Against the Stream - A Multicultural Mentoring Retreat

Amidst all the troubles, uncertainties and growing threats to both nature and culture, the soul still seeks to find and live its inner design and core purpose in life. Genuine transformation has always been the secret aim of the tensions and troubles we encounter on the road of life. Despite and because of all the growing fears and anxieties, our primary task is to find again the great imagination and deep reverence for life that dwells in each soul.

The great religions and the artful practices of diverse cultures have invented many ways to seek the treasury of the soul at the center of life. Each spiritual and traditional practice can lead to the center where the divine waits to be revealed again. Yet, the venerable traditions can only be helpful up to a point. Each person must immerse in the river of change and go against mainstream ideas and common expectations.

The human soul has always been connected to water; as such, it tends to be resilient and buoyant. Yet, we may have to hit rock bottom or reach an existential impasse before the innate buoyancy of the soul can be found and release the imagination and energy trying to arise within us. We must fall apart and repeatedly dissolve in order to re-collect essential parts of ourselves that we could not manage to hold during the abandonments experienced early in life.

As in myths and stories, it usually requires a profound struggle or pain for the psyche to open to the great energies of the soul. Always a sacrifice is required to make a breakthrough and inevitably, finding the soul’s genuine path leads to puzzling obstacles and awakens our inner demons.

At critical junctures we are called to choose between the path of complacency or adventure. We either accept the life that has been given to us or enter the unique adventure the soul would have us undertake. We are here to decipher the patterns of our souls, in doing that we become secures in ourselves and most valuable to others and to the world.

Join us on this path of discovery with a diverse faculty who will present ideas and elements of initiation from tribal traditions, spiritual practices and psychological perspectives. Through stories, poems and the compelling speech of the soul; through chanting and meditation; through the suddenness of ideas and the surprise of ritual; we will approach the borders of our knowing and seek to touch the edge of what our souls came to live and to learn. This event will benefit those involved in mentoring and community building, teaching and counseling, environmental activism and social justice.