Holy Longing: The Ache that Makes Space

with Ronald Rolheiser

You've tasted it once. Maybe more than once. That moment of ineffable, exquisite union: with the Divine, with Beauty, with All That Is. 

And then it was gone… and you've been burning for more of it ever since.

That burning, that longing, is what propels all our searching. And what the mystics have been trying to tell us for centuries is that that longing does not reveal where God is absent, but where God is profoundly present.

This is the wild claim at the center of this month's Night School: the very ache you feel for union is God's own longing for communion, placed inside you. That burning you feel is a sacred fire. 

Beloved spiritual writer Ronald Rolheiser has spent his life unpacking this claim. On September 12, he will reveal the two mystics who brought him to this conclusion: Thérèse of Lisieux, saint of the "Little Way," and Ruth Burrows, the Carmelite nun who took a wrecking ball to all of our spiritual hiding places.

Their shared discovery: emptiness –ache!– is the path of spiritual maturity. The heart of Lunar Wisdom, of Night spirituality itself. Your ache isn’t an obstacle; it’s the whole tamalé. Absence is Presence’s darkest beauty. The Divine’s first and final mystery. (Can you tell we’re excited??) 

On September 12, Ron will stir us with these Carmelites’ eternal song: God is endlessly, helplessly in love with you. All we're called to do is let ourselves be loved, empty hands and all.

Join us for a workshop that is likely to turn your understanding of spiritual maturity on its head.

Creativity & Playing in the Dark

with Cynthia Winton-Henry

Night is when the imaginal world reigns. Stories swirl around the campfire. Music, dances, rituals take place under starlight. Dreams emerge, both in our waking and in our sleeping.

Cynthia Winton-Henry has spent her life dancing in the imaginal realm. Whether in movement, art, or writing, she has shown thousands upon thousands of students the simple but profound truth: your body knows things your words haven't caught up to yet, and play is how you find out what they are.

In this workshop, you'll move, gather, and make things up. You'll discover, maybe to your own surprise, that whimsy isn't just spontaneous—it's disciplined. Real play needs a container, a ritual or rhythm you might even call liturgy. 

You'll also discover the strange relief of forgetting yourself on purpose. Play only works if you're willing to lose track of who you're supposed to be for a while—and something in that losing tends to find what actually matters.

The good news is, you can’t fail at play. There are no grades. No wrong way to move, invent, draw, create. There is only the realm of the possible—and permission to cross into it.

Grief Tending: How to Carry What Cannot Be Fixed

There's an old idea, older than any of us, that grief and love share a root. You don't get one without the other. Every ache is proof of something you loved enough to lose.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped having places to bring that ache. The rituals that once held communal grief—the wailing, the long tables, the elders who knew what to do with a body and a broken heart—have mostly disappeared. So grief goes underground. It shows up as anxiety, numbness, an argument about something small. It doesn't go away. It just goes unwitnessed.

This session draws on Francis Weller's five gates of grief—not as five stages to move through, but five doors into everything we're actually carrying: the losses we name easily, the ones we're ashamed of, the grief we feel for the planet and for each other, the griefs we inherited before we were born. We won't rush toward meaning or resolution. We'll practice something older instead—letting sorrow be witnessed, together, in real time.

Because here's the thing no one tells you: letting grief in doesn't just break you open. It reminds you that you belong—to the earth, to each other, to everyone who has ever stood where you're standing. No one travels this alone. We'll close with a shared ritual to prove it.

Wintering: What Nature Knows About Rest

with Christine Valters Paintner

We live in a culture built for spring and summer: for blossoming, for activity, for output. The fallow seasons of our lives, by contrast, get treated like a problem to fix, or a chapter to push through. No wonder we're exhausted.

Christine Valters Paintner has spent years with the alternative. In this session, she'll draw on the wisdom of contemplative rhythm and the natural world—hibernation, dormancy, the tree that's fully alive underground with nothing to show above it—to offer a different way of measuring this season. Not by how fast you get out of it, but by what it's incubating while you're in it.

We'll listen to what this particular winter is asking of us, through reflection, meditation, and Christine's own gentle expressive-arts practice. And we'll practice trusting what nature already knows—that this isn't the end of the story, just one chapter of it.

Ancestors: What the Dead Still Teach the Living

We are never only ourselves.

Behind us stand countless lives—known and unknown—whose stories, wounds, wisdom, and unfinished songs still move through our bodies. Whether we acknowledge them or not, the dead continue to shape how we love, grieve, belong, and survive.

