May 24-June 1, 2018
Mount Madonna Center
445 Summit Road
Watsonville, CA 95076
Awakened Heart Meditation Immersion: A 9-day Deep Practice Retreat
An in-depth exploration of meditation as a practice and a way of life, based on the most essential teachings of the Tantric and Yogic Meditation Traditions. Designed for teachers as well as practitioners who want to deepen and expand your practice. The retreat will include long practice sessions, deep journaling, small group for depth conversation on meditation, lectures on the philosophical basis of awakened heart meditation, chanting, and yoga.
More details and registration here.
June 12-July 17
Telecourse: The Goddess Empowerment: Awakening your own Power, Love, and Creativity through the Sacred Feminine Archetypes
How well do you know your own sacred feminine energies? How easy is it for you to find the Goddess in your own body? Can you feel mothered by the universe? Are you able to draw on the deep reserve of strength and wisdom that Goddess holds out to you at every moment? Can you feel the shiver of her ecstasy, the shimmer of her light, her radical power to hold you steady in disappointment and teach you even through suffering?
More details and registration here. (Questions about teleclasses? Check here.)
July 19-22
Palm Lobby of Telluride High School
721 West Colorado Ave
Telluride, CO
11th Annual Telluride Yoga Festival
Friday, July 20, 1-3pm: The Wisdom Goddess Empowerment I: Unlocking Sacred Power through the Warrior Goddesses of Transformation
Goddesses are not just myth. Goddesses represent powers that live within us. Using mantras, visualization, story, and embodied practice, we will Sacred energies, personified by the deity archetypes of the Hindu tantra like Durga, Kali, Chinnamasta and others.
Friday, July 20, 3:30-5pm: Befriending the Mind-Dragons: The Tantric Path for Working with Emotions
Your intense emotions carry the seeds of your creative power. In this class, we’ll learn a series of tantric principles and practices for liberating the power in emotions like anger, grief, fear, and desire, so that your emotions can become a path to wisdom. Not only can these practices help free us from painful emotional habits, they also reveal the yogic gift in emotional turmoil.
Saturday, July 21, 3:30-5pm: Meditation for the Love of It
How do you create a dynamic and transformative meditation practice? In this class, a master meditation teacher shows you how. We will work with profound principles and practices for setting your meditation on fire–and falling in love with it.
Sunday, July 22, 10am-12pm: The Wisdom Goddess Empowerment II: How to Experience the Bliss Goddesses
The sages of tantra taught that when we have the blessing of the Goddess, we are blessed by all the forces of life. In this class, you will discover how to call forth the Goddesses who gift is the abundance of the heart. We’ll explore Lalita, whose gifts include both mastery of life and master of the heart. We’ll learn how to take refuge in Bhuvaneshwari, who holds the space for our deepest self-discovery and healing. We’ll invoke Saraswati for inspiration and wisdom. You’ll learn how to connect to the sacred feminine as an inner force, how to receive energy, guidance and love from the archetypal sacred feminine. The class includes meditation, mantra, ritual, myth, and insight into the psychological aspects of these goddesses and how they appear in our lives.
Details and registration here.
July 27-29
1440 Multiversity
800 Bethany Drive
Scotts Valley, CA 95066
Freedom, Ecstasy, and Awakening: Meditating with the Mystical Wisdom of Vijnana Bhairava Tantra
The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra (Wisdom of the Fiery One) is a manual for self-realization and one of the most famous and powerful meditation texts in Tantric literature.
In this highly experiential class, renowned meditation teacher Sally Kempton offers an in-depth introduction to the text, the philosophy behind it, and its enormous relevance to contemporary practice. Guided through a series of powerful contemplations and immersions in the inner yoga of Tantric meditation, you will learn:
- What is a true, open-eyed meditation practice
- The truth about the masculine and feminine currents from the Tantric perspective
- How to use intense emotions and experiences as a path to opening
- How to overcome major psychological issues with awareness and contemplation.
The workshop offers deep immersion in a powerful tradition of non-dual wisdom.
August 24-26
Kripalu Center
Lennox, Massachusetts
Awakening Shakti: Meditation, Kundalini, and the Opening of the Heart
For everyone.
Discover an approach to meditation that harnesses the alchemical energy called kundalini shakti. Using closely guided meditation, mantra, visualization, and inner journeying, this powerful, experiential program opens the body’s core channels and invokes the Sacred Feminine within the body and mind. As you learn to connect with your own energy, you experience what it means to engage and open the awakened heart, joining your individual heart with the Universal Heart.
Based on Sally Kempton’s deep and practical understanding of inner energy, this weekend is an open invitation to explore an energetic approach to meditation practice so that every session becomes a transformative experience.
August 31-Sept 3
Himalayan Institute
952 Bethany Turnpike
Honesdale, PA 18431
The Yoga International Fall Retreat: Deepen Your Practice
Learn from master teachers Doug Keller, Sally Kempton, Gary Kraftsow, Cyndi Lee, and Rod Stryker as you take your yoga off-line, connect with fellow students, and deepen your practice. During this “choose your own path” event, you can study with each of the five teachers, or you can delve deeper with one over the entire weekend. With extended class times and limited attendance, this intimate retreat gives you direct access to these outstanding leaders in the yoga world.
