Kum Nye is a body-oriented movement and contemplative practice, developed by Tarthang Tulku, a contemporary Vajrayana teacher at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley. This practice helps develop multi-level awareness skills that are rooted in embodied experience within a meditative context. It also enables us to experience at subtle and deep levels, the healing potential within the human energy system.

The practice of Kum Nye helps develop stamina and the capacity to enquire into resistance as it is held in a person’s psychophysical structure.

‘In mastering Kum Nye, we learn how to benefit from all manner of experience, we gain confidence that is grounded in self-knowledge and establish a foundation for joy that can sustain us throughout our lives. We learn what it means to be complete in ourselves. We discover what it means to be.’ (Tarthang Tulku, 2006)

These three retreat-workshops (which you can take individually or as a group of three) are designed to provide opportunities to walk together with others on a path that explores our own personal mortality, wherever we currently are in our lives. We can never know how or when we will die, but many who work with the dying share the view that it can potentially be a time of healing and spiritual transformation. With this possibility in mind, we will practice together, in times of silence and sharing, continuing the journey towards our death, which we started at birth. If we choose to enter the threshold of our own death now, our heart practices and enquiry in this territory may enable us to accompany others with ‘emptier’ hearts, so that more love shines through. And perhaps we ourselves can transition with less fear when it is our own time to die.

The mindful movement practice of Continuum naturally takes us into fluid states reminiscent of the embryo. Using the gentle breaths, sounding, and often subtle movement of Continuum, we find our tissues melting, patterns dissolving, thoughts softening. As we return to our essential fluidity, we can experience embryonic creativity, re-form and emerge renewed, refreshed, and ready for what life presents next with enhanced resilience.

This retreat is a special offering from Continuum teachers, Jane Okondo and Cherionna Menzam-Sills, to support those with experience of Continuum to deepen their practice further. The retreat format enables us to deepen further than shorter dives. We can immerse ourselves within our fluid field.

In this retreat, we will review embryological development and how it can be relevant for our health and well-being now. We will specifically explore how the heart, respiratory diaphragm, and other body systems spiral into form, contributing to sensitive presence and grounded being.

This retreat creates a heartfield for our unfolding time together as we listen to the land and the wisdom of our bodies. The Procession of the Heart, an ancient self-healing practice originating from the high Mongolian and Tibetan plains, becomes a doorway into our deeper listening and knowing. Beneath vast, rolling skies The Procession of the Heart was passed on from horse-backed travelling Shaman, to the remote communities they encountered, as a way for the people to help each other, and to keep the people united.

The baby in the womb is a sentient, relational being, although this is often not acknowledged. Prenatal experience, including trauma, also tends to be denied and ignored in our modern world. This experience includes cultural, collective, and inter-generational influences as well as personal challenges of the parents, especially the mother. Without conscious awareness and witnessing, this important material tends to be held in unconscious shadow, creating havoc in our lives as it strives for attention and integration. Our remarkable original potential to develop as we do from a single-celled organism into the complex beings we are can also be in shadow.

In this immersive lucid dreaming retreat, we’ll explore how to transform the third of our lives we spend in bed by learning to dream lucidly and consciously transform our shadows.

A lucid dream is a dream in which we are actively aware that we are dreaming as the dream is happening.

Once we are lucid, we gain access to the deepest depths of the unconscious mind, which allows us to engage in psychological healing at a level often unattainable in the waking state.

We sometimes offer international retreats, through various partners. Please click the link below for more information.