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Detailed List of Retreats

Active Hope - Practice For Difficult Times

Teacher: Tsunma Tsondru
Cost: 2 days accommodation + R450 surcharge
Dates: Friday 02 May 2025 - Sunday 04 May 2025

tsunma tsondruHope does not sit on the threadbare couch clutching a lotto ticket, passively waiting for good luck. Hope wields an axe, actively breaking down the door in a crisis. We can’t escape that Earth is in crisis. It’s also ever-more evident that we feel this crisis within ourselves as personal crisis. There is creeping hopelessness, fatalism, anxiety, denial, and numbness - a disengagement from the natural world which sustains us. The inner crisis even has a name now: eco-anxiety. To hear the daily news is to hear the myriad ways in which humanity is sensing and expressing the eco-anxiety.

How to respond to these crises?  Within a framing of Active Hope, the weekend will be spent in group and solo practices from The Work That Reconnects, moving through the spiral of gratefulness, grief, and transformation that will unlock your unexpected resilience and creative power. Hope is waking up to the beauty of life, on whose behalf we can act. As Joanna Macy always says: I am so grateful to be alive at this time of great upheaval, because we are made precisely for these times! Mostly we will practise in silence and as much as possible  outdoors, in contact with nature. The retreat will be held in an atmosphere of silence and introspection.

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Tsunma Tsondru is a nun ordained by Tai Situ Rinpoche in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. She met Buddhism through Louis van Loon at the BRC in the 90's. After working as a lawyer and environmental scientist, she left for Spain for a traditional Kagyu three-and-a-half-year retreat, followed by a second retreat of four years. Returning to Cape Town, she  served on the Board of the Southern African Faith Communities Environmental Institute - a multi-faith NGO - for 6 years and as its Executive Director. She later spent a 10-day intensive retreat with Joanna Macy, engaging with Macy’s “Work That Re-Connects”, which she teaches at the BRC and other places, Her particular interest is deep ecology, eco-philosophy and wilderness work, and the role that spirituality, ethics and connection/interdependence can play in transforming us and our economic and social systems in protection of the Earth.