2012 Retreat Information

Our 2012 Transfiguration Retreat will be hosted at Earthrise at IONS, one of the most beautiful and inspiring conference centers in the world. Located in Petaluma California, EarthRise is housed on 194 acres of beautiful rolling hills where hiking trails meander through pristine native live oak woodlands, and the surrounding open space offers panoramic vistas of the California landscape. Special features include a beautiful permaculture garden that provides fruits and vegetables for the kitchen, a labyrinth, a meditation hut nestled in a peaceful oak grove, a huge outdoor hot tub, and multiple sitting areas and lovely gardens for quiet contemplation.

link to 2012 TR Retreat registration page

General Information

Our annual 8 day Transfiguration Retreat is held in May each year.

These retreats are extraordinary gatherings of the community of Waking Down in Mutuality practitioners, mentors, and teachers. Our group will become a sacred container for the precious work that unfolds through our collective presence.

Our focus on Individuality and Mutuality will bring us into a deep consideration of how we tend to feel we don’t belong if we’re different. Celebrating our differences is so much a part of Waking Down in Mutuality but it can take some time and exploration to find the feeling of safety and belongingness, especially relative to spiritual groups. Our aim is to make a lot of space for us all to be who we are and come together in whatever ways are natural.

In the early mornings after breakfast, you can choose from special optional sessions, such as silent meditation, dancing your prayers, shamanic work, and explorations in conscious embodiment.

Mid-morning, we’ll divide into several larger sittings for gazing meditation and conversation about your process. After lunch, small group meetings will be held. In each of these groups, one or two teachers, joined by a mentor assistant, will facilitate 5 or 6 students in deeper individual work and mutuality in an intimate, highly personalized setting. The afternoon closes with a gathering called Nectar, an optional non-verbal space to allow the day to settle and integrate into our bodies. The Nectar sessions are led by various teachers who offer gentle music. People sleep, rest, or sit silently as they bathe in this peaceful time.

On many evenings we offer special optional events – parties, a creative expression night, presentations, and sittings. Our parties are always a wonderful and deeply treasured feature of our Transfiguration Retreats, and our creative expression nights are consistently stunning.

Mid-week, on Wednesday, everyone takes a day off to integrate and relax in their own ways. You might arrange an outing alone or with others. Or, you might simply choose to stay on the grounds and rest. Meals will be provided for those staying on site.

PREREQUISITES

Because Transfiguration Retreats are such powerful events, we require all participants to have previous experience with Waking Down in Mutuality, through both direct contact with teachers and also basic conceptual knowledge from reading. Prerequisites for those attending for the first time include a minimum of 5 sessions by phone with a Waking Down teacher, and/or attending at least 5 Waking Down sittings in person.

To learn more or register for this year’s Transfiguration Retreat, Click Here.

by Sandra Glickman

Printable PDF

“Why didn’t you just go ahead and bust the guy?” asked my trusted friend Junelle. We were all sitting at a birthday party-ten of us, friends and intimates of many years now. My birthday friend was commenting how both I and a companion had each in turn been candid and respectful with him regarding a sensitive relationship change occurring amongst the three of us. I had wanted to blurt out that the only two people there not being candid were this guy and myself. My being was itching to be honest and set things straight between us. But something held me back!

I bit my tongue, held my breath and the moment passed. Then I began to feel bad about myself, cowardly. Why was I still “protecting” this guy? (Junelle’s question); and after the many ways in which I have felt wounded by his neglect and absence of honesty? The therapist in me continued to label myself “passive” and “co-dependent.” I finally muttered something to Junelle about the uselessness of confronting the guy and how things spoken to him seemed as if to disappear into a black hole.

