Menla

12/17/2025

Menla Solar Circle: Help Us Cross the Finish Line!

As we approach the close of the year, we’re filled with gratitude for this community.

Thanks to your generosity, Menla’s Solar Campaign is nearly complete.
So far, we’ve raised $107,441 toward our $140,000 goal — and with your help, we can cross the finish line by year’s end.

By Spring 2026, Menla will install a solar energy system that will:

· Offset 50,000+ kWh of electricity annually
· Eliminate 21.4 tons of carbon emissions each year
· Reduce reliance on a volatile energy grid
· Reinvest long-term savings back into healing programs and community care

This clean energy will support Menla’s ongoing mission — and contribute renewable power back into the grid, strengthening regional energy resilience.

As the holidays approach, consider making a gift in honor of someone you love — someone who cares about the Earth, healing, and the future we share.

Every donation, at any level, helps power a living spiritual sanctuary with the sun.

🔗 Link in bio to give
💫 Tax-deductible • Year-end gifts amplified through solar rebates

12/16/2025

When the world feels overwhelming, it’s easy to forget the simple truth: there is still goodness in us—and around us.
We just lose sight of it when we’re tired, stressed, or bracing ourselves for the next headline.

This January, join author and teacher Lodro Rinzler for Finding Goodness in a World on Fire—a weekend retreat designed to help us reconnect with our own basic goodness, our inherent dignity, and our capacity to meet difficulty with clarity and compassion.

Through meditation, guided practices, honest conversation, and down-to-earth dharma, we’ll explore how to soften cynicism, restore our resilience, and rediscover the goodness that’s still here—within ourselves and within others.

Whether you’re feeling hopeful, heartbroken, or simply depleted, you’re welcome.

January 16–19, 2026
More info + registration in our bio.

12/15/2025

12/15/2025

Winter Solstice Clearlight Yoga Nidra Retreat

December 18–21, 2025
with Michele Loew

This Winter Solstice, choose how you want to be held.

Join us for a deeply restorative Clearlight Yoga Nidra immersion, offered in two ways:

✨ In person at Menla (limited spaces remaining)
✨ Live online as an at-home retreat

Yoga Nidra is a meditative inner science that supports profound rest, healing, and spiritual awakening. Over four days, Michele Loew will guide multiple Yoga Nidra practices daily, alongside the sister sciences of dream yoga and clearlight sleep—offering a pathway into luminous, timeless awareness.

This retreat works gently across the layers of the body, mind, and heart, supporting nervous system regulation, hormonal balance, deeper sleep, and clarity of mind.

We culminate together on the Winter Solstice, the moment the Earth rests most deeply in the Northern Hemisphere. This year, the Solstice arrives at 10:02 AM ET, and we will pause together—whether in the Catskills or at home—to enter the cave of the heart and bathe in clearlight wisdom.

✨ Come to Menla and rest in nature
✨ Or stay home and practice from your own sanctuary

Both paths lead inward.

25 Yoga Alliance CEUs available
Practicum credit toward Michele’s 100-hour Yoga Nidra Certification

🔗 Link in bio to register

12/15/2025

In our culture, death is often treated as a medical event, but it is a sacred human transition.

End-of-life doulas are helping shift that reality.

They offer emotional presence, spiritual support, clear information, and grounded companionship when it matters most.
They help families feel less alone.

They bring dignity and meaning back to the end of life.

This February, join Henry Fersko-Weiss, founder of the contemporary doula movement, for a training that has changed countless lives.

Whether you feel a quiet calling or a clear purpose, this work is needed—now more than ever.

End-of-Life Doula Training
February 23–27, 2026 | Menla
Learn more & register at the link in bio.

12/14/2025

New Retreat Announcement

Raised By This Place: Ritual Theater, Ecological Identity & Spiritual Nurturing · March 20–22, 2026 • Menla with Katie Garcia

Step into a weekend where theater becomes ritual, creativity becomes nourishment, and nature becomes your first and deepest teacher.

Raised By This Place is an immersive retreat led by educator and ritual theater artist Katie Garcia, inviting you to explore your inner landscape through movement, voice, storytelling, and embodied play. Rooted in the lineages of Artaud, Boal, Indigenous creation stories, and the wisdom of the inner child, this retreat is a journey back to your own imagination and your relationship with the living earth.

Across the weekend, you’ll explore:
Embodied listening in nature
Improvisational & image theater inspired by Augusto Boal
Creative rituals that integrate movement, drawing, poetry & storytelling
Ecological identity through the lens of play, presence & belonging
Journaling, reflection & collective performance-making

Designed for artists, seekers, educators, and anyone longing for deeper connection, this retreat offers a space to slow down, listen, and remember how creativity and nature can restore the spirit.

Join us for a weekend of imagination, healing, and earth-rooted community. Registration now open — in bio.

