Earth Dreaming retreat at Kripalu is two months away!
As the days begin their slow tilt toward autumn, I am beginning to prepare for the Earth Dreaming Retreat at Kripalu – which is just a little over two months away!
This retreat is an invitation to explore what I call a feral kind of faith: the courage to live like a wild angel in service to becoming each other's answered prayers
In a world where we witness daily acts of war and political violence, feelings of powerlessness can prevail. Dreaming with Earth offers another way - a form of holy resistance that grows in the soil of care. It is a way of saying yes to the world you yearn to co-create, even in the presence of grief and harrowing uncertainty. It is a commitment to the long, slow beauty that will outlive us.
Earth Dreams are not passive - they ask something of us. Even if that something is a sacred presence of witnessing, of listening, of learning in the still silence of heart. They call for reciprocity, for our willingness to meet the dream and harmonize with what it is asking for.
I imagine Earth herself as an Angel embodied in whispers of wind and birdsong, in moments of heart-wrenching awe. To me, Earth is an angelic dream-weaver calling for a more beautiful world by planting living prayers in our consciousness. These prayers, these dreams may arrive as sudden sparks of inspiration, subtle yet insistent longings, as ideas that refuse to dissipate.
Sometimes they look like:
Contributing to a cause that sparks a fire in your heart
Standing up to protect a beloved community garden so that butterflies, sparrows, and neighborhood children can keep finding refuge there for decades to come.
Creating a space where others can gather, heal, and be restored - never fully knowing the lives that will be changed.
Kripalu itself is steeped in such prayers - how many dreams began in its gardens? How many destinies and friendships took root in its halls, simply because someone answered the call to gather?
During this retreat, we will reawaken the subtle senses - those often-overlooked ways of perceiving that live beyond the five we name most. These subtle senses can emerge as a direct knowing that arrives without explanation - as the way your body registers truth before your mind understands. As the recognition in your bones when you meet a kindred soul. These are some of the ways our intuition speaks to us - these are the subtleties that serve as bridges for deeper communion with Earth's dream.
As we attune to and awaken the subtleties of our senses, our retreat will immerse into questions like:
What Earth dream longs to take root through you here and now?
What legacy will your dream carry forward for the children's children's children - human, animal, and pollinator alike?
In the face of the world's grief, what act of beauty, care, or devotion are you called to embody right now?
At its heart, Earth Dreaming retreat is about becoming each other's answered prayers. We gather October 19th–22nd at Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, MA. You can explore the details and register here!
If you feel called and want to sense whether this retreat is the right fit for you, reach out to me at madeline@madelinegiles.com and we can arrange a time to connect 1:1.
With so much love,
Madeline