Spirit Rock’s EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program

Sunday, November 23 | 10:30am - 12:30pm
Introducing the House of Yin: A Sanctuary for Spiritual and Queer Liberation
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee

This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom. Learn about the House of Yin, a liberatory community-learning home for reflective and relationship-grounded practitioners who want to continue to fortify the Yin in themselves and their work in the world.

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Short Program Online
Sunday, October 26 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

An EcoDharma Exploration with Kaira Jewel Lingo: Becoming a Force for Nature

Kaira Jewel Lingo

Life on Earth is really going through it right now. Humanity’s reckoning with itself is on, and we’re all feeling, albeit unequally, the very real and interlocking consequences of centuries of human and ecological exploitation. To make a bad situation even worse, we also must contend with the unfolding chaos, injustice, violence, breakdowns, and instabilities of all orders and magnitudes across the globe. It’s a hard time. Many of us are trying our best. We work to increase our awareness of the massive systems of harm, connect with aligned others, and act courageously, and yet, here we are. Where do we begin, again?

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

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Short Program Online
Sunday, September 28 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

An Eco Dharma Exploration with Konda Mason: A Path Towards Trust & Equanimity

Konda Mason

Join us for a timely and powerful conversation with Konda Mason on how to re-center relationships and nurture beloved community as a response to systems of dehumanization and polarization. Together, we’ll explore what pathways toward deeper trust and equanimity can look like in these uncertain times.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

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Retreat On-land
September 7–11, 2025 (4 nights)

Refuge and Response: Loving Engagement in a Time of Transformation

James Baraz, MA, Carol Cano, MA, Kirsten Rudestam
Note: This event is convening a select group of experts and professionals in the field by invitation only.

Drawing on both Buddhist and Earth-based teachings, this gathering offers a space to explore the intersection of contemplative practice and engaged activism. Through morning retreat practice and afternoon symposiums, we will cultivate the inner resources and outer connection needed to meet this moment with clarity, resilience, and skillful action for those working toward a more just and compassionate world.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

A Tree of Peace

The Power of Remembering the Indigenous Design of American Democracy

Dr. Leslie Gray

At the core of American Democracy is an image of renewal that retains its inspirational power in the face of any adversity. It is the image of the roots, trunk and branches of a living tree. Some of us today can see this tree quite vividly, and for others the image is outside of awareness—but all may invoke it at this perilous moment in history and remember its message of strength in unity.

The Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee flag, representing the six nations of the Iroquois.
You are invited to envision the towering beauty and sparkling leaves of the mighty pine trees of the Eastern woodlands. They can grow as high as 230 feet, can have a diameter as wide as 8 feet and a canopy as broad as 50 feet. You are invited to see these trees not as metaphors or archetypes—but rather as a separate nation of breathing beings with a deeply intelligent organization from which we humans can learn. Only this level of respect will enable you to understand how an indissoluble federal government could derive from a tree.

The Eastern White Pine was the bio-mimetic source of Gayanashagowa (the sacred alliance of the Iroquois) which united five fiercely divided Indian nations. Thereafter it profoundly influenced the binding together of the English colonies into a United States of America and later the joining together of the countries of the world into a United Nations.

By examining The Great Law of Peace—an oral constitution rooted in unity, balance and mutual respect—we will uncover how indigenous concepts of collective governance, consensus building and communal responsibility helped shape democratic ideals embraced by the “founding fathers”. We will also look unflinchingly at what was specifically omitted when they borrowed from Native governance and see in this both the terrible human cost that followed as well as the roadmap to repair.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

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Devotion for the Earth & Engaged Surrender

Ayya Santacitta

With Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha as guides, this series explores re-cognizing ourselves as part of a living, intelligent Earth. By training to see ourselves differently, we can uncover a sense of devotion for the Earth that opens us to the sacred, self-regenerative capacity of the biosphere we belong to.

Modernity and its unsustainability lies at the root of our current metacrisis, urging us to cultivate new ways of looking at ourselves and thereby initiating new ways of imagining worlds worth working for. By not rushing to find answers and learning to trust the healing recalibration of the Earth’s metabolism acting through us, unexpected possibilities can emerge.

