This retreat is a living Dharma laboratory—an immersive week of contemplative practice, collective inquiry, and relational exploration in a time of profound global transition. Emerging from the year-long Rhizome Fellowship Culture Hack training completed by Andrés and Thanissara, this gathering brings together practitioners who are exploring how Dharma practice can meet the converging crises of our time while helping cultivate pathways of justice, regeneration, and deep belonging with one another and the living Earth. The retreat teaching team includes Andrés, Thanissara Djuna Devereaux, Kareem Ghandour, and emiko yoshikami and will be hosted at Big Bear Retreat Center in Big Bear, CA, U.S.
Our days will follow a natural rhythm rooted in the Sacred Mountain Sangha (SMS) approach. Mornings will be devoted to contemplative practice—insight meditation, Kuan Yin bowing, chanting, ritual, and Dharma reflection—grounding us in silence, awareness, and compassion. These practices help establish the shared field of presence and care that allows deeper inquiry to unfold.
Afternoons will open into more interactive spaces of dialogue, healing modalities, and creative exploration. Drawing on the learnings of the 2025–2026 Culture Hack training, we will engage together in questions about how the Dharma can inform our engagement with the world: how we respond to rising authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and systemic violence while nurturing visions of ontological healing and collective transformation.
This retreat offers a space to harvest the insights emerging from the Liberation Spirituality initiative at SMS and to explore how those insights can take root in our communities, sanghas, and movements. Through listening, relational practice, and collaborative inquiry, we will experiment with ways of weaving Dharma, cultural analysis, and spiritual imagination into a shared field of practice.
Together we will explore how the Dharma might help shift our collective horizon—from paralysis and despair toward embodied and sustained participation in the work of long-haul liberation.
Register here.
Registration closes on October 4, 2026.