DAY ONE — ARRIVAL & GATHERING

9:00 – 10:30 AM — Opening, Welcome & Relational Introductions

• Welcome to the retreat

• Housekeeping & support overview (massage/counselling/spa schedule)

• Land acknowledgment & grounding exercise

• Participant introductions through the lens of lineage, land, and work

• Icebreaker: “3 Selves” (Work Self, Community Self, Protected Self)

10:30 – 10:45 AM — Break

10:45 – 12:00 PM — Naming the Harm: The Truth About the Impacts of Working in Colonial Systems

This session creates space for Indigenous professionals to name the deep and often invisible harms of working in institutions built on colonial values. We will:

• Name racism, microaggressions, emotional labour, and silencing

• Surface the grief of isolation, invisibility, and code-switching

• Identify fractured workplace dynamics and their impacts This is not a therapy session, but a truth-telling space. What emerges here will shape the emotional and cultural threads for the retreat.

12:00 – 1:00 PM — Lunch

1:00 – 2:30 PM — Our Nervous Systems at Work: Healing the Unseen Impacts

This session explores how trauma lives in the body and how stress shapes workplace behaviours. Topics include:

• Nervous system regulation (sympathetic/parasympathetic)

• Over-functioning, shutdown, hypervigilance

• The "Window of Tolerance" and how it’s narrowed by colonized spaces

• Burnout as misdiagnosed dysregulation

2:30 – 2:45 PM — Break

2:45 – 4:00 PM — Small Group Exercises

• Embodied check-in: mapping responses

• The nervous system as storyteller

• Safety as a feeling

4:00 PM onward — Integration Time Spa

| Massage | Counselling | Land | Solitude

• One-on-one counselling with Debbi

• Massage with Sherry Lynn

• Healing Session with Moana

• Time in the spa, forest, or quiet reflection