SDI is offering a very unique Forest Bathing Journey – a travel experience hosted by us – to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a Nature Immersion and Deep Listening retreat, for seven days in March 2023. In this conversation, the retreat facilitators, Dr Jeanette Banashak and myself, discuss our themes and hopes for this time together, to give you a better sense of what is being offered. 

For all spiritual directors, companions, and seekers, we invite you to spend a week immersing in nature, breathing the clean forest air, finding silence and stillness, and experience deep listening on new levels.

With this SDI Journey we are able to offer reasonable pricing, with a significant Early Bird discount if you register before October 8th. We are offering standard single and double rooms in both a contemporary inn setting, as well as multi-room cabins and cottages. Bring a friend (or a few friends!) And let us know with whom you’d like to share lodgings. If four or more of you would like to reserve a cabin or cottage together, call us and we’ll work something out.

Designed by spiritual directors and companions, for spiritual directors and companions, this Journey retreat is sure to nourish, restore, and intimately connect you to Nature, Contemplative Community, and the Essence of your very Being.

Learn more at SDI Journey - The Forest as Companion - Nature Immersion and Deep Listening - March 19-25, 2023 - SDI Companions

 

 

Dr. Jeanette Banashak is a queer and bilingual interspiritual and interreligious companion. She has a diploma in shinrin yoku (forest bathing) and guides people of all ages in nature urban immersion experiences as an act of justice, as well as is working on a piece that explores interspirituality and trees. She is the co-founder/director of The Spiritual Guidance Training Institute, an organization providing training in spiritual direction/companionship with an interfaith, interspiritual, inter-contemplative focus. Jeanette is the author of The Mindful Pilgrimage: A 40-Day Pocket Devotional for Pilgrims of Any Faith or None and a 30-Day ezine of haiga from the Camino. In 2018, she became a “dual pilgrim” after walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain and Kumano Kodo in Japan. Jeanette also teaches social and emotional learning and development at Erikson Institute and spiritual direction at the Graduate Theological Foundation.