When Heart Meets Mastery
Wholehearted Mystic Retreats - Co-Written with Rosa Lewis
Near the end of the October retreat, someone said “the purpose of a good retreat is to let you touch your next level of development.”
If that’s true, the retreats Rosa Lewis runs aren’t good retreats, they’re something beyond Great ones. From August to October, I attended two retreats with Rosa, and I didn’t just get a peek at my next developmental edge, I got to inhabit a way of being that feels at least 2 or 3 edges past my current one.
In one of the final practices of the 2-week retreat, each person was taking turns expressing the journey they’d been on since it began. Where they’d started, what felt relevant or transformative, how they were feeling now — and maybe how they saw the trajectory after leaving the retreat.
The reflection that hit me most deeply came from my own paired partner, Rosa. When it was her turn to reflect, one of the things she said was “these past two retreats feel like a proof of concept. This approach works — it’s not about communicating ideas that people understand conceptually, it’s about embodying a new way of being, that reaches people through relationship, through the practices, through connection, and through their own immediate experience.”
This all rang deeply true for me — I’d experienced other retreats, and any number of books, talks, and recorded practices. In my head there was forming a spectrum of the spiritual interventions that had moved the needle for me. The spectrum ran from the relatively ineffective (TED talks on mindfulness, meditation apps, 10-day Goenka retreats…) to things that were genuinely quite moving (watching bodies burn in Varanasi, a few months of focused Somatic Descent practice from Reggie Ray…), to the quite transformative (dream journeying practice…) — and then a big gap before the clear first place spot: these retreats.
I’ve written some fragments below about what I love in these retreats, the unique experiences of being there. I hope you’ll read them and find something inspiring, or at least useful. To be up front about a couple things:
We’re looking for funding. I’ve started what I’m calling the Renga Fund (I’ll get to reasons for the name below). If there are people who are aligned with the values we are embodying here and willing to provide some funding, it makes sure they can continue to happen in a way that isn’t constrained by transactional economic concerns. Money should never be the bottleneck to wholeness, depth, or awakening.
This isn’t an advertisement for these retreats. For now, we are expanding the network slowly, by personal invites only. As you read some of the fragments below, (as well as Rosa’s reflection above), it should become clear why it works that way for now.
These events have been some of the most life-changing periods I’ve gone through. I walked out of each one with different futures than I walked in with. I hope I can communicate some amount of their importance to me, the vision for how this could benefit more people, and my hope for them to continue.
A New Paradigm
by Rosa Lewis
The purpose of my teaching is to invite people into a new paradigm where it is possible for people to be wholeheartedly present in alignment with true nature. For this to become possible requires defining a base-level of reality that is different from most other spaces. It couldn’t be yet another place limited to a rationalist paradigm where people are just individuals who need to process their trauma, or a place where people check out into the spiritual side of experience.
The underlying vibe is one where the cosmic and the personal weave together through all experience. From uncovering the deepest personal shadows to accessing the most expansive transpersonal states, everything is recognised as an expression of Buddha Nature.
For this to land in people’s systems, it requires everyone to come with a commitment to presence, a sincere desire for thriving for yourself and others, and a faithfulness to aligning with truth. These clear intentions allow us to drop into the depths in a faster, safer, cleaner way, where there’s still space for difficult truths to be presenced.
The invitation is to be in the depths of truth, one where interconnection, resonance, and mystical experience can be met with high capacity and discernment. Importantly, this is not about creating a codependent group vibe but a space that is expansive enough to support people being in their own sovereign truth and finding resonance from there.
The aim was for people to show up in radical fullness — including in the rational, the mystical, the practical, and the emotional aspects of experience — and to be able to feel at home in that. Not in a way that is always comfortable, but in a way that is rich, rewarding and aligned with truth.
There’s an entire ecosystem of being that contributes to this becoming possible. The space is designed to reduce distortion, hold disintegration and reintegration, increase safety, amplify sensitivity, uphold truth, allow new experiences to surface, and support deep opening. An important element of this is creating a place of relational depth, but not forced vulnerability.
Awakening, in this context, is not solely about insight but is also directly related to the body’s capacity to stay with reality without collapsing into protection. Reality is vast, intense, confronting, delicate, overwhelming, nuanced, and subtle. It’s embodied and also goes far beyond the embodied realm; it takes a lot to be present with it.
This approach to collective awakening is not just about accessing nice sounding transpersonal states, but about embodying precision truth, mystical mastery, and clean relating. These skills were brought into the practices that spanned a full range of experience, from focused personal shadow work, to accessing the non-dual, to artistic expression.
