Kay Gardner is best known for her work as a founding member and Senior Lead Trainer of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a model she has studied and contributed to since 1991.
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With over 40 years of clinical experience and 30 years in private practice, Kay brings a wealth of expertise and a compassionate presence to her work. Her background as a therapist and teacher of Hakomi Body Centered Psychotherapy enriches her approach, combining body-centered awareness with spiritual depth. Known for her heartfelt and skillful teaching, Kay creates an inviting space for transformative learning and healing.
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Kay is currently and most intimately working with Legacy Burdens - offering workshops and retreats around the globe and currently writing her first book on the subject.
Coming Home to Ourselves:
A Healing IFS Retreat in Italy
Tuscany
June 13-20, 2027
This workshop will be held with the intention of helping folks find their way home to their higher Self. Through working with legacy and cultural burdens, energetic patterns, using exercises such as the U- turn, working with the body and shadow work, we can begin to release what keeps us from being home to our true Self. We will then find ways to strengthen and develop spiritual practices and techniques to help us stabilize and stay home within our bodies and within the state of energy we call the higher Self. Learn more here.
Registration form here!
Spirit of the Land Retreat
October 4–9, 2026
Kilkenny, Ireland
Step onto sacred soil and into sacred remembrance. Guided by the deep teachings of Kay Gardner. This retreat offers an embodied experience of spiritual and energetic systems. You’ll explore how intention, presence, and ancestral connection can deepen not only your personal healing, but also expand the depth of your therapeutic practice. Expect fun and the unexpected in ceremony, sacred connection to the land, communal healing, storytelling, and space to soften into what you’ve inherited and what you are ready to transform. Come home to your Self, your lineage, and the spirit of the land.
SOLD OUT!
Legacy Burdens:
An IFS Retreat For Ancestral Healing of Cultural Burdens and Invoking Blessings
Avila Center For Community Leadership in Durham, NC
December 11 - 13, 2026
Details
This transformative workshop offers an inspiring, experiential exploration of our inner landscapes, with the intention of working with our legacy and our cultural burdens and blessings. Participants will have a rich opportunity to explore what we carry from both our ancestors and our culture.
We will spend our time together in experiential meditations and embodiment practices, sculpting our parts and sharing deeply with one another in the sacred space of our collective Self-energy. We will also deepen our relationships with our Whole and Well ancestors, often reaching far back into our ancestral lines. We will culminate our time together with a grief ritual for our ancestors.
Join us for this deep and intimate exploration of our cultural burdens, our blessings, and our ancestral lines.
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Join Kay in Avon, CT
The Spiritual, Energetic Lens of IFS
April 5-9, 2027​
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This retreat will help you expand your experience and understanding of parts work to include a rich and deep resonance with energy and spirituality. Kay has taken the things that have enriched, inspired and enlivened her along this path and included them in this retreat.
All the systems we will explore (the chakras, the enneagram, the dakinis, the sacred marriage, the marriage within, shadow work, the survival strategies etc ) are there to help to wake us up, to not only who we are, but how our patterns run energetically. ​
Coming soon...
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July 16-18. Seattle legacy burden retreat (July 2026)
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Energetic Lens of IFS (Virtual with Souliology, December 2026)
