The Abolitionist’s Dream: A Journey through Love, Healing, and Liberation (Hybrid)

This Hybrid retreat is offered in person at Wonderwell (Residential option) and Live via Zoom (Online option). To learn more, please choose one of the options in the YELLOW panel.

To support an inclusive and representative retreat container, residential registration will begin with an application period from May 10-31. Click here to access the residential application page, where you’ll find full instructions and details.

We are living through an apocalypse, struggling to learn lessons through a pervasive pandemic, economic instability, political unrest, climate change, and various forms of systematic violence. However, this moment is also inviting us back to an authentic indigeneity. We are being asked to remember how to be in relationship to the land, to our broken heartedness, and in gentle healing relationships with others. In the face of so much change we may find it difficult to maintain our physical and emotional balance.

We invite you to join Lama Rod Owens and Sister Siofra at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge or online via Natural Dharma Fellowship’s interactive hybrid system as they bring forward a deeply embodied, justice-rooted approach to liberation that draws from Buddhist practice, earth-based traditions, and lineages of collective healing.

In this retreat, we will explore both personal and collective liberation through somatic based mindfulness practice, grief work, chanting, and prayer. We will explore themes of spiritual abolition, liberatory care, grieving as care work, as well as what it means to be a love centered agent of liberation in this moment. We will rely on the wisdom of Tantric Buddhism, African spirituality, the Black Prophetic tradition, American Indigenous traditions, and sacred herbalism to understand and experience that any state of freedom must center tending to our broken hearts while calling real joy to hold the labor.

Please join us to:

• Explore grief and broken-heartedness as pathways of healing and transformation
• Engage chanting, prayer, and ritual as supports for personal and collective liberation
• Return to an authentic relationship with your body through somatic mindfulness, movement, and breath as a foundation for liberatory care
• Deepen your connection with the land and the more-than-human world

This retreat offers a precious opportunity to engage these teachings in a supported, practice-centered environment—one that honors both the depth of what we are facing and the possibility of real transformation. Whether you are seeking renewal, community, or a deeper way of meeting this moment, this retreat offers a grounded and compassionate container for practice. We invite you to join us. All are welcome.

Application & Registration Process

To support an inclusive and representative retreat container, residential registration will begin with an application period from May 10-31. During this period, priority for available residential spaces will be given on a rolling basis to retreatants who identify as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+. After the application window closes, remaining spaces will be offered to other applicants, and open registration will begin in June if space allows. All applicants will be notified of their status no later than June 7.

Submitting an application form indicates your interest in attending but does not guarantee a space. If you are offered a place in the retreat, you will receive a follow-up email with instructions to complete your registration and submit payment. A deposit will be due within one week of acceptance.

Unable to attend in person? We warmly invite you to join this retreat online and practice together from wherever you are. 

Natural Dharma Fellowship Full Calendar