It is rare to find a space that values both whole-heartedness and technical mastery, which is what we wanted to create. A place where we could include expansive cosmic perspectives with practical grounded action. A place where we could recognise the underlying interdependence of all life, while also inviting people into their unique sovereignty.
If you want to hear more, we recorded a couple talks about these retreats — what they’re like, how (and why) they work, and what happened on these first ones. You can start following that conversation here (there’s also a Part 2):
You can also get a flavour of Rosa’s work by reading her new book, The Depths of Being, or by coming to her upcoming workshop, a guided journey through the book. The proceeds from the workshop will go to the Renga Fund, to make more gatherings like this possible.
You’re Allowed to See
One bit of feedback came up over and over again, one lens on the power of these retreats. “It’s an enormous gift to be allowed to see what we see.”
The world is often quite rough on mystically sensitive folks. A lot of social realities operate via everyone’s tacit agreement to not see what they see, or at least to not — god forbid — say what they see. All of us have to agree to stop seeing (or at least stop saying) just to get by, both as children and as adults.
One way we might describe mystics is that they are people who have a harder time than most with ignoring the truth. There are endless examples I could give, a lot of them tipping over into what’s generally considered woo, but many of them fit firmly in the mainstream paradigm.
For example: take a day (or even a single conversation) and pay close attention to the people you’re talking to. Look at their faces, feel their vibe, note the emotions you sense in their eyes, their voices, their posture and words. Really allow yourself to unashamedly pay attention, to be with them and their experience and to see what you see there.
This might require a little practice, but in general, you may walk away from the conversation feeling a bit like you’ve just looked at someone naked without their permission. We all, all of us, exude so much information when we interact with other people. Our emotions, our thoughts, our relational patterns and traumas and griefs. But we all, almost all of us, agree to ignore that information in each other. We allow ourselves to be drifty, distracted — we don’t really look at each others faces, we don’t let ourselves listen to their voice, only their words.
It feels somehow rude to actually pay attention to someone, and to notice their sadness, their anger; their mixed feelings about their family, the way they relish small moments of control over colleagues. If you let yourself pay deep, close attention, you’ll realize that none of these are hidden. We just all agree not to look at each other very closely.
Expand that dynamic to many other parts of reality, and imagine that you’re someone for whom ignoring what’s present and burying truth is actively painful. That is a significant part of the mystic experience.
And at these retreats, some of us experience, maybe for the first time in our lives, a place where we can all just see what we see. Where we don’t have to ignore most of reality out of politeness or protection. It is safe to feel, welcome, embody, express, and navigate the full richness of what is present, as well as get access to parts of experience that we didn’t even know were there.
In all of this there is also an underlying dedication to poetic or loving awareness. There’s a level of artistic attunement to reality and relationships, to cultivating realness in the group. A commitment to seeing what’s here and honouring it from a place of heart.
What Others Say
At each retreat, everyone gave feedback, describing what things had been like for them. Here are a few of the impacts.
“I will be leaving with a feeling of a new reality. When I came here, I felt like I had no future, which does happen to me a lot of the time. It’s fine, but it’s not a good feeling. Now the future exists again, and on a very simple level that’s nice.”
“I’m often being overruled by stories. Now, I’m still hearing them loudly in my head sometimes, but being able to question them more. And I think now I just have really, really strong signals where to go.”
“It feels like the space of silence has expanded. And it’s an interesting quality because it’s not just big, it’s sort of infinitely expansive, where as I relax into it, it just continues. And that comes along with a very pleasant, relaxing sensation.”
“The container felt unique compared to anything I had done before. Rather than being mainly an internal world, the collective nature of it was radically different. Touching deep void experiences and then preparing dinner afterwards was something I was not super prepared for in practice so far.”
“What feels really present right now is — there’s an experience of speaking from my core and letting myself really be here, versus a thing that I go into a lot, which is like sliding away or speaking to the side or slightly being not here. And now there’s pain here, and there’s vulnerability, and there’s all that, which is why it usually gets slipped around, but there’s also a really nice grounded feeling.”
“When I reflect on the retreat I get the image of putting tendrils into the earth, like a network of roots, and feeling grounded by that, nourished by it, in some intangible way. There’s a sense of having received community connection, energetic mirroring, seeing and being seen.”
