It’s hard not to be relaxed when you visit The Light Center, a secluded 34-acre natural sanctuary in the woods about 15 miles southwest of Lawrence.

With Sander, a friendly, Labrador-Brittany mix who lives on the property, leading the way, you’ll follow a peaceful path that goes past a 100-year-old renovated barn, meditation gardens and a sweat lodge built of willow branches.

You emerge in a meadow, bordered by trees, where you’ll find a medicine wheel and a labyrinth made of straw under the high blue dome of the sky. The only sounds you hear are birdsong and the whir of cicadas.

“This has been my dream for a long, long time. It feels really great to be in the place I wanted to create,” said Robin Goff, founder of The Light Center.

For about 20 years, Goff had known she wanted to create an alternative or holistic healing center in a retreat setting. Finding a perfect location became a personal quest.

“I had looked at a lot of property, looking for a place of privacy and quiet away from neighborhoods and highways. I like that this place is set back from the road,” she said.

During the past six years, under Goff’s direction, The Light Center has been offering a wide range of natural healing retreats and workshops with a cross-cultural perspective.

The center is a not-for-profit corporation and an Alternative Unity Ministry for holistic health education. It is staffed by volunteers and receives financial support in the form of contributions from people in the Lawrence region.

Goff described its mission.

“It’s an opportunity for people to come away from their daily, ordinary life, to feel the difference of being close to nature. I like to think of it as reconnecting with yourself, other people and God, however you do that,” she said.

“We also teach a lot of classes for nurses and other health-care providers  who can earn continuing-education credits here  about how to reconnect with a paradigm of caring that involves the whole person.”

Wellness retreats

Operating out of the two-story, renovated barn, the center has an ongoing variety of classes, workshops and retreats on subjects such as American Indian and African spirituality, Reiki, energetic healing, natural health care for women, energy work and reflexology.

Goff also teaches classes on healing touch and a curriculum of courses for the American Holistic Nurses Assn.

The Light Center has begun offering healing retreats for people who have cancer or other serious illnesses, or who are interested in developing their own wellness.

These retreats are not designed to provide treatment or therapy. Rather, they provide a space for learning ways to seek inner healing in the fact of illness.

They have been carefully modeled after the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which has offered retreats for more than 17 years.

Goff trained with Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen at The Commonweal Center in Bolinas, Calif., which educates people who want to set up retreat programs.

“There were people from Harvard and Yale and medical centers, and then there’s me from the middle of Kansas. It was kind of fun,” Goff said.

Connect with spirit

She has a long history of experience in the health-care field.

Goff earned a bachelor’s of science degree in nursing from Duke University in 1968 and a master’s of arts and values degree from the San Francisco Theological Seminary in 1987.

She has 10 years of experience in hospice chaplaincy, most recently with a branch of Midland Hospice located in Ottawa. Goff left that position three years ago.

The Light Center is allied with the Unity Church movement, which has its world headquarters in Unity Village, Mo. Goff is a licensed Unity teacher.

The Light Center, however, is intended for people from all faith traditions and cultural backgrounds.

“We’re not acting like a church, but we are offering a place where people can connect with spirit. What we do here is create an environment that is healing and nurturing,” she said.