“If you can't find where your soul is hidden, for you the world will never be real!” ― Kabir

This retreat is designed to cultivate what we consider the 2 most fundamental inner capacities of developmental embodied integral leadership: (1) Integral Engagement, and (2) what ancient wisdom traditions sometimes called the Witness.

The practice of Integral Engagment helps us more fully feelingly-be-with the Realness of our unique individual life in a way that increases not only our sense of tenderness and intimacy with it, but also our effectiveness and capacity to shape it in desirable ways for ourselves and those we love.

Initially the Witness seems to distance us from life, but ultimately does the exact opposite because when we recognize what we are not, then we are free to let go and dive into the white water rapids that our lives sometimes feel like - without needing to worry about drowning.

The orchestrating principle of this intensive retreat is the life process.  In the beginning is birth, and at the end we confront death to deepen our relationship with this precious situation that we currently find ourselves in (called life).  And in between birth and death, as Sigmund Freud put it, is love and work.

With the intention of deepening our ability to bring more love into our lives, in this retreat we will be working on inner skills to strengthen 5 different types of soul friendships.  These 5 types of soul friendship are already present in our lives to some degree - but we probably aren't consciously cultivating and benefiting from all of them as much as we could.  Our goal here will therefore be to bring more awareness and skill to the process of deepening our existing soul friendships, and to get better at creating new ones.

Another key focus of this retreat (the work part) will be helping you gain clarity about what you uniquely have to offer our world in your short time here.  The 7 modules of this part of the process are organized around 7 stages of psychological development.  The intended outcome is to support you to live not just with a somatically felt sense of purpose, but also a deep feeling of belonging to and as this life process that we all together are.

Both our love and our work are circumscribed by the depth of our relationships with our selves.  Therefore perhaps the most important part of this intensive experience will be learning to attune to our own core energy.  The better we are at staying connected with our own energy, the more competent we'll be at surfing our emotions: intimately feeling them as a surfer feels the wave under her, while simultaneously using Witnessing capacity to not drown in them.

Sexuality, money, and our relationship with our bodies are three important areas of contemporary life, and are often lagging developmentally.  In this retreat we'll have guest appearances from these three special topic areas with the intention of starting to fill in holes in our overall developmental profile - which are likely causing unnecessary suffering.

Our commitment to you - should you decide that it feels right to join us for these 6 days - is that you will have an impactful and fulfilling experience that contributes something important which makes a tangible difference for you in this developmental journey that you call your life.