The Dark Alchemy of Embodied Prayer: Dancing with Grief & Gift-Bearing February 2026
Schedule
Tue, 27 Jan, 2026 at 03:00 am to Sat, 31 Jan, 2026 at 03:00 am
UTC+11:00Location
Chakola- Kangaroo Valley | Kangaroo Valley, NS
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A residential, face to face, fully catered, camping intensive held at Chakola Wildlife Refuge - Kangaroo Valey, Southern NSWWe welcome back Animas Valley Institute guides DougVan Houten and Jules Howatt to Australia for this program.
WE LIVE IN A PIVOTAL MOMENT ON EARTH, a time of immense challenge and profound uncertainty, in which this precious world, with its endangered creatures and imperiled ecosystems, hangs by a precariously thin thread. This is a time of both a great unraveling and a great turning, a time when humanity has entered a collective dark night — perhaps a necessary one. And yet, this moment is not only about collapse. It is a summons - a mythic invitation to return to the body as a sacred vessel of memory, movement, and metamorphosis. A call to embrace our full participation in what Thomas Berry has called, “the Dream of the Earth”.
The body of the world, alive with sorrow, trembles beneath us: countless species vanish, waters rise like ancestral memory, forests burn like funeral pyres. This trembling is not separate from us — we are part of Earth’s body dreaming itself awake. Grief pulses through our veins, nests in our bones, and aches in the hollows of our bellies. We carry collapsing ecosystems on our shoulders, the silence of lost birdsong tucked beneath our ribs. To be alive now — truly alive — is to feel the slow, holy exhale of a dying world, and to let it move us.
At such an hour, we are called to walk directly into the fire, to be transfigured and transformed as we behold the breath-taking beauty of the world while fully feeling its pain, yielding to what visions emerge as prayers in the dark.
Chakola is a experiential leisure centre set in a 32ha wildlife refuge and conservation area in Kangaroo Valley, NSW
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Where is it happening?
Chakola- Kangaroo Valley, 230B Mount Scanzi Rd, Kangaroo Valley NSW 2577, Australia, Kangaroo ValleyEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