Ancestors: What the Dead Still Teach the Living is an invitation to listen for these presences with care, humility, and discernment. This class explores ancestral connection not as nostalgia or superstition, but as a living relationship—one that can offer grounding, perspective, and healing in uncertain times.

Many of us carry inherited grief, resilience, and strength without language for where they came from. The night invites us to slow down enough to remember that we do not walk alone, but with all those who came before.

In this gathering, you’ll be invited to:

• Ask who your ancestors actually are: blood and otherwise, human and otherwise
• Learn what indigenous and ancestral traditions still know about surviving dark times without breaking
• Explore rituals for honoring the dead without romanticizing them
• Consider what your ancestors survived that still lives in your body, and what it might be asking of you now
• Reflect on becoming a good ancestor yourself—because ancestors aren't only behind us

If you’ve felt untethered, curious about lineage, or drawn to the quiet pull of those who came before, this class offers a way to listen—gently, wisely, and together.

The Night Sea Journey: Into the Depths

with Alexander John Shaia

There are seasons when the soul does not move forward — it descends.

Across wisdom traditions, this descent is known as the Night Sea Journey: a passage into the depths where familiar lights fail, old identities loosen, and something truer begins to take shape beneath the surface. This is not a collapse, but an initiation.

And yet, most of us were never taught how to travel these waters. When clarity disappears, we’re told to swim harder or find our way back to shore. The ancient stories offer a different wisdom: the sea itself is the teacher, and what we are seeking cannot be found without going down.

The Night Sea Journey: Into the Depths is an invitation to explore this descent as sacred terrain.

This class is for those who feel drawn inward — by grief, longing, exhaustion, or unknowing — and sense that this is not a detour, but part of the path. Together, we’ll explore the wisdom of descent through story, contemplative reflection, and embodied practice, listening for what the depths reveal when we stop resisting the dark and begin to accompany it.

In this gathering, you’ll be invited to:

• Explore the Night Sea Journey as an ancient map for times of uncertainty and transformation
  
• Discover how descent loosens old identities and opens deeper knowing
  
• Learn how to stay present in the depths without rushing toward answers
  
• Reframe darkness not as abandonment, but as initiation and intimacy
  
  

This is not a class about fixing yourself or finding clarity.

It is an invitation to descend with care — trusting that the dark is not empty, and that something essential is being formed beneath the surface.

If you’ve felt yourself entering deeper waters lately, this journey offers companionship and orientation for the descent.

You do not have to make it alone.

Night Body: The Lantern Within

with Edwina Yeow

When the familiar light fades, the body remembers how to see.

Long before we learned to think our way through uncertainty, the body knew how to move by feel—how to sense danger and safety, rhythm and rest, when the path ahead could not be clearly seen. In the dark, it is the body that becomes our lantern.

Night Body: The Lantern Within is an invitation to rediscover the body as a source of quiet guidance in times of unknowing. This class explores how wisdom lives not only in insight, but in sensation, breath, intuition, and the slow intelligence of the nervous system.

Many of us have been taught to override our bodies, pushing through fatigue, bypassing grief, or mistrusting what we feel. But the dark asks something different: to listen more closely, to move more slowly, and to let the body lead when the mind cannot.

In this gathering, you’ll be invited to:

• Explore the body as a lantern for navigating dark or uncertain seasons
  
• Learn how nervous system wisdom supports steadiness, presence, and trust
  
• Reconnect with felt sense, intuition, and embodied knowing
  
• Practice ways of listening to the body without rushing toward fixing or control
  
  

If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your body, overwhelmed by the world, or unsure how to navigate the dark, this class offers a gentle reorientation.

The lantern is already within you.

The Sacred Feminine & Wisdom of the Womb

with Coke Tani

There is a wisdom that does not rush, explain, or conquer.
It waits, listens, and receives.

Across cultures and spiritual traditions, the sacred feminine has named a way of knowing rooted in gestation, relationship, and deep time. The womb, in this sense, is not only anatomical—it is a symbol of the capacity to hold life as it forms in darkness.

The Sacred Feminine & Wisdom of the Womb is an invitation to explore this way of knowing as a wisdom available to all.

In times of uncertainty, the womb teaches something radical: how to stay with what is unfinished, how to trust slow formation, and how to honor what is becoming before it is visible.

In this workshop, you’ll be invited to:

• Practice staying present to what is forming without needing clarity
  
• Learn how cyclical wisdom supports discernment in dark seasons
  
• Reconnect with the body as a site of quiet knowing
  
• Discern when life is calling you to be proactive, and when to allow emergence

The sacred feminine invites you into the mystery of life forming slowly, relationally, and in the dark.

