One of the great challenges in our busy world is staying connected with ourselves— with our bodily felt experience, our living wisdom, our sensitivity and our depth. This intensive retreat will address this challenge through helping you connect with yourself, your awareness, and your felt experience in a fully embodied way.

Grounding in the heart and belly, we will practice consciously inhabiting the “wisdom body”— our capacity to relate freshly to our experience just as it is. We will also work with tracking the “life stream”— the ongoing flow of present experiencing— allowing it to open up and flow freely. And we will unpack the mental and emotional patterns that normally act as logjams blocking this inner flow.   

This retreat is largely experiential work, drawing on embodiment exercises, psychospiritual inquiry, mindful speaking and listening, periods of silent practice, and meditation to cultivate embodied presence and awareness. There will also be talks and discussion.

A Personal Note from John Welwood
For 23 years I have offered an annual retreat/training on the East Coast that has explored the intersection between psychological, meditative, and embodiment work, evolving in new directions each year. My intention is to offer this rich opportunity for personal and spiritual exploration as an annual residential retreat in the Bay Area as well. 

This year’s program marks the fourth year of this West Coast retreat offered by the California Institute of Integral Studies. It is appropriate both for new participants and for those who have studied with me before and would like to go deeper in continuing this work. It will be useful not only for those in the helping professions, but for everyone who is interested in these issues

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John Welwood, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, an editor of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and teacher whose work integrates Buddhist teachings with Western psychological practice. His books include Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation; Journey of the Heart; Love and Awakening; andmost recently, the award-winning Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships.