Adelynrood's 2025 Summer Program Lineup
Adelynrood Open House
Saturday, May 31, 2025 | 12-3PM
Help us kick off summer with our Annual Open House, Neighborhood Picnic and Craft Fair on the historic grounds of Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center. Individuals and families are welcome to join us. There will be music and children’s activities to enjoy as well. If you’ve visited Adelynrood before, this is the perfect opportunity to share it with your family, friends or coworkers. If you haven’t visited, it’s a great way to explore all that Adelynrood offers. This event is FREE.
School for Spiritual Direction: Observing Ourselves and Others – the Enneagram as a Tool for Spiritual Director
June 2-6, 2025
Our approach to this training assumes that self-understanding and continuing growth is essential to our availability to others as spiritual directors. In this module, we look in depth at tools for understanding human personality. This session will focus on the Enneagram, using the Riso-Hudson type indicator.
The Rev. Michelle Meech trained with the Enneagram Institute and has taught the Enneagram ever since.
Deep Peace and High Anxiety: “Pray, Love, Remember”
June 4, 2025
We all live in what the poet W.H. Auden called the “age of anxiety.” But we are also invited into the peace of God, a peace so radical that it “passes all understanding.” How can we get from here to there? Without denying the power of what we fear, how can we learn to live in trust and hope? This retreat uses Scripture and poetry, as well as insights from psychology and art and the lives of the saints, to explore ways we might loosen the grip of worry on our lives, and enlarge our faith that we might hold our anxieties both more lightly and from a deeper place.
Enthralled by the magic of words since early childhood, Deborah Smith Douglas, SCHC, has always found refuge and strength in reading and writing.
Leading with the Heart: Circular Leadership for Lifting All Voices
June 19-22, 2025
In these times of change, adaptive leadership provides the tools we need to find our voices and calling. Using the circular leadership model we build reciprocal relationships that honor diversity of culture, race, age, gender, personality, and ministry.
Our interactive program with break-out circles discusses the qualities, critical thinking, and behaviors of Circular Leadership that replace domination and greed. This is about reconciliation with creation and each other, listening to what is and is not shared.
Serving as the president of Province VIII Synod, advocating for Creation Care, skiing, dreaming and being inspired by “Mountain Mamas,” fills Evita Krislock’s time while renewing her spirit.
Christine Budzowski currently serves as secretary/treasurer of the Province VIII Episcopal Church Women (ECW), ECW Diocesan President, Los Angeles, and second vice president, Daughters of the King, Los Angeles.
Seeing As Spiritual Practice
July 18-20, 2025
Participants will be led in the practice of holy seeing, and understanding sight as a vital spiritual act, a Franciscan virtue that allows us to encounter our world with tenderness and empathy. Through group discussions, silent contemplation, and guided exercises in writing, drawing, or photography, participants will experience holy seeing as a way to open eyes and hearts to beauties that are often overlooked, and to scenes of suffering from which eyes are instinctively averted.
Margaret (Peggy) Adams Parker is a longtime liturgical artist and theological educator.
Life Story Writing
July 23-25, 2025
Experience a three-day program focused on reviewing life so far. We will excavate long-forgotten memories, explore our life choices, and reacquaint ourselves with our own stories. Writing in response to prompts, we will recall challenges and joys, ponder roads taken and not taken, and consider some who’ve guided and inspired us along the way. Leader-led, with ample time for writing and always-optional sharing, our writing will trigger surprises, laughter, and unexpected insights. No previous writing experience required. Story is really all we have of ourselves. Anne Lamott says, “You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up one day and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs, your truths, your version of things, in your own voice.”
Nancy Rose-Weeber, MFA, MST, RN is an award-winning fiction writer, essayist, literary consultant, developmental editor, and former editor of the literary journal Peregrine.
School for Spiritual Direction – Seeing the Diversity in Human Persons
August 4-8, 2025
This session invites participants to examine the ways in which biases shape our responses without our being aware of them and how we can cultivate openness through our spiritual practices. Our presenters will offer tools that can be used with any population, including dream work, exploration of archetypes, and the effects of trauma and addiction. The practicalities of ethics and developing a spiritual direction practice will also be addressed.
Anne Ritchings, SCHC, MA, MSLS, MDiv is an Episcopal priest with 30-plus years of experience in spiritual direction. Tracey Clarkson is an active Unitarian Universalist in Portsmouth, N.H., where she has lived for over three decades and has been working her dreams for almost as long. Dr. Kathleen Hope-Brown, DMin is affiliate faculty at Virginia Theological Seminary and DeSales University, where she teaches spiritual direction and spirituality studies.
Discover Your Inner Voice: A SoulCollage® Experience
August 6, 2025
Discover the transformative art of SoulCollage®, an expressive practice designed to help you tap into your intuition, creativity, and inner wisdom. In this one-day workshop, you’ll create unique collage cards by blending powerful imagery with personal insight. Guided by the principles of SoulCollage® as developed by Seena Frost, you’ll learn techniques for crafting and interpreting your cards through journaling and small group discussions, allowing them to reflect and guide you on your life journey. By the end, you’ll have a few completed cards to start your own personal deck, offering a visual journal that connects you with your soul’s wisdom. No artistic experience required—just bring an open heart and a curious mind.
Susan Nutting is a self-taught mixed media artist and certified Zentangle teacher who discovered her passion for creative expression in 2010.
Creating a Rule of Life: A Spiritual Discipline
August 8-10, 2025
Join two Companions for a soul-nourishing weekend retreat. Participants will gain a better understanding of the history of spiritual practices that bind communities together in love and service. Through dialogue, reflection and creative exploration, we’ll foster new practices to enhance our life journeys. As we reimagine, our hope is to build a bridge between foundational ancient traditions and our need for contemporary spiritual practices as companions along the way.
Lynn Buggage is the East Region Canon, Diocese of North Carolina. Sally Freed is an experienced retreat leader and a certified Soul Collage® facilitator.
A Day of Healing: Collaborative & Creative Community Building with Nature and the Arts
August 15-17, 2025
Collaborating with Nature, Rev. Barb will weave a weekend of reflection, creation, and celebration that will support each individual’s own unique healing journey.
Starting with grounding, music and settling into beautiful nature at Adelynrood, we will open to the possibility of healing from the inside out. We will work with water to release all that is no longer serving us. Poetry will invite us into a reflective space as we listen with our hearts to the sounds of nature. A modified Terra Divina practice will provide context for deep sharing and a collaborative watercolor painting experience.
We will culminate with music, gentle movements and affirmations as we together reflect and celebrate the healing of the day!
Reverend Barbara Thorngren, M.Ed. is an interfaith interspiritual minister who lives with her partner on a lively homestead in the heart of the Monadnock Region of southern N.H.; the ancestral homelands of the Abenaki, Wabanaki and Pennacook people.
Rewilding the Spirit
I Have The Light of Freedom: Tell Me How Did You Feel When You Came Out of the Wilderness
In short, we are called upon to free ourselves from the imprints, yearnings and appetites socialized into us by the ruling elites who use all of their power and resources to strip us of our authentic selves who are born with the spirit of God in us, to recreate us in their own image.
Within this context, freedom is a contested territory for which we all must struggle. However history determines nature and dimension of struggle to come out the wilderness. None of us are exempt from the toxins.
Ruby Sales, born in Jemison, Alabama, on July 8, 1948, suffered many hardships during the civil rights movement but was not discouraged. She has spent her adult life working in philanthropic endeavors.