditations
- Delicious all-vegetarian meals with locally sourced ingredients
- Option to extend stay on Personal Retreat
- Extensive library of dharma books
- Expansive wooded grounds with beautiful paths, flora and fauna
APPLICATION
This program is free of charge, but requires an application, which you can download here. Applicants will be accepted on a rolling admission basis.
SCHEDULE
(subject to change)
Friday, March 28
3:00 PM | Check in begins |
6:00-7:00 PM | Dinner |
7:00-9:30 PM | Welcome and Program Overview |
Ice Breaker and Introductions: The tools of Non Violent Communication (NVC) |
|
Mini Presentation: The Good News about Neuroscience and Healing | |
Two Practices to Down Regulate the Nervous System • Scaling and Breathing • Heart Guided Meditations |
|
Journal and Small Group Share | |
10:00 PM | Lights out |
Saturday, March 29
7:00-8:00 AM | Morning Salutations and Meditation, optional |
8:00-9:00 AM | Breakfast |
9:00 AM-12:30 PM | Mini Presentation: Understanding Trauma |
Teaching RAIN • Tool for Self Compassion and Emotional Regulation • Teachings of The Second Arrow |
|
Breathing Exercise | |
Small Group Debrief | |
Large Group Share | |
Self Care through The Expressive Arts Create a Spirit Stick that honors your gifts, your beauty, your power and your wounds |
|
NVC Exercise Identifying Universal Needs |
|
Closing Meditation | |
12:30-1:30 PM | Lunch |
2:00-5:30 PM | Cultivating Resiliency, with Kim Sneiderman |
6:00 -7:00 PM | Dinner |
7:00-7:30 PM | Walking Meditation |
7:30-9:30 PM | Sound Bath, given by Ben Brown |
10:00 PM | Lights out |
Sunday, March 30
7:00-8:00 AM | Morning Salutations and Meditation, optional |
8:00-9:00 AM | Breakfast |
9:00-1:00 PM | The Heart Expanding Practice of Self Compassion |
Closing and Evaluations | |
1:00-2:00 PM | Lunch |
This program is made possible by the generous underwriting of the Disabled Veterans National Foundation and M&T Bank.
Teachers
Therese is a spiritual director and a psychotherapist in private practice in the Hudson Valley and the former director of The Interspiritual Counseling Program at One Spirit Interfaith Alliance (2011-2021). She is a seasoned leader of retreats and workshops on a wide range of psycho-spiritual and creative themes. She has advanced training in various trauma-based teachings, guided visualizations for health, mindfulness meditation, Buddhism and Psychology, Expressive Arts, Jungian Sandplay Therapy, Soulcollage, Restorative Justice, and Collective Trauma, among others. Therese has led workshops and retreats for organizations, training institutes, educational institutions, government facilities, congregations, and community based nonprofits, in addition to…
Learn more about Rev. Therese Bimka, LCSW
Kim Schneiderman, MSW, LCSW, is a Certified IFS psychotherapist and the author of Step Out of Your Story: Writing Exercises to Reframe and Transform Your Life (New World Library, 2015), as well as the Novel Perspective blog on Psychology Today. She has taught self-discovery writing workshops at the New York Open Center, the 92nd Street Y, the JCC of Manhattan, Vassar College, Sivananda Yoga Ashram in the Bahamas, among other venues. She has also lectured on the spirituality of crisis and conflict at NYU’s Post-Graduate certificate program in Social Work and Spiritual Care and the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute’s Summer…
Learn more about Kim Schneiderman, MSW, LCSW
As a sound practitioner, visual artist, and bodyworker. Ben Brown seeks the intersection of mediums that provide a haven from social-emotional isolation, and support our adaptive capabilities to self-soothe and heal. Much of his work comes from the impulse to create more space in the nervous system and body through vibrational frequencies that connect us to our ancestral wisdom and being. Ben facilitates live and virtual sound experiences. He is the co-creator of HOME and E L I X I R, two monthly sound practices; LUSH, a hands-on bodywork and sound experience; and Beauty Medicine, an interdisciplinary sound art project…
Learn more about Ben Brown
Celeste Cipriano is LCSW and a Dance Movement Therapist who has a private practice in Brooklyn, New York. Celeste is known for her warmth and her well anchored clinical skills honed through her many years of extensive training and experience working within multiple mental health settings. Celeste integrates body, mind and spirt in her therapeutic approach to support healing and transformation. She is delighted to join this retreat in a supportive capacity as she is a daughter of an army veteran and her brother also served in the armed forces. She will be available to sit with anyone who would…
Learn more about Celeste Cipriano, LCSW