“It’s an incredible gift to craft an environment where people can heal themselves.”
As a teacher Rythea balances empathetic facilitation with structure. She creates a safe container through clear and honest communication, providing step by step tools that are accessible and empowering. Passionate about creativity and transformation, Rythea has led Expressive Arts workshops, Performance Art intensives, therapeutic support groups, movement-based practices, and most recently peer to peer counseling courses.
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS
Here is a roster of workshops that teach and utilize Peer Counseling. What is Peer Counseling? Read more on this page: https://rythea.com/therapy/
Due to our commitment to addressing white privilege and societal racial inequality, we offer scholarships for people of color, please inquire
Healing Self-Hatred 9-Week Intensive Support Group
In person!!
Dates: Monday Nights 6-8:30 EST. January 9- March 6, 2o23
I think I’ve finally turned the corner on my healing process, and my work with you and the group played a huge part in helping me move through digesting my trauma faster. Feeling like I can interact with the world again and now that I’m no longer in survival mode i can devote more energy to creating and trying to start earning money again so this is good!!!! And I’m feeling much stronger knowing that if i have an emotional flare up so to speak, i have the tools i need to get through it and that i can always reach out and ask for help. That’s a new thing for me 🙂 thanks to the group for helping me work through my fear of receiving. I’m still working on it but my grip is softening. This is good.
Being part of the Healing Self Hatred group felt like being on an epic adventure, with Rythea and Divinah as wise and caring guides.
I came into the HSH group after continuing to struggle with self-loathing, despite years of introspective healing work in therapeutic and 12-step spaces. I really wasn’t sure it would teach me anything I didn’t already know about myself, but I hoped it might give me a boost. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly the unique nature of the group revealed new colors and textures to my inner map, helping me to travel further than I had ever gone before.
In addition to a more detailed map of my inner world, the group has given me a new respect for the various parts of self that make the “me” that I bring into the outer world; connections with a posse of courageous spiritual warriors; and a kit of tools to help me find my way back to self-love when the going gets rough, as it inevitably does on planet Earth.
A Zoom Miracle!
PEER COUNSELING
Due to Covid, many of our classes are on pause. Check back soon!
Radical Closeness for the People
A Workshop Series for Learning the Basics of Peer to Peer Support
9 Weeks on Tuesday Nights
with Rythea Lee and Samantha Burnell
Are you longing for deep connection? Are you looking for meaningful ways to connect with people during this crazy, disturbing, disrupted time?
Human beings come in with a full range of very important emotions. Anger, sadness, fear, shame, joy and so much more. Somewhere along the line we get the message that only happiness and being, “ok” is what you can share with other people. We are afraid of being too much, too sad, too angry. We live in a society of isolation and separation, where feelings are considered taboo and few people have the skills to help out or even listen.
We are meant to live in community, to be in relationships where true intimacy can flourish, where pain and joy are shared equally with compassion. This work aims to create a context for developing deep and lasting connection through time.
This series will facilitate the practice of peer counseling, fostering a safe space, tools, and theory to build enduring peer support. We will cover enough groundwork for beginners and enough depth for people who have peer counseled before.
Our intention is to create a weekly experience that helps you move forward in:
1. Not feeling alone in your life
2. Allowing feelings to cycle through without getting blocked
3. Having new insights that move your life out of stuckness
4. Creating relationships that support you to have true intimacy
5. Waking up emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and creative avenues of expression
Rythea Lee and Samantha Burnell have both been peer counselors for over 25 years and have seen the deep value of creating a network of peer counselors as part of every day mental and emotional health. We have been teaching peer counseling classes for 5 years and have grown an incredible community of peer counselors in our area
Early Registration $280 by Dec.20th- you must pay at least a $100 by this date. $300 after that date.
If you have been in crisis recently or currently, please email us before you register to discuss if this course is appropriate for you.