“I just feel so much coherence here. It’s very regulating to be here and there’s a kind of purified motivation or something — everyone is sharing from a place of wanting to see others flourish, for others benefit, and assuming positive intention versus having skewed motivations or trying to be provocative for some personal aim or something.”
“This retreat felt like a very clear example of a specific dimension of integrity, honesty, realness, and open heartedness being so high and I really value the impact of that.”
“I’m really with how much heart is in this group. And the possibilities when heart meets mastery — walking the path with heart and building all this capacity, and then what that enables. Because you could also do a lot of practice, and stay very much in the head and be disconnected and lack that purity of intent. There’s something really beautiful about everyone here walking this path with so much heart and coming together. The world needs more of this.”
“As I go through this life, I just see it’s not actually super common to be able to really connect deeply, in richness, integrity, wholeness, depth, spaciousness, and as friends. And even when these things are well intended, they don’t always turn out as planned. It feels like we as a group really embodied something quite magical. And precious and rare. The rareness of it does touch me. It feels very tender in my being.”
“I found the thing that I’m often looking for in connection, which is something that is very epic and cosmic and also grounded and real. It doesn’t quite fit into words or the material, but that’s also somehow a match for what it is.”
But What Do We Do?
In one way, describing what we concretely do on these retreats can feel a bit anticlimactic, or besides the point. It’s analogous to the way that some people find meditation retreats transformative, and when you ask what they did, the answer is “we sat in a room and breathed together, then occasionally listened to the teacher give a speech.”
At the core, what we do on retreat is practice being more wholeheartedly present and awake with the full range of experience — and to do this not only within ourselves, or on a meditation cushion, but to stay with it in connection, in relationship, in movement, in Presence.
A lot of the purpose of the different exercises was about clearing out distortions, aligning with the subtle truths of the present moment, and practicing expression from that Presence.
You could run the same exercises outside of the retreat setting and they would not reach the same depth, because the whole experience is a co-created trust exercise in opening to deeper layers of reality together. The openings emerge from people sharing the depths of realisation that they embody — and that isn’t about conceptual ideas, it’s an embodied reality.
From the outside, practices often look like sitting around, sometimes talking, sometimes moving, sometimes silently sitting together, or breaking off into pairs to do something.
From the inside they look like people meeting the deepest aspects of themselves and reality, parts that they often weren’t aware were even there, and coming into wholehearted relationship with them.
I’ll briefly describe a couple of the scheduled activities I liked — and then maybe hint at some of the off-the-schedule moments that affected me strongly.
Seeing & Being Seen
Echoing the above sense that we’re allowed to see what we see, one of the activities involved spending a lot of time face to face with your partner, looking at them without dropping into habitual looking. The point isn’t to just see the person you expect to see, but to really zoom in and out, take different vantage points.
We focused on the physical details of the person we were with. The worry in their forehead, the way light flickers through their hair; the mischief in the lines around their nose. We then switched to a more receptive mode where we allowed moods, energy, and imaginal information to come in. The way their eye movements evoke a subtle imaginal sense of a small mammal; the sense of a piercing infinite void behind them; a warm glow of yellow energy emanating from their heart.
For this exercise, we sat with our partners, looked clearly, received openly, and saw what we saw — and after a while, each partner switched to drawing. It was less about providing a skilled portrayal of our partner than about expressing what we saw when we looked at them. Many of these drawings layered the metaphorical, imaginal and impressionistic, with the physical and material.
Energetic Transmission/Attunement
There are different realms/frequencies/layers of experience that you can attune to, but that are often not foregrounded. In the same way that doing Brahmavihara practice can drop you into a heart realm, or practicing jhanas or subtle body meditation can connect you to the energetic realm, these practices open up new layers of experience and allow us to sync up there.
In general, one person is prominent in the circle, and they attune themselves to a particular embodied way of being. They share that way of being, transmitting it like a beacon through their energy, posture, voice, and descriptions. The rest of us either surrender into that expression, or try to “find” it ourselves, depending on the exercise.
For example, one person shared a system of seven different energy layers, linked to the Reichian character structures. The purpose of the system is to support people in finding wholeness. Each of the seven layers of experience had different qualities and different names, each name poetically evocative of how it felt to be in that layer.
As part of the exercise the person leading might for example embody “tree” energy, describing how it felt and inviting people to connect to it. “Uprightness. Strength. Steady. Time is slower here. Love feels like support, holding.”
