Tending Spirit in Your Relationship

Tending Spirit in Your Relationship

We invite you to participate in a workshop for committed couples seeking to deepen and enrich your relationship.  This one will focus on Tending Spirit in Your Relationship.

What is a Couple Enrichment Workshop?

This couple enrichment workshop is open to all couples who view themselves as committed partners, regardless of marital status or sexual orientation, who want to enhance their relationship, and spend some of their time focusing upon the spiritual dimension of their relationship. Couple Enrichment is not a therapy session, marriage counseling, nor an encounter group.  For us it is preventive medicine for our relationship, and fosters a deeper spiritual connection.

Why participate in Couple Enrichment? 

Our culture celebrates new beginnings, courtship and the act of commitment.  We can fall short when it comes to supporting relationships to stay vital and healthy over the long term.  Like other living things, committed relationships need care and careful attention.  Those that are tended and nurtured can thrive and realize their fullest richness and potential.  This workshop is a chance to step outside the usual busyness of our lives to intentionally create time for our most intimate relationship, giving our attention to our partner, exploring how our views and experience of spirituality affect our relationship.

Flow of the week:

We imagine beginning each morning with worship and proceeding from a worshipful center.  Using a skill-based approach, we’ll invite partners to take stock of their relationship, reviewing together what they value in each other and in their relationship, while taking time to foster greater under standing. We will offer a variety of experiential activities for couples to practice new skills in listening and speaking to one another.  As the group begins to create a supportive community, one of growing trust, couples will have the opportunity to share some of their communication and dialogue with the group on topics of their own choosing.  The group in return creates a safe environment for deep sharing. Throughout the week, participation in various exercises is voluntary.  We will have opportunities to explore exercises with our partner privately, and opportunities to support one another as members of this couple community.  We often find that working with the group’s support can help us to go deeper into a topic, break old patterns of relating, and bring a fresh understanding to issues. We affirm the quote by Douglas Steere:  “ To ‘listen’ another into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.”

Pre-Gathering Preparation Queries:  We invite you to sit with the following queries prior to Gathering.  How would you describe your Spiritual Journey to your partner?  How have your journeyed with Spirit in your life?  How do you experience your Spiritual paths mingling in your relationship?  What do you long for in tending the spiritual dimension of your relationship?