Spring 2027 |Shema Neshema Retreat
A Once-in-a-Generation Pilgrimage to Meet Your Ancestors & Return to Self
A seven-day ancestral healing journey through Holocaust memory, sacred land, and embodied Remembrance, held in Kraków, Poland. Spring 2027.
There are journeys that you choose and there are journeys that choose you.
The kind that arrives, in a whisper, or with direct clarity all at once. A knowing.
Something that has been patiently waiting for you.
Shema Neshama is one of those journeys.
A remembering.
A quiet listening.
A Return.
This is the kind of passage that asks something of you before you ever pack your bag.
It moves through some of Poland’s most historically significant Jewish sites, and invites you to listen through the body, where memory lives beyond what the mind can hold.
What This Is
It welcomes the lineage running in your blood, whether you’ve claimed it or not, to walk with you. To sing through your breath. To heal through your presence.
You are invited to:
Witness what was
Feel what has been carried
Return to life with deeper truth, connection, and choice.
The Deeper Why
There is a wound many of us carry that is rarely spoken out loud.
A fragmentation. A quiet question:
Where do I belong?
For generations, Jewish identity has been shaped by:
exile
survival
adaptation
silence
And even now…That history lives in the body.
In the nervous system.
In the way we relate to ourselves, to each other, to the world.
Sometimes as anxiety. Sometimes as disconnection.
Sometimes as a longing we cannot name.
This retreat begins there.
Not to fix you.
But to meet what has always been waiting.
The Origin
This work began as a calling.
On New Year’s Eve, in a moment of stillness, a vision came to Dr. Galya Loewenstein,
Shema Neshama’s founder, a practitioner of Chinese medicine,
and a granddaughter to three Holocaust-survivor grandparents:
Go to Europe. Plan nothing. Let your ancestors lead.
So she did. Two months across Germany, Poland, Hungary, and beyond.
Following intuition, with faith as her guide, she found herself being directly led.
Running her fingers across her ancestors’ names etched on walls.
Standing on the land where her family’s stories lived, and died.
Attuning to the memories that the ground still held.
Something opened. A path revealed itself through the unknown.
Carved out with weight, responsibility, and the rare clarity that comes when you stop planning; and start Listening.
Shema Neshama was born from that walk.
This is your invitation to take one of your own.
Why We Remember
Galya’s grandfather Ernie spent most of his life trying to forget.
However, in the end, he couldn’t die with the truth inside of him. So he gave it to her, story by story, from the time she was seven years old. His resilience passed through those stories like a current.
His life testimony became her purpose: when it’s hardest, love harder.
Her great-grandmother left something different. She left her eyes. Precise, visionary, healing. Patients have compared them to Galya’s acupuncture needles in the way they pierce, and the direct presence they offer. Those eyes have been in this lineage for generations. Her great-great-grandmother used them to persuade a Nazi officer to let her and her two daughters live.
It was their beauty, yes, but more than that, it was the soul behind them.
Something in him recognized something in her. Because of those eyes, three lives continued…one of them being her Grandmother.
Those eyes have moved through generations like a priceless, living heirloom.
They arrived in Galya. Through her work, they continue to do what they have always done: Recognize the soul behind the wound.
The survivors are gone. Those brave enough to tell their stories gave us an extraordinary gift. Now it falls to us, the lineage, not just to listen- but to remember. To alchemize. To carry what happened not as something that has broken us, but as something that makes us unbreakable.
This is why we remember.
This is why we return.
Why the Land Matters
Reading about history is one kind of knowing. Standing on the land where it happened, is another.
When your feet meet that soil, when your breath moves through that air, something in your blood responds. A visceral response that only presence can reach. Living memory inhabits that place. It waits. And when you arrive, it meets you. This is why we choose to go to Poland rather than just reading about it, watching documentaries, or honoring it from a distance. The land itself is a participant in the healing. The relationship is reciprocal, symbiotic.
As we walk through Kraków’s Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, and experience the sites that mark what was lost and what miraculously survived- these are not backdrops. These are time stamped imprints of life. They are ancestral witnesses to your arrival. We go to meet the past with dignity, to feel what is ready to be felt, to honor what is ready to be released; and to allow what will become from the integration of the past and the present.
The Journey
This trip begins before you board the plane. From the moment you say yes, you enter a structured arc of preparation, pilgrimage, and integration, spanning four virtual gatherings and seven days on the land in Kraków. Each one builds on the last. Each one indispensable.
Before You Arrive
You will be invited into a personal conversation with 2 of your facilitators. A chance to be known before the work begins, and to receive your preparation guidance. Two online gatherings follow. The first brings all participants and facilitators together in a workshop format, where each person shares from their preparations, songs, stories, prayers and artifacts from their own lineage, brought forward as an offering to the group. The second gathers everyone again in the days before the departure, deepening the connections formed. By the time you land in Poland, you will not be meeting strangers.
Arrival & Belonging
First we must land. Coming into the body, into the group, into the particular weight and presence where you are. Safety and trust are established her, not assumed.
Lineage & Preparation
Before you can witness, you need to know what you’re carrying. This phase explores identity, artistry, and inherited memory, preparing the nervous system and heart for what’s ahead.
Witnessing
This group visits historical sites including Auschwitz, moving through each place with historical context, reverence and the guidance of seasoned facilitators. What arises, individually and collectively, is received with patience and compassion.
