A Samhain Retreat for Ancestral Healing and Future Planting

October 30 – November 2, 2025, St. Ottilien, Germany

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.

Find more information here: https://seeingwithyourheart.com/into-the-dark-in-st-ottilien-germany/

You can also reach out to rotger.heilmeier@gmail.com

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 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.

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.

You are warmly invited to an Ovate Gorsedd in Ireland from September 4th to September 8th 2025.
An Ovate Gorsedd is an opportunity to come together as Ovates and share our experience and knowledge.  It is an opportunity to learn from each
other.

During this Gorsedd we will visit  and perform rituals at the sacred sites of Uisneach, Loughcrew and Tara,  tapping into the landscape, and connecting with the ancestors of the land. Integrating our Bardic studies we will immerse ourselves in the stories of the landscape and use our creativity to record our experiences and create momentos of our time together.

Deposit of €150 by March 14th. Please note the 14th March is a deadline for booking, so please don’t miss out on a place!
To book your place or make further enquiries, please email Ovategorsedds@obod.org

Canadian OBOD Camp June 27 to 29, 2025: Finding Your Story