The Urban Retreat

• Being Love: Discover love as your essential nature for all spiritual practice
• Calling/Being/Vocation: Explore the intersection of your soul’s purpose and your daily work
• Community/Authenticity: Learn to show up genuinely while honoring your need for belonging
• Creativity/Vulnerability: Embrace creative expression as a pathway to courage and truth
• Mindful Synchronicity: Develop awareness of life’s meaningful coincidences and divine timing
• Oneness/No Boundary: Experience the interconnectedness that dissolves the illusion of separation 
• Nature as Wisdom: Receive teachings from the natural world as your spiritual teacher
• Letting go/Playfulness/Joy: Release what no longer serves while rediscovering wonder and delight
• Living in the Present Moment: Cultivate presence as the gateway to peace and authentic power
• Practicing Spiritual Attunement: Develop sensitivity to the harmony within & to re-tune when needed
• Quiet Mind/Still Soul: Discover the profound peace that exists within each of us, beyond the cluttered mind & life's incessant distractions.
• Light in the Midst of Darkness: Find hope, meaning, and illumination during life’s challenging seasons

• Taoism: Emphasizes simplicity, naturalness, & balance
• Buddhism: Focuses on mindfulness, ethical living, and compassion in the midst of suffering
• Confucianism: Focuses on personal morality, harmony, & community
• Hinduism: Teaches realization of divine nature in all beings
• Aboriginal Spirituality: Teaches interconnectedness of all living & non-living elements
• Stoicism: Teaches self-mastery & emotional resilience
• Jewish mysticism: Seeks direct intimate knowledge of divinity & universe's hidden structure
• Christian mysticism: Direct encounter with divinity through intimate relationship
• Islamic mysticism: Emphasizes deep spiritual love & purification of one's heart
• Contemporary Spirituality: Focuses on holistic wellness, inner awareness, & ecological reverence for nature
• Perennialism: Proposes all major spiritual traditions share a universal wisdom
• Integral Spirituality: Teaches a holistic, inclusive approach to spiritual awakening, honors modern science, while incorporating wisdom of all major traditions.

Enjoy a peaceful, loving, communal space to cultivate openness to spiritual growth in an intimate cohort of fellow seekers.  

Our retreat is not religious. It isn’t trying to promote a particular belief system. Meister Eckhart proposed the following: “Divinity” he said, “is an Underground river that no one can stop and no one can damn up…There is one Underground river, but there are many wells into that river: an African well, a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a goddess well, a Christian well, and aboriginal wells. Many wells, but one river.”

It is from within this one river, this unquenchable spirit, we draw inspiration along our Twelve Paths Urban Retreat.  In that river we will find treasures abound in various ways, especially in our own lives, as we draw inspiration from the depth of our innermost essence.  We’ll witness our own wisdom as it surfaces like water cascading through a universal, ever-flowing underground river.

The great Celtic poet & author John O’Donohue captures the essence of our Urban Retreat when he said: “The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient of mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.”

“I love, therefore I am” is what Twelve Paths seeks as the hub or center of our human spiritual development.