Due to our commitment to addressing white privilege, reparations, and societal racial inequality, we offer scholarships for people of color, please inquire
Limited group numbers so register early. Not a drop in class. Intake required, please contact Samantha Burnell at samanthaburnell@gmail.com
To read more about this incredible practice read this article by Rythea Lee, HERE
Cancellation policy for a series:
The $100 deposit to sign up for a series is non-refundable. If you pay in full for the whole series, you can get 1/2 back up to 2 weeks before the workshop not including the $100. Once it has hit 2 weeks before the class, there are no refunds. We can forward the remainder of your balance (not including the $100 deposit) to a future workshop up to 2 weeks before the series.
Sacred Rage Workshop:
Accessing Power and Anger for women, trans, and non-binary folk
Coming Soon
Facilitated by Samantha Burnell and Rythea Lee Workshop held in Williamsburg, MA
Anger can be a direct line to our life force. Allowing it to express and articulate,physically move, and be heard can be transformational. Our very life-energy is often tied-up in our repressed or mis-directed rage. Supporting each other to break silence will be a powerful outlet in this workshop.
Anger and rage are basic human emotions, just like happiness, sadness, and fear, andyet, most of us who were socialized female are trained from a young age to stifle our anger to avoid being shamed, shunned, and punished. We have often been robbed of the opportunity to experience how useful and essential anger is for claiming space, having a voice, making boundaries, taking action, and creating healthy and equal relationships.
In this workshop, we will create a safe container and invite ourselves to access anger and/or find ways to express anger in ways that are beneficial to healing. We will work with different release exercises and the skills of peer counseling to process and move through whatever comes up for us around this issue. It will be intense and fun and life changing. Because both facilitators are trained counselors, they have skills and tools around creating safety, group dynamics, boundaries, trust, and support. They are looking forward to supporting participants in supporting each other in breaking free, whatever that means to each of us.
Cost: $100 if paid by April 25th, $120 after that date. The workshop will be held in Williamsburg, MA. This space is in a cat home.
If you have been in crisis recently or currently, please email us before you register to discuss if this course is appropriate for you.
Due to our commitment to addressing white privilege, reparations, and societal racial inequality, we offer scholarships for people of color, please inquire
1/2 refund if you cancel up to 2 weeks before the workshop, no refund after that date
TO REGISTER: rythea.com/shop
PEER COUNSELING, 9 WEEK COURSE, Level 2
Sundays, 6-8 P.M in Northampton, Arts Trust Building
Ongoing, inquire with us
Taught by Rythea Lee and Samantha Burnell
This class series is for people who have taken our Peer Counseling intro classes or have had some experience with Re-evaluation Counseling or Co-counseling. We will build on the basic skills of compassionate listening, releasing emotions, and working on early material (childhood). We will learn more about what it means to be a grounded counselor with a solid tool-belt of skills who can also respond to the moment. We will learn what it means to take charge of our own healing as a client, to ask for the support we need in the moment, and to find safety to feel and express in our sessions. Peer Counseling is, most importantly, a practice that deepens over time, as connections develop into solid longer-term support. Our intention is to facilitate the growing of community of Peer Counselors in our area.
This work creates a weekly experience that helps you move forward in:
- Not feeling alone in your life
- Allowing feelings to cycle through without getting blocked
- Having new insights that move your life out of stuckness
- Creating relationships that support you to have true intimacy
- Waking up emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and creative avenues of expression
- Being able to act on your own behalf with confidence and ease
Limited group numbers so register early. Not a drop-in class.
If you have been in crisis recently or currently, please email us before you register to discuss if this course is appropriate for you.
Due to our commitment to addressing white privilege, reparations, and societal racial inequality, we offer scholarships for people of color, please inquire
INFO: email rythea@crocker.com 413-586-7390
Cost: $280 if you pay by January 2nd, $300 after that date (You only need to pay $100 to hold your spot)
Please read cancellation policy on my website at rythea.com/teaching
To register and pay a deposit: https://rythea.com/shop/
Cancellation policy for a series:
The $100 deposit to sign up for a series is non-refundable. If you pay in full for the whole series, you can get 1/2 back up to 2 weeks before the workshop not including the $100. Once it has hit 2 weeks before the class, there are no refunds. We can forward the remainder of your balance (not including the $100 deposit) to a future workshop up to 2 weeks before the series.TESTIMONIALS FOR PEER COUNSELING COURSES:
TESTIMONIALS Fall 2018
Samantha and Rythea are changing lives by giving us the tools and community to change ourselves. After being in therapy for 10+ years, being taught by counselors who let us know we are all broken and dealing with our unique traumas, themselves included, allowed me to shed my fear and embarrassment over being a work in progress for the first time! I feel like I’ve discovered the true, deep truths hidden in my heart and soul, and there’s a supportive community that I can now rely on to help me continue the work I’ve started.
