Coming Back to Center is an invitation to gather what has become scattered, to listen beneath the momentum of the thinking mind, and to rediscover the deep, quiet ground from which we can live.
About this Retreat
Hara, Embodiment & the Ground of Being
There are many ways we learn to leave the center of ourselves.
We move upward into thought, outward into activity, forward into anticipation. Attention becomes dispersed across the many things that ask something of us, and gradually we can lose contact with the quieter intelligence of the body beneath all that doing.
This retreat is an invitation to come back to our intrinsic serenity and stability.
In Japanese contemplative traditions, *hara* refers to the lower belly, but also to something more subtle: an inner center of gravity from which we can meet experience with greater steadiness. Taoist practitioners have long cultivated this lower *dantian*, as a reservoir of vitality. These traditions suggest that presence is not only a quality of mind. It is something we can inhabit bodily.
Over four nights at Drala Mountain Center, our practice will orient toward this deep center. Through Yin and Yang yoga, meditation, breathwork, somatic inquiry, Internal Family Systems depth psychology, and Buddhist contemplative teachings, we will explore the belly as both an anatomical and energetic landscape. We’ll become curious about the relationship between the diaphragm and pelvic floor, the psoas and deep abdominal body, the Buddha Nature of Self and our many parts, and the breath and nervous system.
There will be periods of silence, dynamic and quiet practice, meditation, inquiry, and time to simply be within the spaciousness of the mountains.
May we together discover that centeredness is less something we accomplish than something that becomes available when we stop abandoning the ground beneath us.
Open to all levels of practice.
