Ravenna, one of the doorways into
the mystical world of Dante
In-Person Retreats
Many people who are drawn toward spirituality have already tried the available practices: meditation courses, retreats, and inherited techniques from various traditions. These experiences can be deeply meaningful, but just as often they fail to take root. Something real is encountered, yet it remains at a remove. The practice never quite becomes the life.
These retreats are founded on a different premise. The Western mystical tradition - in its Judaic, Christian and Islamic forms - has never been primarily about the pursuit of spiritual highs. What it measures is the way in which life is lived as a whole. Not dogmatically as a set of rules, nor as a set of practices divorced from our everyday lives. Instead, it is concerned with the interaction between the two: the ways in which ordinary life deepens our practice and the ways in which practice provides meaning and orientation to our lives.
The great scholar Evelyn Underhill once described mysticism plainly as "the business and method of Love." This sums up how we approach the contemplative life in these retreats. Mysticism, in this understanding, is not a departure from the world but a different way of inhabiting it: one in which love of self, others, the world, and what lies beyond it becomes both the aim of practice and the measure of a life. Spiritual disciplines matter not as ends in themselves, but insofar as they orient us toward the deeper reality from which love springs and from which life derives its orientation and meaning.
Monastic in structure and orientation. Rooted in the problems of an ordinary life.
To this end, every retreat is structured around an ordinary human problem that leads us to the heart of the mystical tradition. How do we act in moments of spiritual, psychological, or existential disorientation when our sense of direction and meaning falls away? How do we live well and lovingly in a world marked by suffering and injustice? How do we attain freedom in a world that constantly tempts us to consume and strive beyond ourselves? These are some of the questions that Western mystics and contemplatives have grappled with for centuries, showing us what it means to live by love rather than by compulsion, fear, or the need to possess.
These are monastic retreats in the full sense — rigorous in structure, serious in aim — that draw on art, poetry, and landscape as integral to the same inquiry. We work in small groups, exploring not only the depths of a particular mystical tradition within the culture and landscape that inspired it, but also asking how these traditions speak to our ordinary lives today. Everyday mysticism is ultimately concerned with how we live, and the measure of the work is what continues when you return home.
The retreats are open to people of any religious background, or none. No prior knowledge or experience is assumed.