J.G
I want other people to know that it’s okay to commit to your life, your story, your feelings, all the bad stupid junk about you, all the glorious, vibrant, starlight about you. That you have to find places and people that help you hold and move that junk and this is one of those places and these are the people.
R.L
My friends joke that my answer to every question these days is “peer counseling.” Samantha, Rythea, and Michelle model being real! That is such a huge, rare, and empowering gift because they couple being real with teaching concrete loving skills and support us to practice them. I don’t even really understand why this class has been so powerful but it is helping me change some pretty core stuff.
M.M
This class is changing my day to day experience in the world as well as helping deal with old stuff. My friends joke that my answer to everything these days is “Peer Counseling.” Samantha, Rythea, and Michelle model being real! That is such a huge, rare, and empowering gift because they couple being real with teaching concrete, love skills and support us to practice them. I don’t even really understand why this class has been so powerful, but it is helping me change some pretty core material.
S.A
This class was so well done. Your leadership, Samantha and Rythea, was seamless, flawless, loving, caring, honest, authentic, and powerful. I personally grew a lot in these 2 short months and was able to begin unraveling and making accessible some root issues that I’ve been grappling with for years!
Karen A
Testimonials 2017
This community is the real deal, and this practice is sincerely life-changing. Deep listening, loving attention, and wise holding of our feelings can be in such short supply in this world; counseling and being counseled has restored something so human and so essential to my life and relationships (old and new). Rythea and Samantha hold space with an expertise based on devoted practice and personal healing, and a humility and vulnerability based on continual learning. These classes have held me through true and incredible transformation. I bring these tools with me everywhere I go now.
Mary-Hannah
Peer Counseling has felt to be a catalyst for integrating sincere ways of experiencing myself, a foundational groundwork for feeling, exploring, and articulation emotions. Accessing the wisdom of my process, a true support system (system in the way of being community and accountability and reliability and consistency). At times a cannonball to burst me open, get real and vulnerable into dissecting defense mechanisms, projections, insecurities, patterns, and stories.
Demi
Peer Counseling is a game-changer. That’s the way I most often describe my experience of this class. Being encouraged, held, and challenged to feel my feelings, and actually understand what that means has been more life-affirming and connecting then pretty much anything else I’ve been a part of. I feel safe here and pushed and seen and I feel allowed in every way. There’s something deeply radical about creating a space that asks each person to be their most vulnerable selves and bring their full agency as well.
Aliza
I go deeper and deeper every class. Sometimes I think I’ve figured it all out about myself and then Rythea and Samantha provide some activity or nugget of wisdom during a session and I learn so much more than I could on my own. Through Peer Counseling, I’ve started to trust that I can go after my dreams, my fears, etc. because I have a network of support. It’s a complete game-changer, life changer. It’s given me a confidence in going through life, having feelings, and continuing to move forward.
Michelle
Peer Counseling has truly changed my life. I can’t think of any other practice that has transformed me so quickly. The safety, the community, the support, the love, the tools, all allowed me to go into my deepest “stuff” and being able to make real, deep shifts. I am so grateful to have been able to be here and I can’t picture not having Peer Counseling in my life now that it’s here.
J. Eckard
Bring Rythea to you
Rythea is available to teach outreach to organizations, schools, colleges, festivals, and creative events. She tailors her workshops for different populations including artists, non-artists, dancers, non-dancers, theatre students, and groups of any kind that need creative direction and community-building experience.
