Into the Dark - Meeting the Season, Tending the Past, Planting the Future

A Samhain Retreat for Ancestral Healing and Future Planting
With Emily Blefeld, Dan Cohen & Rotger Heilmeier
In English with German translation provided
Guided by two Jewish and one German facilitator,
this circle is held in reverence, rooted in integrity, and open to grace.

As the veil thins and the air turns crisp with memory, we enter a sacred turning of the wheel of the year—an ancient invitation to slow down, listen deeply, and return to what matters most.

Into the Dark is not just a retreat; it is a ceremonial passage, a collective breath, and a remembering of what lives within and beyond us.

Set in the contemplative beauty of St. Ottilien Monastery, this retreat gently honors the unspoken histories that live in the German collective field—particularly those still echoing from World War II. While museums and memorials offer public remembrance, many personal and ancestral stories remain hidden beneath layers of silence and shame. With care and courage, we create a sacred field where truth can emerge and the heart can rest.

The Journey We'll Take Together
This Seeing with Your Heart workshop series invites you into the ancestral field—a space where time collapses, and past, present, and future converge. Through Systemic Family Constellations, we will tune into the wisdom of the land and the knowledge that lives in our bodies, allowing what has been forgotten or silenced to find its rightful place.

Together in community, you will learn to access your body’s evolutionary capacity to perceive and integrate the ordinary, ancestral, and spiritual dimensions of consciousness that are at the core of what it means to be human.

Held by the heart of Systemic Family Constellations, and threaded with ritual and embodied inquiry, we gather to remember what has been forgotten, restore what has been broken, and reclaim what is most essential: the wisdom of the heart, the blessing of the ancestors, and the wild intelligence of the dark.

We invite you to enter this liminal space with intention and soul.
Together, we will:
Attune to the rhythms of the Earth and your own inner seasons:
Feel the pulse of the year within your body and spirit, and align with nature’s wisdom.
Restore connection—with yourself, your beloved ancestors, and the ones who walk beside you:
Reclaim the threads of kinship that weave through time and space.
Enter the ancestral underworld with courage and compassion:
Greet what has been hidden or held in silence, and offer it space to transform.
Listen for what is stirring in the soil of your being:
Plant soul seeds in the dark so your visions are ready to root and rise in the time to come.

A Potent Time to Gather
Held during Samhain, a time long revered as a natural threshold between worlds, this gathering offers a luminous pause—between what has been and what wants to be born.
Across cultures and continents, this season has always beckoned us to gather around the fire, honor the ancestors, and open our hearts to the mysteries that flicker just beyond the edge of ordinary sight.
In the Celtic traditions, Samhain welcomes the presence of the dead with candles and prayer. In Día de los Muertos, families gather with food, flowers, and joy to receive the souls of loved ones. In Obon in Japan, lanterns guide ancestral spirits back to the realm of light.
These rituals, though varied in form, share a sacred heartbeat.

A call to tend the unseen, to commune with memory, and to walk hand in hand with our ancestral stories in order to nourish the seeds of the future.
This is not about reliving the past. It is about freeing the living from the shame and sorrows of the past, so that you—and those who came before and after—may walk with more lightness, more sovereignty, and more soul. Whether you come seeking clarity, release, inspiration or simply a deeper alignment with the season, Into the Dark offers a gentle yet transformative container for the journey.

Find more information here.
If you like to participate you can sign up and pay the fee here.

Looking forward to meeting you!