If you sense that something is asking to be born in you—or through you—this class offers language and practices for honoring that process without rushing it into the light.

Divine Intimacy
& the Dark Night

with James Finley

Most people spend their whole lives avoiding the Dark Night of the Soul.

But what if it is the gate to divine union?

Join the highly sought-after James Finley for a masterclass uncovering God’s invitation waiting for you in the dark. From John of the Cross’s teachings on suffering to God’s longing for us, you’ll discover:

• Why losing the feeling of God could be a sign of spiritual growth
• How to see the unraveling of things as the mystics would
• Why longing is the hallmark of every mystical path
• How to trust the spiritual path when nothing feels certain anymore
• What it’s like to be prayed by God
• How John of the Cross’s greatest loss led to his greatest legacy
• A deeper understanding of divine union—not as something you feel, but as a transformation that includes even the cross

Shadow Work & IFS: Making Friends with the Dark

with Kelly Deutsch

There are parts of ourselves we learn to hide.

The angry part. 

The worrying part. 

The needy or judgey or bitter part.

Many of us have spent our lives trying to conquer and control these tendencies. Whether through discipline, shame, or sheer force of will, we sought to eradicate our “sinful nature.”

Of course, these parts don’t die when we conquer them. They go underground… and resurface in the most inconvenient of ways.  

Anxiety. Numbness. Perfectionism. Exhaustion. Longing. Crisis.

But what if these tendencies are not enemies to be defeated?

What if they are wounded parts of us—carrying pain, protection, and unmet needs—that have been waiting, not for conquest, but for compassion?

This is the heart of both Shadow Work and Internal Family Systems (IFS): approaching our inner world not with shame, but with curiosity. Not with a sword, but with a lantern.

Together we'll explore:

• What "shadow work" really means (beyond the buzzword)
• How our wounded parts often try to protect us
• Why hurt people hurt people—and how healed people can heal people
• What contemplative spirituality and IFS surprisingly have in common
• How this inner work moves us toward wholeness—and makes us less likely to project our unexamined pain onto others

Because as Richard Rohr writes: "If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it."

When we transform our shadow, we stop projecting it onto others—and onto the world. This is where that work begins.

Learning to Walk in the Dark

with Barbara Brown Taylor

We spend much of our lives trying to stay in the light.

We seek clarity over mystery, certainty over unknowing, and answers over presence. Yet across Scripture, the contemplative tradition, and the rhythms of creation, the dark is rarely portrayed as a place to fear. Again and again, it becomes the place where vision changes, the senses awaken, and the Sacred draws near in unexpected ways.

Learning to Walk in the Dark is an invitation to reconsider everything you've been taught about darkness. Inspired by the wisdom of Barbara Brown Taylor, this class explores the night not as the absence of God, but as a sacred landscape where trust is deepened, illusion falls away, and a different kind of seeing becomes possible.

Rather than asking how to escape the dark, we begin to wonder what the dark itself might have to teach us. When we stop resisting mystery, we discover that not all wisdom arrives in full daylight.

In this gathering, you'll be invited to:

• Explore how darkness has been understood as a place of encounter across Scripture and the contemplative tradition
• Reflect on what becomes possible when certainty gives way to curiosity, wonder, and trust
• Learn practices for becoming more attentive to the wisdom that emerges beyond familiar ways of seeing
• Discover how walking in the dark can deepen your relationship with yourself, the Sacred, and the mystery of life

So settle in, make yourself at home in this place of Mystery. For some truths can only be discovered when we loosen our grip on certainty, and allow the dark to become our teacher.

Dreamwork as a Spiritual Practice

with Laura Huff Hileman

Every dream is a personal word from the Wisdom Teacher at the “night school” we attend every time we sleep. 

As we recall our dreams and ponder, pray, and play with them, we discover that we are in a living relationship with the Sacred that moves within and beyond us. The Divine longs for us to develop our wholeness and give it lively expression in our waking lives. Dreams offer a full and daring vision of that lifelong adventure, while guiding and encouraging us along our way—even in our nightmares! Whether or not we ever recall a dream, they are shepherding our sacred evolution. 

Join Laura Huff Hileman for a rich session that weaves together concrete practices, Jungian wisdom, and Ignatian tradition. Together, we’ll learn how to listen for that Wisdom Teacher's voice, and bring it, gently, into the light of day.