12/13/2025

The Christ & The Buddha and the Apocalyptic Rise of the Sacred Feminine
February 19–22, 2026 • Menla

We are honored to welcome Andrew Harvey, Ph.D. and Robert A.F. Thurman for a groundbreaking retreat exploring one of the most urgent spiritual questions of our time:

What new consciousness is trying to be born at the intersection of the Christ, the Buddha, and the rising Sacred Feminine?

This rare gathering brings together two lifelong friends and visionary teachers who believe that our global crisis—ecological, political, and spiritual—is also a fierce invitation into radical transformation.

Across the weekend, Andrew and Bob will illuminate:

✨ The Magdalene-Christ revolution and its deep parallels in Tibetan Buddhism
✨ Padmasambhava & Yeshe Tsogyal’s union as a model of embodied, awakened partnership
✨ How patriarchal distortions have limited both traditions
✨ A bold, joyful path of engaged enlightenment + sacred activism
✨ Teachings, practices, and maps of transformation you can begin using now

This retreat is an offering for anyone who feels the call to help birth a more compassionate, embodied, and courageous humanity.

Registration now open
In-person at Menla & Livestream options available.

12/12/2025

Tibetan Wisdom Principles to Carry Into the New Year

1. Interdependence
We are deeply connected. Our actions, thoughts, and intentions ripple outward and shape the world we share.

2. Training the Mind
Lasting happiness comes from within. Through steady practice, we can transform challenges into clarity and compassion.

3. Compassion in Action
Compassion is a verb. It asks us to show up with courage, presence, and a willingness to ease suffering wherever possible.

May these teachings guide us toward a more grounded, open-hearted, and wise 2026.

To keep learning from Tibetan teachers who share their wisdom here at Menla, sign up for our newsletter — link in bio.

12/11/2025

Looking back on 2025, our hearts are full. This year at Menla was shaped by extraordinary people, unforgettable retreats, and moments of genuine connection.

From welcoming the year with Krishna Das, Bob Thurman, and friends…
to the deep stillness of Dark Retreat with Andrew Holecek…
to our Vajra Yoga immersions…
to the transformative Sound Healing programs with Lea Garnier…
to the profound meeting of Tibetan and Amazonian knowledge-keepers at the Sacred Bridge Gathering —
this year reminded us again and again of the power of community and shared wisdom.

We’re also deeply grateful for every guest, group, and practitioner who walked this land and became part of Menla’s unfolding story. Your presence is felt here long after you leave.

As we turn toward 2026, we look forward to welcoming new and returning friends to experience the healing and transformation that continues to blossom on this sacred ground.

Image from Sacred Bridge by Piotr Redlinski

12/10/2025

For almost two decades, our Menla community has gathered in the Catskill mountains to welcome the New Year with practice, joy, and deep connection. As we step into the Year of the Fire Horse. a year of courage, transformation, and bold authenticity, we invite you to join us for Igniting 2026.

This year’s retreat features an extraordinary lineup:

✨ Marina Abramović — The Art of Presence
✨ Robert A.F. Thurman — Dharma teachings
✨ Krishna Das & Nina Rao — Opening kirtan
✨ Michele Loew • John Campbell — Yoga
✨ Alexander Mallon — Astrology for 2026
✨ Elizabeth Pyjov • Paul Bloom • Arjun Bruggeman • Lea Garnier

Five days of meditation, movement, kirtan, astrology, community, reflection, and celebration, plus the opportunity to book self-care treatments at Menla’s Healing Spa.

There is still time to join us online or in person.

Step into 2026 with clarity, joy, and a heart full of possibility.

Link in bio to register.

12/09/2025

Looking for a meaningful holiday gift?
This season, consider giving something that continues to ripple outward long after the wrapping paper is gone.

A donation to Menla’s Solar Fund—made in honor of a friend or loved one—helps us move toward a greener, more self-sustaining future.
It reduces our environmental footprint, lowers our energy costs, and supports the land and community we’re stewarding for generations to come.

It’s a gift that nourishes the Earth, supports a nonprofit you care about, and honors someone you love in a truly thoughtful way.

Give the gift that keeps giving back.
Make a donation in someone’s name at the link in our bio.

12/08/2025

Finding Goodness in a World on Fire
A Weekend Retreat with Lodro Rinzler
January 16–19, 2026 | Menla

If the world feels loud, divided, or heavy lately, you’re not alone.
Many of us are carrying grief, exhaustion, or quiet discouragement as we move through our days.

This January, we gather in the stillness of Menla’s mountain valley to remember something essential:
✨ there is goodness in you
✨ there is dignity in others
✨ and even in chaotic times, compassion is a renewable resource

Guided by Lodro Rinzler—meditation teacher and international bestselling author of The Buddha Walks into a Bar—this weekend offers grounding meditations, gentle contemplative practices, dharma talks, and heartfelt conversation.

Lodro’s down-to-earth, accessible teaching style helps us reconnect with a sense of inner steadiness.

Not to bypass the world’s suffering — but to meet it with clarity, courage, and care.

Come as you are.
Hopeful, heartbroken, tired, curious — all of it is welcome here.

We’d love to sit with you in the quiet of winter.
Details + registration in our bio.

CompassionInAction