October Mini-Retreat Contemplative Resistance with Mark van Steenwyk

This workshop will help participants confront the toxic narratives and ideas that have taken root in our society, contributing to ongoing injustice. They will also discover how those narratives and ideas have taken root in their own imaginations. Together, we will begin to uproot those narratives inside ourselves and in our society—a process that leads to transformation.

Part one explores how social oppression is empowered and enabled by legitimizing myths—social narratives that are so taken for granted that they are rarely challenged. And these myths are anchored in a sort of spirituality–an orientation towards the ultimate good–that must be challenged if we are to find liberation.

Part two offers a contemplative response, but one that resists the tendency of using spiritual practice merely as a way of coping, but engage more deeply into reality. How can we our own woundedness and how it connects with the woundedness of the world.