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.
