2026 | Alchemy of Reconciliation: Working with the Defense System

A Very Special Retreat | “Alchemy of Reconciliation: Working with the Defense System"

RETREAT INTENTION: Reconciliation of the Defense System, which runs us all the time.

It is our human need to feel included and belong to our families, communities, and ourselves. The inward turn to innate belonging honors our basic human need to belong to the earth, life, and the life we were born to live—within ourselves and with each other.

By bringing our conscious intention and attention to ourselves—as we are and to each other as they are, we come to discover what obstructs our growth and development.

Reconciliation of our ego’s ‘avoidance’ and ‘self-idealization’ is made possible by learning how to resource grounded presence and orient toward the avoidance.

Discernment is the foundational skill needed to realize that the idealization overtakes the whole of us.

How do we recognize our avoidance?

This retreat focuses on the inquiry needed to access the defense system that otherwise operates unconsciously across our lives. It’s active all the time—until we awaken to it.

Through Somatic Inquiry and practices, this retreat aims to go deep, offering a place to reflect and discover what has been hidden from us as a result of unconscious, automatic defensive patterns.

Using Family Constellations work, we can unveil the ancestral unknown, and we can witness and experience the avoidance and the idealization that need to be seen, heard, understood, and included through legacies long-held in our psyches.

Combining Somatic Inquiry and Family Constellations alongside the Enneagram map offers us a compassionately supported, holistic approach to healing the deeper wounds—ancestrally, emotionally, and somatically.

Combining these two very powerful approaches, led by Marion Gilbert and Hemla Makan-Dullabh, supports our journey into the defense system’s protective barriers and its energy-expensive, deeply unconscious cost to our lives.

Opening to the greater reality of who we truly are—through personal liberation that results from safe deconstruction and long-deserved healing—is the objective of this retreat.

Featuring;

• Inner Practices to cultivate the Inner Observer, Grounded Presence, and Placement of Attention.

• Interactive exercises for developing received knowing, feeling, and sensing.

• Breakout groups for sharing conversation and experience.

• Didactic Somatic Enneagram: understanding type structure and our defense system.

• Didactic Family Constellations: understanding principles of constellation work.

• Individual co-facilitated constellations for healing, with group participation.

• Integration practices and movement.

• Includes evening meditations and guided inner practices.

• Includes labyrinth walks intending to highlight something that may be hidden in our shadow to receive new understanding and insight.

Save the Date:  TUES APRIL 28 – SUN MAY 3 2026

Time:  Check in TUES 2:00 p.m. | Concludes SUN 5:00 p.m. with option for dinner

Where:   Pallottine Retreat Center

St Louis County, Missouri 

More Details coming soon

Join the waitlist to be first in line.