We are thrilled to bring together our thriving online community for this unique opportunity to connect in-person and explore these deep teachings. Space is limited and classes are reserved on a first come, first serve basis. Join us for a memorable weekend of practice, learning, and renewal.
Click here for further details and to register.
September 9-14
Esalen Institute
Big Sur, CA
Embodying Shakti: Awakening Sacred Power through Sound, Mantra, Meditation, and Voice
with Sally Kempton and Silvia Nakaach
Practical mysticism is deep and wild, and we need it now more than ever. This five-day workshop offers a series of initiations into core sacred technologies from the tantric traditions of goddess-wisdom. We’ll unfold a process of ongoing transmission, based on sacred traditions of both eastern mysticism and western shamanic healing. Silvia’s profound work with healing sounds, voice and Indian ragas will combine with Sally’s meditative and mythopoetic transmission. We’ll chant medicine melodies, move as yogis, discover the deep lore around mantra practice, meditate with deity qualities and deepen our relationship with devotional sound. Through contemplative visualization and subtle touch, we’ll open our inner body. This work can dissolve subtle energetic blocks and awaken sacred energies. During this week you’ll receive mantra initiations and have the opportunity to discover both your personal and transpersonal connections to goddesses like Saraswati (sacred inspiration and flow), Durga (warrior strength), Lalita (fully empowered sacred sexuality) and Chinnamasta (pure Awareness).
Sally’s partner in this 5-day retreat is Silvia Nakkach, MA, MMT. Silvia is a brilliant, Grammy-nominated musician and a renowned vocal artist with many CDs to her credit, including the recent Liminal. She is also a powerful shaman and teacher of sound therapy and vocal healing, who created the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Sound, Voice, and Music in the Healing Arts certificate program. Silvia studied and taught at the Ali Akhbar Khan school of Indian music, and currently studies with the Dagar Brothers, master-adepts of classical devotional singing. A long-time practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, she founded the international Vox Mundi School to teach and preserve indigenous musical traditions. She is the author of Free Your Voice. www.voxmundiproject.com.
Registration will be through Esalen’s website here.
October 5-9
TriYoga – Camden
57 Jamestown Road London NW1 7DB
London, UK
October 5-7: Weekend Program: Heal + transform through tantric meditation
Friday Evening, October 5 & Saturday Morning/Afternoon, October 6
The Wisdom Goddess Empowerment: Invoking Deity Energies for Healing and Transformation.
The path of feminine spirituality has emerged powerfully in our time. Even so, many of us are just beginning to explore the sacred feminine energies whose cosmic role is to support awakening and transformation. The sages of the Hindu tantric traditions recognized that to live an awakened life, you need the help of these inner feminine powers. They developed sophisticated systems for invoking and opening to the powers of the Hindu Goddess-energies like Durga, Lakshmi, Kali, and lesser-known but equally powerful goddesses like Lalita, Bhuvaneshwari, and Matangi.
In this weekend workshop, we’ll explore a series of insights and practices for embodying goddess energies. Using meditation, mantra, story, asana, writing, and partner work, you’ll discover how to bring forth these powers, and allow them to inspire and transform you. A kind of miracle happens when we tune into goddess energy. She lends us her power and love, bringing alive our connections to the Self, to others, and to the physical universe.
Sunday, October 7
Befriending the Mind Dragons: A Yoga-Tantric Approach to Emotional Transformation
Yoga and tantra traditions created a radical approach to emotional turmoil: Find the creative energy within the turmoil, and the suffering will free itself. In this workshop, Sally introduces the core tantric principles and processes for freeing ourselves from painful or prohibiting emotional habits. We’ll explore the reasons we remain immobilized in disruptive or counterproductive emotional patterns, and work with a series of meditations and contemplative inquiries that are uniquely designed to redirect how we relate to obstructive patterns, allowing the essential truth of our hearts to emerge and begin dissolving the energies that block us.
October 8-9: Teachers’ Immersion: Teaching Meditation as a Transformative Path
What does it take to be a great meditation teacher? Since even an app can give meditation instructions, how do you take your teaching beyond the obvious and routine?
In this two-day immersion, we will have a chance for a deep exploration and practice of these issues. We’ll look at how to answer the hard questions and work with the deep issues that so often arise when people meditate. We’ll discuss how to adapt a practice to the needs of an individual and help a student tweak their own meditation. We’ll look at subtle body meditation, discuss the relationship of different practices like mindfulness, inquiry, and visualization with each other, and at when a particular practice should be taught. We’ll discuss the tantric paradigm of Upaya—how to calibrate your practice to your inner state. We’ll also tackle some of the major issues that confront us as we work with other people’s meditation—touching the inner lives of others and transforming ourselves in the process.
Among the topics we’ll discuss:
- Asking and answering the hard questions.
- Finding your own voice and style.
- Balancing concentrative practice with self-inquiry and mindfulness.
- Teaching to different levels.
- When and how to teach mantra.
- Meditation for emotional issues.
- Taking meditation off the mat.
Details and registration here.
October 24-28
Dolce Hayes Mansion
San Jose, CA
SAND Conference
November 14-December 12
New Telecourse: Exploring the Sacred Science of Death & Dying
More info coming soon.
