The Awareness Intensive (three days), The Love Intensive (four days) and Satori (seven days) are a lunge into the ultimate reality, a taste of enlightenment, an alignment of inner and outer beyond any idea of separation.
It is a state of joy, beauty and easiness and the recognition of it as our natural state. It is a sip of True Nature that finally quenches our thirst and gives sense to our searching.For centuries spiritual seekers asked themselves: Who am I? What is Life? What is Love? What is Freedom? These, and few more, we call “existential questions”. For centuries seekers contemplated in isolation and for long years until, in the middle of the sixties, a zen master decided to experiment and see what would happen if two people would sit facing each other asking those questions and answering in turn. The result was miraculous: the process of introspection became incredibly more potent and faster as to the question was added the communication.
The technique we use in these retreats is the most radical and efficient to come to know yourself directly, beyond concepts, beliefs, opinions, familial, social and religious conditioning.
If you are ready to look within and face your “original face”, these retreats are for you.
Awareness Intensive Retreat
The question “ Who am I” is the most relevant question for any human being. It is the existential question. It will never be old fashioned or out of date.
The awareness intensive process has three fundamental goals: Clarity, Alertness, and Capacity to Communicate.
The state that includes all these qualities is called Presence, which is the capacity of the individual to use, in an integrated and focused way, their mental, emotional and physical resources in each and every situation.
What will the retreat offer
The Awareness Intensive Process blends in a unique and seamless way, traditional techniques of self-inquiry:
Zen & Advaita; with modern communication skills, body exercises and a cleansing diet.
The integration of mind, body and emotions that matures allows the participant to attain a higher level of sensitivity, discrimination, understanding and expression.
The most meaningful by-product is the capacity of re-evaluating personal history and potential in a new light,
and discover new perspective and resources.
A nourishing environment, beautiful healthy food, a real retreat.
Physical dynamic meditations to detox the physical and emotional body.
The process is highly structured, fully residential with all meals.
Whilst it’s not therapy, it is highly therapeutic.
Love Intensive Retreat
Awareness and Love are central qualities of Being, of the Absolute, of the divine that manifest themselves in each of us in unique and incomparable ways.
While we often take for granted being aware, love is one of the mysteries and stumbling blocks that we all face and struggle with in everyday life.
Who doesn’t want love in his life, long for it? Who does not desire the joy, passion, warmth, intimacy, excitement of love? What stops us? What are the obstacles that prevent us from a complete connection with the love we feel, with the ability to receive it, to share it?
The intensive is centered on the existential question What is love? And it is an invitation to directly experiencing love beyond all the concepts, beliefs, ideas that we have received.
In addition to cleaning up the past and conditioning, the intensive opens you up to an original and always fresh incarnation of love: yours. Uniquely you.
Satori is radical inquiry. It is going under the skin and in the heart and in the belly to see and feel what is in the way of being myself. Who am I?What is my true nature? How do I lose myself or feel that there isn’t all of me here, now? What is this restlessness that pushes me to do and do and do? What is this longing for being more real, truer, complete? What am I doing here?
Self-inquiry means to open and unsettle the mechanism that destroys the present by repeating the past. Self-inquiry means being so present in the here/now that I can have a direct experience of myself and reality, fresh and alive, free of the filters of conditioning.
The aim of this retreat is having this direct experience of being , an experience of awakening, an experience of no-mind. Satori is not therapy and doesn’t have the goal of finding temporary solutions to daily problems, even though it will give you a different and new perspective about those problems. Satori aims to dissolve the identification with the ego, which is the only cause of problems.
A seven day retreat working with the existential questions: Who is in? Who am I? What is Life? What is Another? What is Love? And others.
The quest for Who is in? and Who am I? is as old as humanity. These life-koans are the core questions for every human being, no matter if man or woman, young or old, stupid or clever, seeker or business man. All other life-koans are aspects of this master key koans: What is life, love, freedom, consciousness, another? to name a few. We cannot answer life-koans but only live them by experiencing directly.
The key is to go into them. Relaxation, trust, love, openness for oneself and others will grow simultaneously with understanding. In the Awareness Intensive Retreat, the ancient Zen technique of facing the wall in silence is combined with the modern technique of structured communication facing a partner. Opening oneself in the presence of another person supports the incentive for the inquiry into who one truly is. As we move inside, the connection our resources gets strengthened. We experience an infinite pool of creativity and Being, becoming ready to live our potential more fully.
Though the work is not geared towards change it evokes profound change. Though it’s not therapy, it is highly therapeutic. Apart from the obvious benefits of being in the moment, there are many others hidden in this process: we learn to listen, we learn to see and feel ourselves and others. We can experience the uniqueness and ways of Being and learn to give space to ourselves and others. We get to know and speak our truth independently of the image we carry and we can come in touch with the relaxation and joy which manifest as we connect with ourselves. Trust, love, freedom and consciousness grow inside by opening up and ripple toward others. In fact, we don’t know a better school for relationships.
These and many other paradoxes are the hidden treasures of the process. The Technique allows each participant to move into their uniqueness, live in the moment, and expand into the unknown. It really is a training for life. The Training is for everybody who has taken part in Who is in? and/or Satori before and wants to deepen their understanding of the process, or wants to acquire the skill to lead it.