Though I had justified myself, I still felt uneasy. Why can’t I, supposedly living now as the Embodied Self, just be this One? A few hours later in the middle of the night, my reliable discriminating mind awoke me with the answer: TRUST, the necessary foundation of EMBODIED Consciousness. My body has come to know more keenly than my thinking mind where I can and cannot trust another! On many an occasion I have been perfectly capable of free expression, confrontation, even raw blurting out of unpleasantries. But in that moment, my throat held back, throttled itself against those words flying out, relegated my words to internal echoes and reverberations, and sent them up to the convoluted channels of my ever-so-greedy mind patterns, where they came to be used against my poor dear vulnerable self. My body knew what my mind, habituated to “self-improvement” and striving, hadn’t yet got: the profound need for Trust. My body consciousness wouldn’t allow myself to be wounded again in a perceived hopeless project. Therefore I was required to feel instead the limits in my relationship with this person whom I love and deeply value.

At first I felt the Core Wound of pain and confusion. This then turned into the simple Wound of loving in a limited relationship. I found and find that I have no choice but to grieve and finally accept that here is a person who can only meet me so far. Because of this I can only grow so far with him. He doesn’t trust-at least not me, not now. So I must choke off my free expression, relinquish an opportunity to know myself more honestly, forego whatever I could learn or experience by exposing myself more deeply and vulnerably, and forego a deeper level of love and intimacy which could come out of a more mutually trusting relationship. My heart breaks over and over with similar incidents in many of the relationships in my life. It is excruciating in the ones I have come to love the most.

So do you see the beauty and glory for me of finding a group of Beloveds who are capable of Trust? Who have come to perceive the value of Conscious Embodiment? Who are willing to risk with me whatever it takes to bring forth themselves in Consciousness and honesty? Who have become capable of staying in the room and going through the hard places, hearing hard feedback, giving me themselves in all their freedom, in all their rawness?

Trust is the great gift which makes all this possible, which has made and continues to make possible the finding of all the parts of myself, with which I so long to connect. These parts I now know, can only arise in relationship and can only be fully claimed in mutual trust. This work cannot be done on one’s own. In the relationship I described above, I have had to struggle alone, because my Beloved does not go there with me. I can only bow to the mystery of why this is.

Still, what a gift to find I can no longer give myself out to everyone, even a dearly loved one. Though my mind might, my body will not participate in such a horrible punishment-to speak, shout, even whisper into a black hole where nothing returns to be resolved, or it returns “sideways.” Such a debilitating depletion of self! Yet I confess I had to override myself more than a number of times to get this lesson. My body’s inherent knowledge, as the Consciousness, now ferrets out who is and who is not available for mutual trust.

Trust. How could I have found myself as Consciousness, more and more Embodied, if this sweet nectar was not available here, first with Saniel and then with so many of You? I am profoundly grateful to Saniel for his capacity to trust me and tolerate all the dark and even glorious aspects of me, and for his capacity for first finding trust of himself. His teaching of mutual Love-Trust is truly the foundation of this realization process.

Through trust, we find we can eventually BE ourselves, all of ourselves, from low to high, simple to complex, in every dimension. We find we can survive and even transform into delicious divine food our darkest parts. Through trust we express and celebrate and magnify our Divine and human natures. Trust is big, vast. It is equivalent to Consciousness, to Love, to God. That is what it is. Nothing less. That is what I find.

Sandra Glickman, Senior Teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality
www.wakingdown.org/SandraGlickman

Ongoing Courses: (open to all)

Our online course is always available to take now.

Transfiguration Retreat: (open to those in any stage involved in the WDM process)

Our much-loved 8-day residential spring retreat is a great way to immerse yourself in the Tribal transformation that is Waking Down in Mutuality.

Second-Life Courses: (open to those in the second life)

These advanced courses are an opportunity for those who have awakened through the Waking Down process to explore and develop their new spiritual and human capacities and explore ways of relating to others using them.

Those wanting to mentor or teach using Waking Down in Mutuality should take these courses.

Basic Courses: (open to all)

These courses are for to those who are interested in exploring the fundamental “core dharma” teachings of Waking Down in Mutuality, and can be scheduled when there is sufficient interest.

If you are considering attending one of these courses, please email us at:  registrar@awakenedmutuality.org