Jef Szilagyi

Jef is healer, poet, and community builder. He brings his rich sense of language, emotional intuitiveness and over 30 years experience working with men to individually and in groups. Ancestral Futures.

Retreat Teachers

Eliyahu Sills

Eliyahu Sills, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and men’s group facilitator with over 30 years of dedicated involvement in men’s work. His life’s work is rooted in creating spaces where men can engage with authenticity, emotional depth, and meaningful personal transformation. Through steady guidance and mentorship, he supports men in exploring their inner worlds, uncovering their strengths and purpose, and cultivating a deeper capacity for connection—with themselves, their emotions, and their communities.

Eliyahu’s work is deeply informed by a lifelong engagement with diverse cultural and spiritual traditions. He is committed to honoring the complexities of lineage, identity, and belonging, and to fostering spaces where men can wrestle honestly with these dimensions in ways that are both personal and collective.

Parallel to his clinical work, Eliyahu is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist whose musical path reflects the same ethos as his therapeutic practice: attunement, presence, and a devotion to wholeness. As the founder of The Qadim Ensemble—whose album reached #7 on Billboard’s World Music charts—he brings together musical traditions of the Middle East as a living expression of cultural bridge-building.

A student of sacred and folkloric music from around the world, Eliyahu has devoted decades to the study of instruments including the Middle Eastern ney, Indian bansuri flute, oud, and upright bass. His teachers include renowned Hindustani bansuri master G.S. Sachdev, as well as ney masters from Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Morocco. This deep immersion in global traditions informs both his artistry and his therapeutic presence, enriching his work with nuance, humility, and reverence for lived experience across cultures.

Eliyahu is a husband and father of two, and he brings warmth, humility, and groundedness to all aspects of his work.