Thanissara, Andrés González, Yong Oh, Djuna Devereaux, Kareem Ghandour, emiko yoshikami.
This retreat and collective inquiry––a living Dharma laboratory in motion––is the culmination of a year-long Rhizome Fellowship Culture Hack training (toward post-capitalist futures), which is an evolving experiment in weaving Dharma, inquiry, and systemic visioning into a collective field of practice.
Rooted in the Sacred Mountain Sangha approach, our days will flow with a rhythm of inner practices in the mornings, like Kuan Yin bowing, insight meditation, chanting, ritual, and Dharma sessions to ground us in silence, awareness, and compassion. Afternoons will open into interactive inquiry, healing modalities, and creative processes exploring how contemplative practice can inform strategies for engagement and cultural transformation in this time.
Through this gathering we will integrate the learnings of our 2025/26 Culture Hack training and implementation through the unfolding work of Liberation Spirituality, a shared inquiry into how the Dharma responds to the converging crises of genocide, fascism, and climate collapse, while envisioning pathways of justice and regeneration––ways of being that re/member our belonging to one another and to the living world.
Our intention is to help shift the window of discourse: from paralysis and despair toward embodied, emergent participation. Together, we’ll articulate the narratives, frameworks, and curricula that can guide us, as Dharma and spiritual practitioners, sanghas, and movements, through this time of profound transition; bridging a multiplicity of perspectives and practices into a greater coherence that honors difference while cultivating collective strength.
By the time we meet at Big Bear Retreat Center, many of us will have been working together within the Rhizomic field through a year-long 2026 initiative at SMS cultivating new ways of collaborative practice, learning, and informing our engagement and activism. This retreat offers a space to harvest those insights and anchor them in real-time Dharma embodiment.
We warmly invite you to join us for this week of deep practice, reflection, and co-creation through listening, healing, imagining, and relational participation from the heart of Liberation Spirituality.