Grief does not begin with you. It was carried here across generations, across silence, and across love and loyalty that had no language.
Lake Lanier, Georgia · April 18–19, 2026
For two days beside the water, we step out of denial and enter a sacred, well-held field where sorrow, love, rage, and belonging are witnessed without urgency, correction, or performance.
Reserve Your PlaceThe Pattern
Many of us were introduced to grief through Kübler-Ross's stages, a framework that offered real orientation, language, and permission. It helped countless people make sense of loss.
Yet it did not teach us how to sit inside the depth of what those stages actually feel like in the body.
We say grief is non-linear. But we rarely know how to witness non-linearity.
So we rush. We explain. We bypass. We intellectualize. And grief becomes something we endure, rather than a current of depth and richness that can restore us.
What Grief Actually Is
To love is to open. To open is to risk shattering. Grief is not evidence of weakness, it is evidence that you have said yes to love.
Within the body live the same forces that shape mountains and rivers:
These forces are not mistakes. They are life. When grief is suppressed, it does not disappear. It settles into our systems, shapes our relationships, and influences how we receive love, money, sexuality, and power.
Unexpressed grief becomes a heavy, inherited system. Expressed grief becomes medicine.
Reserve Your Place
Grief does not begin with you. It was carried here across generations, across silence, and across love and loyalty that had no language.
The Map We Follow
Unlike the linear model, the Andean tradition understands grief as a spiral, a sacred journey through the body, the lineage, and the land. This is the living map that holds our work.
This Place, This Work
Lake Lanier holds more than water.
Beneath it are trees, foundations, remnants of what once stood.
Grief is similar.
It is not only about what has recently been lost. It includes what was never received. What was silenced. What was endured alone.
In systemic constellation work, we often see how life and death become confused. For some, vitality once felt like danger. Intensity felt overwhelming. Love was followed by harm. So grief can register as a hard no in the body.
This immersion somatically explores what lives beneath your surface. What lives in your bones that needs to be seen and belong, so you can experience a fuller life. We do not excavate forcefully. We acknowledge what has always been there and give you the container and support to be witnessed.
Presence replaces explanation. Witnessing replaces fixing. Integration reignites the welcoming of life.
The Container
This is not a retreat in the conventional sense.
It is a stepping out of denial and a willingness to let the heart be pierced open. We enter the heaviness of grief together, knowing it is not a place of despair, but a place of profound transformation.
The Black Jaguar walks with us here. Jaguar sees the richness and life in the darkness.
Through constellation work, somatic integration, ritual, and shared presence, we create a sturdy embrace. This is a container where emotions can be expressed freely and supported. Everything you are belongs in this space.
Step Into the River
When Grief is Witnessed, Life Changes
Holding the Field
Cathleen's work is rooted in systemic constellation facilitation, as developed by Bert Hellinger, presence-based witnessing, and the restoration of dignity within family and relational systems. For years, she has been listening to what lives beneath the surface: the unspoken grief carried across generations, the loyalty to suffering that shapes identity, and the places where life and death become confused in the body.
Her approach is spacious and precise. She sees the movement that wants to be expressed in the field like a dance unfolding. At The Returning River of Life, Cathleen holds the systemic field, ensuring the container remains sturdy, attuned, and relational.
Kristin creates grounded, body-led spaces where grief, rage, desire, and death can be explored with depth and care. She guides participants into the shadowed aspects of the feminine, where what has been exiled becomes a portal back to aliveness. Her work restores vitality, belonging, and a lived connection to what is sacred.
Kristin works at the threshold where grief, rage, longing, relief, and desire meet the body; how loss and suppressed emotion imprint in the nervous system, how what was braced against becomes contraction, and how shadowed experience carries untapped life force when witnessed with depth and care.
Together, Cathleen and Kristin steward sacred containers that honor both the spirit and nervous system. They believe grief is not pathology but devotion interrupted. In community, when sorrow is mirrored without urgency or correction, something reorganizes. Breath deepens. Identity clarifies. The river returns.
The Container
Over two days beside Lake Lanier, you will be held from arrival through integration. This is what you can expect:
You may move through anger, tenderness, silence, tears, and laughter, in no particular order. You will feel. You will be witnessed.
Reserve Your PlaceYou Are Held All the Way Through
This immersion does not end when you leave the water. You will be held before, during, and in the weeks that follow.
Is This For You?
"Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time."
— Maya Angelou
Grief requires courage. Not the courage to conquer it, the courage to stay with it. And the courage to love again. It is always worth loving.
Reserve Your Place
Limited to 12 participants each day · Minimum 6 required to proceed
The Invitation
When grief is witnessed, something softens.
When it is allowed, something reorganizes.
When it is held in community, life begins to flow again.
If your instincts are stirring as you read this, if something beneath the surface is ready to move, we welcome you to the Returning River.
Step Into the River