Rythea has taught at colleges such as Mt. Holyoke, Greenfield Community College, Muhlenburg College, Smith College, and UMass. She has taught for many years at Earthdance Center for Creative Living, for Community Crisis Response Team, and Survivor Theatre Project. She invented and taught a wide range of classes at her studio, Wild Life Sanctuary, for 20 years, assisting people from all walks of life to make art and express with power. She continues to teach and facilitate art-making as a community experience for creating healing and change.
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“Zany Performance Art” Writing, Moving, and Sharing into the Wild Unknown. Rythea Lee leads participants through a creative journey, in which we use our voices, tell our stories, find the humor in who we are, go deep, and get Zany. This is a time to mine the depths of your personal mythology to bust through logical thinking into beautiful, unrestrained art making. We will offer manageable, bite-sized, structures in theatre, creative writing, and movement that allow creativity to unfold step by step. ANYONE CAN DO IT! Then we share our discoveries in a safe, supportive, and grounded environment held and cultivated by the facilitators. This workshop can focus on improvisational performance or the making of set performance pieces, depending on the requests and needs of each organization. |
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“Authentic Movement” Authentic Movement is an expressive, improvisational movement form developed originally by dance pioneer Mary Starks Whitehouse in the 1950’s. It can be used for personal process, artistic sourcing, and/or contemplative attunement. Authentic Movement involves at least one eyes-closed mover and one witness, though there can also be many movers and witnesses. It heightens the body senses, perceptions, and awareness. Opens you to experience: image, memory, character, inner landscape, and visions. Develops your ability to move with (conscious) and be moved by (subconscious) one’s experience. Helps you source your unique artistic inspiration for movement and voice. This practice is used by dancers, choreographers, artists of many disciplines, therapists, students, and spiritual seekers. The practice is often accompanied by time to integrate discoveries through writing, drawing, and sharing. For students of dance and theatre, this practice is a powerful way to discover and explore ones own movement vocabulary and artistic voice, as well as find seeds for developing material |
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“Painting & Movement workshop”
Painting can be a meditative and opening art form. In this workshop, we will explore painting as a practice of playing and listening through flow, color, texture, line, and image. As we move our hands from our whole body and full self, the painting emerges. Movement offers a way to access the personal and archetypal through the body, the heart, and expression. We will bring these two practices together so that one creative state feeds another. The painting will inform the movement and the movement will feed back into painting. This is a chance to give yourself the gift of timeless expression and artistic satisfaction in an non-judgemental environment where emotional intelligence is the basis of how we teach. -
“Co-Counseling: Taking Turns in Peer Counseling”
Human beings are meant to live in community, to be in relationships where true intimacy can flourish, where pain and joy are shared equally with compassion. This work aims to create a context for developing deep connectioin with self and others as well as releasing past hurts. This workshop provides the beginning stepping stones for creating a lifestyle of emotional health and healing. Basic theory and practice in peer support, why it works, and how it works will be taught. We will present the benefits of the “counselor” role (listening while providing a supportive space) and of the “client” role (embodied emotional expression and finding ones inherent aliveness). We will offer bite-sized peer counseling structures to try in pairs and then answer questions that come up around this work. People will come away with simple hand-outs to take home so that you have a map for doing this with those in your life or with participants from the workshop that you want to counsel with. -
“Inner Bonding Support Groups”
Rythea Lee is a certified Inner Bonding® practitioner with a counseling practice for 20 years. Her groups are an experiential, loving environment for support, sharing, and learning. Inner Bonding® is an emotional and spiritual approach to healing developed by Dr. Margaret Paul and Dr. Erika Chopich. You will learn an extraordinary and innovative 6-step process that allows you to feel the power of your emotions, dialogue with your spiritual guidance, and develop a healthy adult self. This work is wonderful for gaining a tool that can be practiced for resolution of daily upsets. It is also very helpful for healing trauma, painful relationships, addictions, and depression. In a group setting, the facilitator does some one on one counseling as well as teaching the basic principles.
Read more about this at: www.innerbonding.com