A Very Special Retreat | “Alchemy of Reconciliation: Working with the Defense System“
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: TBD
Tuition Cost: $1680.00 | $1350.00 Early-bird Rate through DEC 20, 2025
Space is Limited
Presenters: Marion Gilbert and Hemla Makan-Dullabh
REGISTRATION OPENS SOON >>
Accommodations: $1170.00 (5 nights) or $1345.00 (6 nights) (from dinner Tuesday night April 28 to Lunch Sunday May 03)
Note: It is highly recommended to stay the additional night of May 3 for integration, which includes dinner on May 3. It also recommended to stay onsite (rather than commuting) with the entire group as it enhances group coherency and the development of supportive camaraderie. We also have the meditation room reserved for our group every morning before program start and every evening after dinner. It’s going to be an incredible group experience.
Commuter Rates Available (Options and details available on the registration form)
SPACE IS LIMITED
Space is uniquely limited due to the nature of the program (each person gets their own constellation) , so sign-up early | For questions or more information, please contact us >>
This unique, first-ever offering is a collaboration between Marion Gilbert of Somatic Enneagram™ and Hemla Makan-Dullabh of 7 Rays Holistic Center.
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, on-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.
MEET HEMLA | Co-presenter with Marion Gilbert
Hemla is a Transformation Catalyst based in Los Altos, California. She founded 7 Rays Holistic Center more than 20 years ago. Her workshops and events focus on one simple statement. Awaken the power within!
Hemla helps people engage with their inner healer using the 3-centered approach. We have 3 centers of intelligence and our journey is to engage with all 3 centers connecting with our body, mind, and heart. Hemla believes this can bring wholeness and wellness to our Human “Being”. Hemla works with groups and individuals who are at a crossroads in life, who are on a quest to understand their purpose, and who want to heal inherited (intergenerational) trauma. Epigenetically we hold the unhealed traumas of those who came before us, Family Constellations is a therapy that offers healing to inherited trauma.
Hemla is a certified teacher in The Narrative Enneagram and a Facilitator and teacher of Family Constellations Therapy. Hemla teaches a variety of modalities of therapy including meditation, she overlays her passion for Color Therapy, in all of the modalities she offers.
Hemla Founded 7 Rays Institute of Holistic Studies and offers certification programs in Family Constellations, Somatic Color Therapy, Awakening Your Intuition -The 3-Centered Approach, and other certifications.
Hemla was born in Durban, South Africa, and moved to California over 10 years ago. Her background is as an artist and a teacher.