Kintsugi for New Year’s Eve: Following the Golden Thread
With Rev. Therese Bimka, LCSW, Eric Archer and Rev. Dr. Sushmita Mukherjee
December 30, 2024 - January 1, 2025
RETREAT BY GUEST PRESENTERS
New Year’s Eve offers a portal into a Sacred Time, a threshold that invites insights and expanded consciousness as energies are heightened. It is an amplified field where our deepest longings can be revealed, strengthened, and nourished. Welcome 2025 by coming into closer alignment with your fundamental wholeness and your inner radiance, using kintsugi as your path as you explore the pillars that create and nourish a life of passion and purpose.
“The program, the presenter, and the nurturing environment of the center, staff and beautiful grounds created a very peaceful and healing experience.” ~ J.C
EXTEND YOUR STAY: Take advantage of the holidays by coming early or lingering afterwards on personal retreat. Just add days before or after the program at step 2 of Registration.
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
What do you genuinely long for?
There is a universal longing to come into closer alignment with our fundamental wholeness and our inner radiance. This spiritual yen nudges us at the deepest level—like a gravitational force—gently pulling us towards our highest values, towards awakening, towards deeper communion with our own core divinity. By bringing your longing into the light of consciousness, you create a resonance field of possibility.
Throughout this program, each segment of each day will offer a teaching, a practice and a Kintsugi Portion
Kintsugi: The Golden Thread of the Program
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repair with gold. In the opening ritual, you will break the handmade ceramic bowl you have been gifted. Like a mini alchemical process, you then transform the broken shards into gems as you re-member and re-weave yourself back into wholeness. It is both a symbolic journey and a literal one.
The shards become the metaphorical landscape to reclaim your resiliency and to touch that core place within that has never been broken—your fundamental wholeness. The golden shards become the golden portals… as each shard carries the energy bits of your wholeness and your resiliency.
Through the art and metaphor of the broken bowl, you will identify the core values that comprise a life worth living.
Group Meditation
Meditation offers a myriad of benefits for mind, body, and spirit. Practitioners often find it beneficial to meditate together in community, jointly increasing their depth of focus and comfort in their meditation practice. Throughout our time together we will have sitting meditation, guided meditations, and walking meditation.
Spoken Word, Poetry and Sound Bath with Eric Archer
Enjoy a meaningful exploration of sound and poetry. Eric creates an interactive and joyful experience of connection with self and community through movement, poetry and music.
The Universal Dance of Peace
This simple dance movement is easy to learn and beautiful to experience. The gentle movements are set to the 13th Century Rumi Poem: Caravan of No Despair and in this dance we are reminded of our fundamental inter-connectedness—and that all the answers we need are available if only we pause to look deep within.
Bring in 2025!
Join us in the dining room for non-alcoholic bubbly and snacks as we celebrate and offer blessings for 2025.
In the sacred container we will create together, this creative and spiritually nourishing workshop will invite you into a contemplative and introspective experience, listening deeply while remaining in connection with kindred spirits.
Enter 2025 renewed and refreshed!
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
- Group size limited to ensure personal access to the teacher
- Opportunities to be in community while enjoying silent creative exploration
- Group sharing and deepening will be woven into the weekend time together
- Seating and walking meditation
- Guided visualizations
- Spoken Word Sound Bath
- Movement and Dance
- Option to begin each morning with salutations and silent meditation
- Delicious all-vegetarian meals with locally sourced ingredients
- Extensive library of dharma books
- Expansive wooded grounds with beautiful flora and fauna
- Option to extend stay on Personal Retreat
OPEN TO ALL
There are no prerequisites for this program; it is appropriate for all. No art-making experience necessary; all materials will be provided.
