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.
Two co-founders. Two guides who help hold the retreat container. A broader ecosystem of teachers and practitioners stands behind this and steps in when the work calls for it.
Forest is the co-founder of C.Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to catalyzing conscious changemakers, communities, and corporations so that our children and children's children inhabit a planet where they, and all of life, can thrive.
He is also the founder and executive director of Wise Up, a nonprofit offering innovative, science-backed wellness programs to the underserved. Since 2013, Wise Up programs have touched the lives of more than 8,000 students nationwide. Forest was faculty at the Kresser Institute for Functional Medicine, where he developed and taught The Art & Science of Mindful Living to 1,700 students from 40 countries in the nationally accredited ADAPT Health Coach Training Program.
For nearly a decade he led Mindfulness Programs for Teens and Young Adults at UCSF's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, where he built a twelve-week program that a UCSF research team showed was changing lives.
His work is rooted in healing the disconnection within ourselves, with each other, with the natural world, and with the sacred, in service of a more beautiful and loving world. An engaged practitioner since 1999, drawing from Buddhism, shamanism, and modern psycho-spiritual schools.
Jenny is the co-founder of C.Lab, a licensed Naturopathic Doctor, teacher, and guide.
She previously worked at Sage Integrative Health in Berkeley, where she was a Ketamine prescriber and a provider of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy. Her holistic approach to patients draws on extensive training: the MAPS MDMA therapist training, Dr. Gabor Maté's yearlong Compassionate Inquiry training, board certification in acupuncture, and the Somatic Experiencing Method.
Jenny also carries more than a decade of shamanic, earth-based, Buddhist, and contemplative practice, which she integrates into her clinical work and her passion for mentoring other clinicians on the path of self-discovery and growth.
Kathryn, E-RYT 500, has been curating healing experiences for people of all ages and life experiences across New York, California, and internationally since 2011. She was featured on the Netflix documentary Un(Well). Between 2019 and 2020, she partnered with the Heal Hive to guide people living with chronic Lyme back toward health through somatic practices, vocal activation, and grief ritual.
She has studied grief work under Grief Yoga founder Paul Denniston and On Grief and Grieving author David Kessler. Further training under The Wild Edge of Sorrow author Francis Weller, and culture activist and palliative care physician Stephen Jenkinson. Her RYT 500 came under the tutelage of Tara Glazier and Zhenja La Rosa.
From the yoga room to medicine journeys to healing retreats and grief rituals, Kathryn provides a welcoming, safe container for clients to move through pain and reclaim the parts of themselves that were cut off at the roots. Grief work is joy work, and she has made it her life's work to guide her community back toward deep reverence and remembrance.
Walker is a psychotherapist, licensed MFT, and psychedelic integration guide based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has supported scores of people through real change and greater fulfillment, drawing from a range of psychotherapeutic modalities as well as indigenous, earth-based wisdom traditions.
Originally from the high desert of Arizona, he was shaped in large part by the wild landscapes of western North America. His passions are focused on what furthers the wholeness of human experience, whether writing, music, art, adventure, wilderness immersion, or practices of deep listening.
Walker is walking the medicine path, aspiring to serve the vital, mysterious, wild core of our individual and collective selves.
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 work 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.