As other people in the circle “found” that energy and attuned to it themselves, they started adding their own descriptions, helping the whole circle attune to it together. “I feel very grounded here. Rooted.” “Tough. Immovable. Integrity.” “It’s more flexible than I was expecting. I can move with the world’s force without losing my own strength and footing.”
If people couldn’t sync up with it and were having a totally opposite or different experience to the rest of the group in some way, they were also welcome to share that, which happened a lot. This multidimensionality kept things interesting, stopped group-think becoming too strong. It felt like a healthy sign that people weren’t giving up their sovereignty, but landing in it more fully.
As the group builds a vocabulary of transmissions and energetic stances, a lot of cool things become possible. Different modes of being and relating open up where you can access a fuller range of yourself and experience, and are able to express it with the people around you.
Speaking From/Being From
This is another whole class of exercises. In some ways it is similar to the transmission and attunement ones described above, but with much more of a focus on expressing an energetic stance, rather than simply feeling it. In exercises like this, we invite and speak from different modes of being (or act from it, move from it, relate to others from it…).
For example, in one exercise we had time to find and speak from different qualities, like life force, and presence. In small groups, we took some moments to drop into an embodied sense of what the chosen quality means in us, and then leaned fully into that in our interactions and speech. It got fairly intense. While my small group was expressing from life force, someone energetically killed me during that exercise. Stared me down and energetically shredded me. And I enjoyed it, grinning, gleeful. My belly felt lit up with dense orange flame, and my mouth took on different shapes than it usually does to form words. A couple people were shocked how my voice sounded from there.
These exercises are just a matter of finding the energetic stance you’re exploring, letting it move through your body, heart, voice, and personality, and allowing it to express itself through you — and allowing yourself to be seen and met in that.
It is a speedrun for creating more permission space to express every part of yourself, to increase your range of movement towards more fullness. It’s an opportunity to speak and move from different modes of being, and be met in that space, outside of habit pathways and personality structures.
The Margins
Those were some of the types of events that were on the schedule. Off the schedule, a lot of other things happened. Much of it extremely transformative, or at least deeply clarifying. I listened to my friends play their songs over and over again. I had long talks with people who see me clearly. We were in deep enough states that we were able to be extremely real with each other, and access things about ourselves we couldn’t usually see. I went out into the woods and had visions. I went out into the woods and facilitated visions for others. I performed impromptu rituals in a darkened room. I had conversations where some of my relational patterns I’d never noticed before were laid bare. I lit up a grill and did a little fire ritual to the full moon. I laid in a field and watched the Milky Way roll by overhead.
Each of these did as much or more than any of the official practice slots — and the overall composition of the retreats wouldn’t have been the same without all the little things happening in the margins. I know this is true for me, and from some of the conversations and feedback, it seems to be true for the others as well.
Rosa
(This part is written only by me, River.)
The big thing at the center of why these retreats work is Rosa herself. I’ve known Rosa for years, but for whatever reason it’s only in the past year that I’ve really started getting a sense of what her capacity and capability are really like. It’s kind of incredible. And also weirdly hard to point at.
Watching Rosa work reminds me sometimes of this show, Scavengers Reign. The show features some alien ecosystems, and shows some fascinatingly intricate pathways in that ecosystem. Pathways where effects that seem non-linear become obvious once you know how the flora and fauna work. Ecosystems where, I don’t know, you brush the leaves of a bush, and that causes a fruit to drop from a nearby tree which attracts a certain bird that you can then kill and eat.
Watching Rosa work, I get that feeling sometimes, of some psychospiritual version of that. She’ll ask a question, or nod in silence, or tell you to feel a specific area of your body, and then somehow things just start moving. She brushes a leaf in your mind, which causes a shift in your energy, which draws in a particular insight.
This whole dynamic sometimes makes it hard to point at what exactly is so special about Rosa’s leadership. One thing that is easier to point at is her capacity. On both retreats, this felt notable, the way that she can hold incredibly intense experiences for groups and individuals, and do this over and over again, seemingly all day. She led me through a very intense process, one that I needed a few hours to recover from, with the help of a friend who stayed with me after the process. — Rosa, on the other hand, went right from finishing my process to starting another one with someone else, maybe 5 minutes later.
Her capacity isn’t endless, but it’s more than I’ve seen from just about anyone else. The way she’s able to bring out clarity and depth in other people day after day is maybe the most significant piece of what makes these retreats work.
Renga
These retreats and the values behind them are what I am starting the Renga fund for. I’ll describe a little more about what I mean by renga.