In these four sessions we will co-create a safe container that supports reverence for the Earth and a humble curiosity for what makes a good ancestor in these transitional times. Practices offered include Dharma reflections, guided meditations, chanting, sharing, and prompts for contemplation. You are invited to bring a capacity for embodied awareness in meditation and an open heart-mind, willing to see your life and the world through new eyes.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

When No Thing Works

Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse

Norma Wong Roshi

Talking story, weaving poetry, and offering wisdom at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism, When No Thing Works is a visionary guide to co-creating new worlds from one in crisis. It asks into the ways we can live well and maintain our wholeness in an era of collective acceleration: the swiftly moving current, fed and shaped by human actions, that sweeps us toward ever uncertain futures.

Grounded in Zen Buddhism, interconnection, and decades of community activism, When No Thing Works explores questions like:

• As we stand at a threshold of collective change, what leaps must we make?
• How can we push through discord and polarization and meet these critical changepoints collectively?
• What practices, strategies, and spiritualities can align to vision a sustainable future for our communities and descendants?
• How can we step out of urgency to tend to our crises with wisdom, intention, and care?

Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian leader Roshi Norma Wong’s meditation holds our collective moment with gravity and tender care. She asks us to not only imagine, but to live into, a story beyond crisis and collapse—one that expands to meet our dreams of what (we hope) comes next while facing with clarity and grace our here and now in the world we share today.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

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After working as a leading climate scientist with a powerful environmental organization in the U.S. for over a decade, Kritee stepped away from the mainstream climate movement to focus on Ecodharma and what she calls “Reindigenizing”—a personal and collective journey back to Earth-honoring, shamanic and animist ways of living. In this Ecodharma exploration, she’ll share why stepping away felt crucial to her. Together, we will explore questions like:

• What is the global polycrisis? (Hint: It’s complicated.) What are its root causes?
• How are childhood traumas, climate emergency, and racial injustices connected?
• What are planetary boundaries, and how do they call us to respect the Earth more deeply?
• Why do leading scientists say Indigenous knowledge systems are key to protecting all life?
• How did your ancestors live as part of their ancestral lands or ecosystems? If that changed, when and why?
• How can we more deeply honor the Earth and our life, community, and work—right where we are?

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

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The world is in a state of panic and injustice is escalating. We need actions to alleviate suffering. Yet if we respond from a place of urgency, we are only adding more panic to the world. How do we move in ways that honor that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast?”

As we face the poly-crisis, how do we escalate our actions without escalating a worldview that keeps us from interdependence? How can we view injustice less as a political issue and more as a manifestation of collective trauma? And how can Buddhist teachings and practices support us in responding skillfully to these times?

Fierce Vulnerability invites us into building a movement with the power to stop injustice while cultivating the love necessary to heal it. One that has the vulnerability to accept the depth of the crises we are in and the fierceness to not get frozen by it.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

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The EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program kicks off with Spirit Rock’s Earth Day Weekend Gathering and Celebration (April 19-20).

Join us as we celebrate Earth Day with a weekend of joyful connection in honor of our magnificent home—this living Earth. Together, we will cultivate Earth awareness and celebrate our interconnection with all life through Dharma talks, meditation, music, and community. Join the Spirit Rock community as we celebrate the power of collective action and step forward as compassionate stewards of the Earth.

This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.

Day 1 (Saturday, April 19 | 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM)

Protect What You Love: Interconnection and Engagement

Teacher: James Baraz and Ayya Santacitta
Guest Teachers: Christiana Figueres (Online), Leila Salazar-López, and Jessica Serrante
Musicians: Jennifer Berezan and Chris Webster (performing together), and Wildchoir

Rooted in love, humility, and generosity, our gathering invites a spiritual, joy-based approach to caring for our planet—one that nurtures real connection, deepens our reverence for the natural world, and fuels positive activism. While sadness and despair need to be honored as natural responses to our climate crisis, we know that meaningful cultural transformation arises not from fear, but from wonder, gratitude, and a shared commitment to protect what we love.

Day 2 (Sunday, April 20 | 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM)

Nurturing Interconnectedness and Strengthening our Relationship with our Beloved Earth

Teachers: Bonnie Duran and Carol Cano
Guest Teachers: Dean Hoaglin

This program is designed to create a meaningful space to celebrate Earth Day and foster a sense of unity and collective care towards our Beloved Earth and each other. Join us as we honor the wisdom of indigenous traditions and Buddhist teachings, weaving together practices that deepen our connection to the natural world. Through guided meditations, reflective dialogues, and wisdom teachings, we will explore pathways to live in harmony with the Earth and all beings.

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