Connecting with the Wild, Connecting with our Heart
With Kurt Hoelting
July 16-21, 2021
Note: This retreat now full. Please contact Kurt directly by email: kurt@insidepassages.com if you would like to be placed on a Wait List for this retreat.
Also, please be aware that because of Covid-related family responsibilities, Bob Stahl & Jan Landry have regrettably had to cancel their participation as Co-Teachers with Kurt on this retreat. It will go forward as planned under Kurt’s leadership.
Join us at Keene Channel Lodge, in the heart of Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, to cultivate a deeper embodied presence through mindfulness. This adventure of the heart will be led by Inside Passages Lead Teacher and Guide Kurt Hoelting.
The retreat will offer multiple ways to connect more deeply with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. We will explore the elements that connect our senses and our hearts to the wisdom inherent in wild nature. These practices open us to the grace of connection and interconnection, while dissolving feelings of separation and isolation.
The lodge is five miles from the nearest road, and is powered by solar panels. Its location offers easy accessibility by boat from Petersburg in all weather and features beautiful vistas of the surrounding Tongass National Forest, and sheltered islands and channels for exploration by sea kayak. Its location is also ideal during the Covid pandemic, since it is off the grid in a remote location. The waters are home to abundant salmon and halibut, seals, sea lions and harbor porpoises. Pods of orcas periodically make passages through the Wrangell Narrows. The surrounding forest is home to black bear, wolf, moose and Sitka blacktail deer.
Our days will be spent within the balances of silence and speaking from the heart with meditation in both stillness and movement, along with mindful kayaking through the protected waters of the Inside Passage. Joining together the power of Alaska’s iconic wilderness with the power of mindfulness can be a transformative experience, opening new channels for wisdom, joy and wise action in the healing of ourselves and our world.
Retreat Leader
Kurt Hoelting brings twenty-five years experience as a wilderness guide and meditation teacher. The founder of Inside Passages in 1994, he draws upon a deep local knowledge built over three decades as a commercial salmon and halibut fisherman and wilderness guide in Southeast Alaska. He is certified as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher through the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, and has taught MBSR to veterans at Seattle’s VA Hospital since 2007. Kurt has an M.Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School, is an ordained UCC minister, and has co-led Inside Passages retreats in Alaska with noted teachers from secular, Buddhist, and Western teaching lineages, including MBSR founder Jon Kabat-Zinn, poet Gary Snyder, Zen teacher Norman Fischer, Fr. Gordon Peerman, and Rabbi Rachel Cowan, among others. He is the author of The Circumference of Home, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in 2011.
Retreat Base Cost: $1800, There will also be an opportunity to offer an additional voluntary gift to the teachers. Dating back to the time of the Buddha, there has existed an interdependence between those who offer the teachings and those who receive them. We would like to carry on this joyful tradition in the form of inviting donations from the community so that we can continue to offer the teachings.
For more information, Contact Us.