SCHEDULE
(subject to change)
Monday, December 30
| 3:00 PM | Check in begins |
| 6:00-7:00 PM | Dinner |
| 7:00-9:00 PM | Welcome and Introduction |
| Ice Breaker: Using The Non Violent Communication Deck that identifies universal feelings and needs, we will playfully begin our journey together of getting to know each other. | |
| Ritual: Breaking our Bowls (Bring a meaningful cloth to wrap your bowl). Sleep with your shards and let the oracle of sleep time infuse them with energy and meaning. | |
| Closing Meditation: Brief teaching on meditation and contemplative practices | |
| Learn how to down regulate your nervous system. |
Tuesday, December 31
| 7:30-8:00 AM | Morning Salutations and Meditation (optional) |
| 8:00-9:00 AM | Breakfast |
| 9:00 AM-12:30 PM | Teaching on wholeness and resiliency from a Buddhist perspective |
| Meditation: Using guided visualizations, Therese will invite you on a contemplative journey to find a “gift” from a wise teacher | |
| Work in triads to share what you are discovered in this “encounter” | |
| Using a Core Values Exercise, identify the resiliency factors that comprise the uniqueness of YOU | |
| Kintsugi: Begin gluing your bowl back together. | |
| 1:00-2:00 PM | Lunch |
| 2:00-5:30 PM | After introducing Buddhist Psychology teachings on The Witness Self (vs. the “small s” self), Therese will guide you into an experience of integrating the power of The Witness Self as the necessary pathway for embodying one’s wholeness. |
| Meditation: Using Thich Nath Han’s Walking Meditation, we will mindfully embody the Prayer of Breath as we walk the campus path learning to host an intention or a question in our hearts as we walk | |
| Kintsugi: Using Paint and Professional Grade Liquid markers to write on each of the shards, participants will begin to discern the fundamental ingredients that comprise your Unique Map of Wholeness | |
| 6:00-7:00 PM | Dinner |
| 7:30-9:30 PM | Spoken Word, Poetry and Sound Bath with Eric Archer |
| 9:30 PM | New Year’s Toast |
Wednesday, January 1
| 7:30-8:00 AM | Morning Salutations and Meditation (optional) |
| 8:00-9:00 AM | Breakfast |
| 9:30 AM-1:00 PM | Scroll as Remembrance: Using specialized rice paper and twigs, we capture the essence of our own inner wisdom, awareness and the teachings that most resonated during the workshop. The scrolls will likely include the resiliency factors that you identified as core to your being and wholeness. |
| Closing Ritual: Polish the Heart Meditation and The Universal Dance of Peace | |
| 1:00-2:00 PM | Lunch |
| 2:00 PM | Checkout and Departure |
Teachers
Therese is a spiritual director and a psychotherapist in private practice in the Hudson Valley and the former director of The Interspiritual Counseling Program at One Spirit Interfaith Alliance (2011-2021). She is a seasoned leader of retreats and workshops on a wide range of psycho-spiritual and creative themes. She has advanced training in various trauma-based teachings, guided visualizations for health, mindfulness meditation, Buddhism and Psychology, Expressive Arts, Jungian Sandplay Therapy, Soulcollage, Restorative Justice, and Collective Trauma, among others. Therese has led workshops and retreats for organizations, training institutes, educational institutions, government facilities, congregations, and community based nonprofits, in addition to…
Learn more about Rev. Therese Bimka, LCSW
Eric Archer is a lover of nature and art in all forms, and practices this love through music, meditation, yoga, woodcraft, cooking, teaching, and poetry. Eric has been faculty at The Omega Institute, The Finger Lakes School of Massage, and The Millbrook School; he has been a Senior Jamtse Yin Yoga teacher and co-produced the community-driven series Everyday Expert. Eric is also a naturalist and outdoor enthusiast who includes the visceral, universal experiences of immersing and communing with Nature into his teachings: Simple, spontaneous, vital. Through embodied expressions of nature, knowledge, and devotion, he teaches from his own experience and…
Learn more about Eric Archer
Rev. Dr. Sushmita Mukherjee’s life and career straddle cutting-edge biomedical research technology and a spirituality that is not easily categorized. In both scientific and spiritual realms, her work lives at the interface of image, imagination and creativity. As a scientist, Sushmita works as an Associate Professor of Research, and a Co-Director of the Microscopy and Image Analysis Core Facility, at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Her spiritual home is at the One Spirit Learning Alliance, where she is an Academic Dean of the Interfaith/Interspiritual Seminary Program. Sushmita is an ordained interspiritual minister and a trained spiritual companion/counselor.…
Learn more about Rev. Dr. Sushmita Mukherjee
