Perhaps we migrate between love and suffering.
Oh praise the soul’s migration.
I fall. I get up. I run from you. I look for you.
I am again in love with the world.

“I have explored this topic before the terrain is so vast and deep that I want to dive in again and go further, so it won’t be an exact duplicate of what I’ve offered in the past.  Most of this journey will be new.  It’s a theme that is dear to me, one that keeps leading me and teaching me.”  Mark Nepo

This weekend retreat is based on favorite teachings sessions drawn from Mark’s twenty books, intended to explore how deepening is the soul’s way of coming alive in the world. Just as all healthy plants and trees root and shoot into full growth and blossom, so too the human soul in the life that carries it on Earth. 

Under all the veils of circumstance, there is a radiance that informs all life. The gift of deepening is how we meet and drink from that radiance. In this retreat, Mark will open a heart space through which participants can better understand their own relationship to the gift of deepening and the radiance in all things. Through poetry, stories, and metaphors, Mark will unfold the archetypal thresholds that lead us to deepening and radiance. Through reflection, journaling, and dialogue, each participant will have the chance to personalize their own path to being a spirit in the world. All to encourage each other to engage in our own conversation with the Universe. All to uncover our own direct experience of the radiance that informs all life.

Topics on this journey will include “The Wisdom of a Broken-Open Heart,” “Inner Work and Service,” “We Are More than What Is Done to us,” “The Sorrow and the Peace,” “The Radiance in All Things,” and “Wandering Authentically.”

“When we can open our hearts and work with what we’re given, loving what’s before us, life stays possible. Then, through effort and grace, we do what we can with what we have. And when exhausted by all that’s in the way, we’re faced with the chance to accept and love what’s left, which is everything. This is how we discover that Heaven is on Earth.”

—Mark Nepo

Mark Nepo

Teaching Faculty / National Advisory Board

Mark Nepo

Teaching Faculty / National Advisory Board

Mark Nepo is a poet and philosopher who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for forty years. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, he has published fourteen books and recorded eight audio projects. Recent work includes: Reduced to Joy (2013), Seven Thousand Ways to Listen which won the 2012 Books for a Better Life Award, Staying Awake (2012), Holding Nothing Back (2012), As Far As the Heart Can See (2011), Finding Inner Courage (2011),and Surviving Has Made Me Crazy (2007), as well as audio books of The Book of Awakening, Finding Inner Courage, and As Far As the Heart Can See (2011). As a cancer survivor, Mark devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship.

Mark has appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV, and has been interviewed twice by Oprah as part of her SIRIUS XM Radio show, Soul Series. He has also been interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America about his New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. As well, The Exquisite Risk (Harmony Books) was cited by Spirituality & Health Magazine as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2005, calling it “one of the best books we’ve ever read on what it takes to live an authentic life.” Mark’s collected essays appear in Unlearning Back to God: Essays on Inwardness (Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 2006). He is also the editor of Deepening the American Dream: Reflections on the Inner Life and Spirit of Democracy (Jossey-Bass, 2005). Other books of poetry include Suite for the Living (2004), Inhabiting Wonder (2004), Acre of Light (1994, also available as an audiotape from Parabola under the title Inside the Miracle, 1996), Fire Without Witness (1988), and God, the Maker of the Bed, and the Painter (1988).

Mark Nepo's work has been translated into twenty languages including French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Danish. In leading spiritual retreats, in working with healing and medical communities, and in his teaching as a poet, Mark Nepo’s work is widely accessible and used by many. He continues to offer readings, lectures, and retreats.

For a complete listing of our teaching faculty, click here.

marknepo.com

Please bring a journal.

Mark Nepo is a Great Soul. His resonant heart—his frank and astonishing voice—befriend us mightily on this mysterious trail.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You and Yours, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, and Red Suitcase

Mark Nepo is one of the finest spiritual guides of our time.
—Parker J. Palmer, author of A Hidden Wholeness and The Courage to Teach

Mark Nepo joins a long tradition of truth-seeking, wild-hearted poets—Rumi, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver—and deserves a place in the center of the circle with them.
—Elizabeth Lesser, Cofounder, Omega Institute, author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Nepo is a consummate storyteller with a rare gift for making the invisible visible.
—Publishers Weekly