C.Lab is a nonprofit. We run retreats, circles, and gatherings. Consciousness, community, creativity, contribution. Business as unusual, for the love of life, and for the brief time we're here for this.
Montezuma. Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Jenny was pregnant. Something dropped in.
Since 2011, Forest had been designing curriculum at Wise Up and the Kresser Institute. More than eight thousand young people had come through that work. It was reaching. That year, on the beach, the pull changed direction. Not wider. Deeper. Fewer people, longer with them, the kind of slow relational depth you can't fake and can't rush.
Two years later, the first C.Lab retreat. Ten people. Six days. Then another. Then another. Six retreats in now. Fifty-some alumni across four continents. Gatherings forming in France and Quebec. A young women's retreat in its second year. A Costa Rica retreat center shared with us by an alum.
Word of mouth the whole way. Invitation only. This site is the first time the door has been even slightly open to people we haven't already met.
Two people. A marriage. The alchemy is visible when they teach together.
A circle of ten humans in nature, grounded and awake, asks more than one person can hold. Two can, when they've been in it this long, when they live it at home, when the relational field between them is the first thing in the room. A wider ecosystem of teachers and adjunct faculty stands behind the work, and steps in when the container calls for it.
Fifteen years designing curriculum. Wise Up since 2011, where the work reached more than eight thousand young people. The Kresser Institute, designing clinical training. Experiential over conceptual the whole time. The mind is a great servant and a terrible master, and the work of teaching has been about getting under the thinking layer into the body where the learning actually lives.
His own practice runs through the Diamond Approach of A.H. Almaas, essence work, and years of integrated awakening with Jennifer Welwood. Waking up and waking down held in the same hand. A deep pull toward somatic and relational practice. The design aesthetic is zen garden. Less is more. Nothing extra in the room.
Jenny brings the relational field. A therapist trained in somatic and relational work, with years of group facilitation underneath her. Safety is the foundation of everything we do, and Jenny is the one tending it. People feel held in a way they weren't expecting. Things long carried get set down. The room keeps its shape while that happens.
Therapeutic precision with what's tender. A steady eye on what's moving between people. Ten humans going into real depth together is only possible because of the co-holding she makes with Forest, and the quality of attention she brings to the ground of the work.
None of this is ours. These are the traditions that shaped the work. Teachers we sat with. Books we kept coming back to. Practices that did something real in us. We name them because they deserve naming, and because the mending of splits we're up to now rests on all of this.
A.H. Almaas. Essence work. The pull that shaped Forest's inner practice.
Jennifer Welwood. Waking up without leaving the body or the relational field behind.
Joanna Macy. The Great Unraveling and the Great Turning. Our orientation to the cultural moment.
Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, Andrew Cohen, Elizabeth Debold. Evolution as a spiritual force; cosmogenesis.
Chris Bache's LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Rigor in psychedelic inquiry.
Goenka, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Ram Dass, Alan Watts. Meditation as a basic capacity, not a luxury.
Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. The archetypal layer, the hero's journey, the work of soul.
Fifteen years on one page. No master plan. Each year we listened for what wanted to come next, and built toward that. For the children of our children, and all of life.
Curriculum design for young people begins. A decade and change of figuring out how to teach the hard things so they land experientially, not just conceptually.
Jenny was pregnant. Costa Rica. A pull toward depth. Fewer people, longer with them, the kind of work that asks for a real container.
Ten people. Six days. A circle of humans in nature. Grounded, relational, awake. Not escaping the world. Preparing to serve it.
The form settles into itself. First conversations with alumni about facilitating. Something wanted to pass through more than two sets of hands.
Gatherings form in France and Quebec. A young women's retreat. A Costa Rica retreat center, shared with us by an alum. The community starts to hold its own weight.
The work gets quietly more visible. For the next chapter of the Great Turning. For the children of our children, and all of life.
Consciousness, community, creativity, contribution. Here. Now. If any of that is pulling at you, there are two doors from here.