Integration & Return
Grief is processed. Life is honored. The final phase integrates the experience and offers personal guidance on how to carry it.
After You Return
The journey doesn’t end at your return to the airport. A final group gathering brings everyone back together on the other side, guided by questions sent in advance, creating space for what has continued to surface since coming home. For those who want to go deeper, individual integration sessions are available to be booked separately with Feather or one of our other trusted facilitators.
What You’ll Experience
The work draws from multiple healing traditions, each chosen for how it speaks to the others. You will move through:
Holocaust remembrance and historical context, grounded in Jewish spiritual teaching and ritual.
Somatic practices run throughout each day.
Meditation, breathwork, vocal toning and song serve as tools for release and reclamation.
Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture are woven into the arc of the week, supporting the nervous system as it encounters this potent terrain.
Space for reflection is built into every day. So is community. Ten participants, three facilitators, seven days. The ratio is carefully considered for both intimacy and balance.
The container is trauma-informed and held with the kind of care that only comes from facilitators who have walked this ground themselves.
The Transformation
This experience will not make you someone new.
It will help uncover who you are.
The space has been curated for deep presence in traumatic places with Judaic historical significance. This trip is designed to offer an invitation into what it could look, feel, and sound like to connect more deeply with your ancestors, without agenda. To listen, with presence. How you choose to alchemize it, is your Neshema’s/Soul’s truth.
Because that’s what healing is.
A breathing testament to the existence your ancestors fought to preserve.
Perhaps, the highest form of remembrance is a life lived fully.
Meet the Team
This work is carried by a team whose personal histories are as relevant as their credentials.
Dr. Galya Loewenstein
A practitioner of Chinese medicine and lifelong student of trauma and healing, Galya’s work is rooted in both personal lineage and professional devotion. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish community with three Holocaust-survivor grandparents, her path has been one of deep listening…to history, to the body, and to the unseen threads that connect them.
Founder
Feather Groves
A trauma-informed facilitator and experienced guide, Feather integrates her background in trauma recovery, community leadership, and victim advocacy to hold the structure and flow of the journey with grounded care and intuitive responsiveness.
Container Steward & Integration Support
Naia Kete
A professional musician, transformational breathwork facilitator, and vocal embodiment coach, Naia integrates her work in youth healing, ceremony, and media to guide participants into expression, release, and authentic voice while capturing the journey in a way that honors its sacredness and integrity.
Media Director, Vocal Embodiment & Song HealingWho This is For…
Shema Neshama is for those who feel the call.
You may be a secular Jew reconnecting with a history that was never fully handed to you. Or someone deeply rooted in Jewish tradition who is ready to meet their heritage in a more physical, more felt way. You may be exploring what your lineage actually means in your body, beyond what you were taught or told.
Occasionally, someone arrives who is not Jewish but whose connection to this history runs deeper than curiosity. A partner, a longtime ally, someone for whom, somehow, the story of the Jewish people resonates, perhaps beyond explanation. That person is welcome here too.
What unites everyone who comes is a willingness to go beneath the surface of what they know and connect with what history has left in their bones. You do not need to have it all resolved. You only need to be willing to listen, which, in Hebrew, is the first word of the Shema.
Practical Details
Spring 2027 - Kraków, Poland
This is a fully immersive seven-day experience. Once you arrive, everything is taken care of.
LODGING
Carefully selected accommodations that reflect the character and rich history of Kraków.
MEALS
Shared communally, many in the heart of Kazimierz at restaurants chosen for their connection to Jewish culinary tradition. Here, food becomes ritual. What you eat becomes a savored morsel of the passage.
DAILY PRACTICE
Meditation, writing, workshops, somatic practices, and structured reflection layered throughout each day.
SITE VISITS
Historical and sacred locations including Auschwitz, Kazimierz, Kraków’s Jewish quarter, approached with reverence and full facilitation.
SHABBAT & RITUAL
Shabbat experience and synagogue visits interspersed within the arc of the week.
HEALING SESSIONS
Group acupuncture sessions tending the nervous system throughout the week.
FACILITATION & INTEGRATION
Full support across all four phases, including pre and post retreat virtual gatherings. The container accommodates ten participants, supported by three facilitators.
Investment: $10,000 per person
International airfare is not included.
A payment plan is available with a non-refundable deposit to secure your place.
Details provided upon application.
The Invitation…
There is a moment when something inside you says:
It's time.
Not a thought. A knowing. You’re not coming to Poland to grieve, though your tears are welcome.
You are coming to put the weight down, so you can rise.
Your ancestors did not surmount the unthinkable so that you could carry their grief forever. They endured, if solely in their radiant spirit, so that you could soar.
This is a walkabout that requires one thing above all else: your presence.
Not your history degree. Not your religious observance. Just you, willing to show up without agenda, without performance, without anything other than the genuine desire to bear witness, to their story, to your story, and to the threads that connect you across generations.
The greatest legacy we can offer those who came before us is a life lived fully. That is what this passage asks of you. That is also what it gives back.
If something in you is moving as you read this, that is enough. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You only need to be willing to take the next step. We invite you to begin the conversation.
Leave your name and email below and we will reach out personally to explore whether this is the right fit for you.
Close your eyes for a moment.
The Shema begins with a single instruction: Listen.
You have been listening this whole time.
Trust what you have heard.