A year before these two retreats, I’d gone to my first retreat with Rosa. There were 9 of us at a farmhouse in France, a group of mystics and friends who’d come together to share space, share reality, and share practice with each other.
In one of the final discussions of that retreat, someone used the term “lineage of friends.” That’s been on my mind ever since. A lineage of people who love and care about each others’ development; a lineage that doesn’t reject hierarchies, but that doesn’t primarily operate as a hierarchy.
A renga is a form of collaborative poetry. It’s a fascinating subject, and I recommend reading up on it, but just to give the most relevant basics in a quick form:
At a renga party, poets would gather to collaborate on a poem. There would be an appointed “renga master”, who not only decided the flow of what order everyone would write in — but who would also be the arbiter of which verses were good enough to add to the poem, and which ones needed to be rewritten. There were all sorts of structural and poetic affordances to the writing process, things like sticking to the season the poem was set in, or further developing images that poets had put in previous verses. There was space for everyone’s style, flair, and ability, but there was also a standard to uphold and a coherence that the poem itself demanded.
At our retreats, Rosa Lewis is the renga master. Her teachings, her presence, her artistry set the tone and direction. Within that, most or all of the participants tend to lead (or collaborate on) events or practices. At the first retreat, each person led their own spotlight session, in which we shared a practice with the group. At the other retreats, there was a less strict structure, but still a flow where everyone brought something in, some practice or event or framework for the group. Shared effort went into arranging the practices, deciding the theme of each week, or the flow of which practices might be best placed before or after others, which days could bear multiple heavy practices, and which ones needed a lighter touch. The beauty and potency of each practice was placed within the coherent composition of the retreat as a whole.
Renga parties had a tendency, in the descriptions I’ve read, to get a bit boisterous. The poets would drink and enjoy each other’s company. While it’s true that the creation of a poem was the occasion (excuse?) for each meeting, I also get the feeling that much of what was gorgeous about a renga party took place in the margins, outside of the official composition. Friendships were built and tended to. Jokes and experiments were tried on. Even in rejected verses, new poetic techniques and styles might be shared. I imagine drunken poets sharing verse after verse that are entirely too weird, jokey, or non sequitur to be included, simply for the glee and play of it, while the renga master laughs along and rejects them one by one.
Like I mentioned above, at our retreats a lot of the best stuff happened in the margins. In between “official” practice periods, people would break off into pairs or trios. We might take a walk, or cook up a snack, or play around with another meditative practice in the backyard. Life-changing discussions took place on plastic chairs. We pulled blankets out onto the deck to do some energy work after dinner. We dragged yoga mats into the forest to do some imaginal journeying together.
The retreats aren’t just about the practices or the composition of the schedule — they’re about all the juicy richness that can take place when the depths of reality is collaboratively honoured.
Why This Matters
We enjoy these retreats. They clearly benefit the people who go on them.
Why does this matter to you? Because the world needs people who can move from a deeper place of integrity in themselves and meet others from there. These retreats are an answer to that need, a method of developing our capacity to be in wholehearted presence, both as people and as leaders. Each retreat is also an exploration in how we could share all this with the world more fully.
More people are getting interested in awakening and psychedelics, and there need to be trusted places where people can access some of the deepest ways of being in alignment with truth. This takes time, energy, and an enormous commitment to do well, or in a way that has a chance of scaling.
This isn’t well-paid work that fits neatly into a paradigm where you can focus on making money as a primary goal. And while we are happy to make it work financially between us, it is a lot easier when we have support from people who see the value of what we are doing. It means we can focus more on doing the work and less on a lot of practical logistics around making the work possible.
If you feel inspired to donate to the Renga Fund:
Other Stuff
To see some of the art, photos, and people’s descriptions of the retreat you can check out Retreat Vibes at Rosa’s site.
If you’re curious for more about these retreats, you can check out other articles I wrote that came out of my experiences there:
Poetic Will & Choosing the Impossible
The Next Shaman Will Be Shambhala
You can also listen to conversations that were either about the retreat, or emerged from them:
Mystic Retreats Pt 1. (Me & Rosa)
Your Experience is Already Imaginal (Rosa & Adam)
Money & Wholeheartedness (Me & Rosa)
Mystic Retreats Pt. 2 (Me & Rosa)
You can get some flavor of Rosa’s teaching by reading her new book, The Depths of Being, or by coming to her upcoming workshop, a guided journey through the book. The proceeds from the workshop will go to the Renga Fund, to make more gatherings like this possible.