Cultivating Wellbeing for Health Professionals

Replenish Yourself and Gain Tools for Living with Intention

Join us for this mindfulness-based meditation retreat for health professionals and partners. Come away to the serene shores of Cortes Island to be replenished, restored, and equipped with tools to help navigate life in modern healthcare. This retreat emphasizes connection as key to vitality, and fosters connection with supportive peers, connection with a nourishing environment, and connection with our own moment-to-moment experience. We cultivate mindfulness as a guide that connects us to our core values, and equanimity that empowers us to develop clarity and make choices that support our wellbeing.

Wellbeing for healthcare workers requires committed action on many levels, including systemic change and enlightened leadership. At times, many of us feel helpless and struggle to live our values when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and a lack of necessary resources. This reality can lead to burnout, a natural consequence of demands exceeding our ability to replenish our internal reserves. In this retreat, we focus on domains where we can regain agency: developing awareness of habitual reactions, shifting our relationship to them, and through this, liberating ourselves to make different choices. We also explore the sometimes difficult but essential decisions we may need to make to truly care for ourselves. This changing “from the inside out” is not only empowering, but also creates a force for systemic change.

Evidence-Based Approach to Wellness

Led by psychiatrists Dr. Erin Burrell and Dr. Andrea Grabovac, this retreat integrates evidence-based practices from Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MiCBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). We learn specific tools to develop equanimity and practice applying them in daily life situations. We prioritize experiential learning so that we can leave the retreat ready to encounter our individual situations with more mindfulness and clarity.

Partners are warmly welcomed as full participants in the program, recognizing that the stressors health care professionals face affect their entire social ecosystems. When we make changes together with those closest to us, these changes tend to be deeper and more sustainable.

Customized Program Schedule


The retreat consists of morning and afternoon periods of learning through inquiry and discussion, small group activities, and guided mindfulness practices such as mindful movement, body scanning and mindfulness of thoughts and emotions. We will deepen our understanding of mindfulness through discussions of meditation techniques and group reflections on practice. Together, we’ll explore how to apply these mindfulness skills to effectively engage with the challenges we face and navigate the systemic drivers of burnout. By cultivating the ability to pause with equanimity, we can clarify the choices that best align with our unique values and individual senses of meaning. Periods of silent practice outside group sessions will provide additional opportunities to integrate these skills deeply into daily life. Erin and Andrea will also be available to meet individually for customized support for mindfulness practice.

This retreat emphasizes mindfulness in action, which is further supported by optional opportunities for mindful eating and other practices outside the structured activities, as well as invitations to participate in Hollyhock’s yoga and wellness offerings.

See last year's program schedule for more details.

By the end of this retreat, we will:

Apply a precise, actionable definition of mindfulness to our relationship with wellbeing and resilience
Understand how to work with attention to develop mindfulness, metacognitive awareness, interoceptive awareness and equanimity
Practice the ability to attend to present-moment experience in a more spacious, non-reactive, and effective way through a progression of meditations, including:

Mindfulness of breath
Body scanning
Walking practice
Mindfulness of sounds and thoughts
Loving kindness
Mindfulness interoceptive exposure task (MIET)
Experiential Ownership


Explore personal values to obtain clarity about the guiding principles that give our lives meaning, so that we can make choices to better align with these.
Cultivate self-compassion and acceptance of our inherent limitations, creating a foundation for sustainable well-being and effective action.
Develop practical and effective strategies for integrating mindfulness and equanimity in daily life

Click here to enjoy a guided meditation practice used to relate to chronic pain, led by Dr. Andrea Grabovac.
Accreditation
This Cultivating Wellness for Health Professions credit-per-hour Group Learning program has been certified by the College of Family Physicians of Canada for up to 31.25 hrs Mainpro+ credits.

Eligible for 15.5 hrs of MOCOMP Section 1 unaccredited small-group activity credits for specialist Canadian physicians (31.25 hours total – 0.5 credits per hour).
Daily Schedule
A detailed schedule will be emailed to you at least 90 days to your program. Click here to view last year's program schedule.