Embodying the Heart of Listening: A Relational Leadership Retreat

Event Overview

Open to both beginning and experienced practitioners. Registration for this retreat closes on October 19, 2025 at 11:59pm Pacific Time. If looking to join after this date, please inquire at guestservices@bigbearretreatcenter.org

Listening to Life as it unfolds moment by moment is the essence of Buddhist meditation, facilitation, and regenerative leadership. This is a restorative retreat based in deep embodied listening – to ourselves, the earth, one another, and the invisible realm. We will deepen our capacity to get out of the way and take refuge in the spacious awareness from which we can truly be of service.

In an age of so much accelerated need “out there,” it can be easy to become depleted and feed a false sense of separation. Regenerative leadership includes our whole self and begins with our willingness to attend deeply to the quality of our relationship with Self, subtle body, and the quality of presence we bring to every day and every interaction.

Some of the questions we will explore are:

• How does efforting less, surrendering, and getting out of the way allow us to stay resourced as we support others?
• How do we show up in a way that continually restores, rather than drains us, as we support collective healing?
• What does it mean to show up naked and vulnerable, just as we are, as leaders, rather than hiding in the role or conditioned expectations we may falsely attach to leadership?

Supported by a backdrop of silence and the natural world, this retreat will include sitting, walking, and movement meditation, relational mindfulness in dyads and small groups, compassionate inquiry, dharma talks, and deep time in nature to connect with the more-than-human and invisible realms, as well as personal guidance sessions with Eden. You will be among not only mindfulness and meditation facilitators, but healers and changemakers who work with people in groups or one-on-one, and are ready for a deeper immersion in relational presence and regenerative leadership. 

On this relational retreat, noble silence will extend throughout the duration of our time together. We will eat all meals in silence and observe silence whenever we are outside of scheduled group sessions. During group sessions, there will be a mixture of silent meditation, dharma talks, relational practices in dyads or small groups, reflective writing/drawing, and facilitated dharma discussions. Our group sessions will include time indoors and outdoors, stillness and conscious movement, quietude and at times music and chanting.

This retreat will draw upon teachings from two of Eden’s books, Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection to Ourselves, Each Other, & Our Planet and Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown. This retreat will also draw upon the Work That Reconnects, as created by Joanna Macy, and the paradigm of shared power rather than power over in facilitation.