In late 2023, I facilitated one of the events I count among the most meaningful of my career. It was called 'Healing in Tribe', and 44 men and women journeyed together in a profound way.
It was an opportunity for us to come together and explore the healing power of togetherness, and the importance of brotherhood and sisterhood spaces within a larger mixed field.
What the retreat explored
- Nature of Healing: Healing is not a destination or a task. It's a continuous process of recognizing our inherent wholeness and goodness.
- Safety at the Core: True safety is not just physical but is felt at the emotional, energetic, and somatic nervous system levels.
- The Power of Group Healing: Doing inner work with a tribe provides a frequency of connected presence that we might have missed out on earlier in life.
- Transactional Love: Our upbringing often makes our expression and experience of love conditional, leading to a split from our authentic essence.
- Slowing Down: Our culture urges us to rush, but our healing requires us to slow down and be present.
- Rest and Imprinting: Instead of digging up the past, the focus is on allowing our bodies to inform us of our healing needs.
- The Power of Containers: Time spent in men-only or women-only circles can address issues that arise specifically in those settings.
Our intention behind that retreat was simple: to provide an environment where we can all relax into a profound connection with ourselves and each other. It's about creating spaces where our healing can flourish, not because we're pushing for it, but because the environment invites it.
There's so much magic in doing this work together. The collective energy, the shared vulnerabilities, the resonant strengths – they all contribute to a more profound healing experience than many of us have ever known. The beauty of 'Healing in Tribe' is that it's a co-created experience. Everyone is both a teacher and a student, leading and being led by their intuition and impulses.
I also want to share one of my favourite introductions to circle, filmed in 2018. It speaks to the power of imprinting, and to what becomes possible when we let a tribe help us grow in ways we could not manage alone.
Learning through others
In the 2018 recording, I use imprinting to describe learning through the example of another person. My own relationship with my mentor Jerry is part of that story. I am interested in how being around a quality we value can affect the way we express it ourselves.
Recording notes
On imprinting (2018 circle talk)
Christian describes imprinting as the way we absorb behaviour, belief and nervous system patterns from the people around us, starting with parents and continuing through culture and community. He argues that in the absence of healthy mentors many people grow up without a felt sense of what healthy masculinity, femininity or connection actually feels like in the body. He frames Heart iQ's group work as a conscious, accelerated form of this same natural process, where people already embodying a quality can help others access it directly rather than through years of solo effort. He is candid that this is his own framing and belief about how growth happens, not a clinical claim, and he draws on his own long mentorship with his teacher Jerry as the personal example behind the idea.
On the retreat opening talk
Christian explains that for him healing is not a fixed destination but an ongoing process of recognising an intrinsic wholeness that was never actually lost. He distinguishes physical safety from the emotional and nervous system safety a group container can offer, and describes early love as often becoming conditional in families, which can leave a person split from parts of themselves. He talks through the retreat's shift over the years from strict rules and separated men's and women's spaces towards daily integration and invitation-based participation, explaining that rigid external rules tended to create a dynamic where he was unconsciously cast as an authority figure, which worked against the sense of shared adult responsibility he wanted the group to hold.
Mixed Tribe Space and Single-Gender Containers
Mixed tribe space
The whole group practises together, bringing different experiences into contact.
Men's or women's only circle
Some participants find particular material easier to explore in these smaller peer settings.
