INTIMATELY
with what is
Every person who comes here eventually meets this threshold — the moment when what they’ve known of themselves is no longer the full picture, and the familiar ways don’t bring the same ground or ease they once did.
This becomes a quiet doorway into truth.
What we offer isn’t a strategy to overcome, or a way to achieve and get the retreat “right.”
It’s a relationship that supports you in being close to what’s real, in returning to a felt sense of connection with your embodied experience, as it is.
When effort softens and honesty returns, when nurture begins to lead, we are here, intimately, with what is.
take notice of the underlying sensations
THAT ACTUALLY INFORM YOU ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL"
~ Peter Levine
In the vast unknown of the darkness, we invite you to use your body as an anchor.
To settle into a simple and intimate relating with what you're feeling in their body.
To nurture and tend to your hearts.
To receive care.
To discover the depths, richness and subtleties in nothing special - in the utter simplicity of your being
"TO EXPERIENCE EMBODIED AWARENESS,
take notice of the underlying sensations
THAT ACTUALLY INFORM YOU ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL"
"Sit down wherever you are, and listen to the wind singing in your veins.”
~ John Welwood
"IN THE BEGINNER'S MIND
there are many possibilities
IN THE EXPERT'S MIND THERE ARE FEW."
~ Suzuki Roshi
In the dark, what we’ve practiced or experienced before through plant medicine, meditation, or other modalities doesn’t necessarily translate here. The familiar maps may no longer apply. What remains is a delicate invitation to meet what’s here without agenda, to receive it without trying to shape or steady it.
This is the heart of a beginner’s mind. Not inexperience, but openness. It doesn’t move through the conditioned lens of knowing and seeing, but meets what’s here as if for the first time. It listens. It lets the moment show itself.
It’s about a genuine willingness to be here with what’s real, with what’s moving, with what’s quietly alive beneath all the effort to manage or make sense.
The beginner shows up unadorned, receptive and quietly listening, sincerely available to meet things as they are. From here, the body begins to remember its own rhythm of safety, of being present, of coming home.
" No pratices are even necessary
for this quest"
- Ramana Maharshi
FINDING SAFETY IN THE DARK
being with
Most of us live our lives with a quiet question: Am I doing it right?
We rarely say it out loud, but it moves beneath everything — a subtle tension shaped by years of measuring ourselves through outcomes, approval, and progress.
In the dark, the familiar mirrors fall away, but their echoes remain.
Out in the world, safety often depends on an economy of connection, an unseen exchange where we earn belonging through being useful, likable, or needed. Our sense of worth is then shaped through the social feedback that regulates us: the acknowledgment and inclusion that cue the nervous system it’s safe enough to be here.
'
Having a purpose gives the nervous system something to organize around, a way to feel safe through usefulness, predictability, and direction. When that role falls away, the body often registers unease or disorientation. The old cues of safety are gone, and the body is still learning how to rest in its own ground.
A QUIET
doorway
Without an objective or an ideal to reach, we can honestly begin to listen.
When there’s no outcome to achieve, no experience to produce, no sign to confirm we’re doing it right, the nervous system often mobilizes in search of a new foothold. In time, as we begin to orient through a direct felt connection with what’s here, the body gradually finds ground in the dark.
And in that movement, safety begins to return, not the conditional safety of external validation or social referencing that keeps the system orienting outward, but the felt sense of safety that arises directly from within.
As we listen from that space, the darkness becomes a companion rather than a threat. The body begins to register finer details: the subtler rhythms and softer sensations that had been hidden beneath striving — the textures of darkness, the sounds of silence, the weight of stillness.
As effort relaxes, awareness deepens. We start to sense the small, quiet communications within — the impulses long held in waiting, the voices once silenced beneath vigilance, and the subtle intelligence of our being quietly reawakening. In this intimacy, something unfolds that isn’t shaped by culture, effort, or expectation. It’s the natural, spontaneous movement of life meeting itself in the dark.
"SAFETY IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF THREAT,
but the presence of connection.
~ Stephen Porges
In the dark, the familiar structures that once helped us know who we are begin to lose relevance. There’s no transaction to make, no approval to receive, no recognition to earn. There is only the darkness, reflecting us back to ourselves.
At first, the body doesn’t know what to do with that kind of emptiness. The social nervous system keeps searching for external cues of safety — the familiar shapes, sounds, or responses that signal it’s still safe enough to rest. It’s still organized around relationship to form, reaching for what’s known and predictable. Without those cues, the system can feel suspended, unsure how to orient.
Even in unseen ways, we tend to affirm safety through certain kinds of experiences: feeling something significant, having insight, or touching a peak state. We use these inner events to reassure ourselves that we’re on the right path.
In the absence of familiar cues, the darkness quietly invites us into a new way of being — one that isn’t built on achieving, but on direct contact with what’s here.