Wholeness in the Face of Fragmentation
A Global Pilgrimage - Meditation & Dialogue Retreat
Berlin | September 1-7, 2022
In-Person & Online
FOR MORE INFO: evolve-world.org/berlin-retreat
Wholeness in the Face of Fragmentation
A Global Pilgrimage - Meditation & Dialogue Retreat
Berlin | September 1-7, 2022
In-Person & Online
Berlin. For forty years after the Second World War, it was a symbol of division–half belonging to the Soviet sphere and half an island of the West.
Berlin. For the past thirty years, it has become synonymous with wild creativity—an ongoing mix of peoples and ideas birthing new synergies and ways of living.
Could there be a more dynamic place to explore the power of wholeness in the face of division than Berlin?
The sources of fragmentation—war in Europe, ecological catastrophe, social polarization—are many and familiar. So many feel an urgency to act.
How do we respond in a way that doesn’t further division? Can there be a way to respond from the wholeness that underlies everything?
This year’s Global Pilgrimage will take you, live online or on site, to the innovative life hub, moos.space, in Berlin. Together, through meditation and dialogue, you can take part in creating a field of wholeness, a collective heart, a deep solidarity, from which to face fragmentation.
The idea is to have two circles of participants: one will be on the ground at moos.space, an innovative co-living and co-working hub in Berlin, right on Treptower Park, where the Soviet War Memorial stands. The second circle is made of online participants from around the world who will join the meditation and create a global field of attention and intention focused on Berlin. You can join either circle—on site at moos.space or online, wherever you are on this globe. Whether online or on-site in Berlin, you will take participate in creating a field of depth at three different public events in Berlin.
On Site
If you are keen to find a way to respond to the troubles of our times that comes from potential and care, rather than anger and hopelessness, then join us on retreat in Berlin. This experiment in sacred activism will be a living inquiry into how the collective, lived experience of wholeness can open new ways of seeing and responding to the dangers and divisions of our world.
This unique retreat will begin at moos.space, where participants will reside during the retreat. Here, we will take a deep dive into meditation, grounding us in a coherence that is deeper than agreement. After this grounding, we will venture into Berlin—to the Soviet War Memorial and to other places that represent violent divisions—to bring the field of wholeness and spirit of dialogue to these places.
We will be joined and supported by participants from around the world who take part online via Zoom. Together we will inquire into the potential of wholeness in the face of fragmentation. How does the depth of wholeness change how we perceive division? What is before and beyond brokenness that doesn’t deny it? How can we awaken a collective heart that gives us, each and together, more courage to face the darkness and the light? The aim, and hope, is that participants in Berlin will hold the active center of a global mandala that will give rise to a powerful field of wholeness that can transform our perception of and response to the fragmentation of our times.
Online
In the face of overwhelming world events, it is all too easy to feel powerless. What can one do that is meaningful? Joining together in creating a field of depth and love while holding the reality of the pain and violence of the world that we are part of is a powerful act. This is not a psychological, therapeutic process of individual healing, but a collective response of the human heart that arises from our nonseparation and builds soul strength.
Over the past two years, we have opened our retreats to online participants through Zoom. The results have been astonishing. Technology can connect our hearts profoundly and powerfully. For this year’s Berlin retreat, we are taking a step into sacred activism—bringing meditation and dialogue into the streets. Your presence, as an online participant, will give strength to the field we create together.
So, you are warmly invited to join us in this retreat experiment. We will bring you with us via Zoom to our meditation space in moos, Berlin, as well as to the places in Berlin that we will go to in the spirit of wholeness. You will be with us, expanding the field globally, as we explore how to bring that field of heart connection to face very real divisions tearing the social fabric.
You are invited, alone or with friends, to create your own retreat space in your home or in a beautiful spot that you choose. We will create a 24-hour meditation space that you can enter at any time. You can join us in meditating for one, three, six…or as many hours as you like via live feed from Berlin. We offer this to you on a donation basis.
Our hope is to create a living mandala centered on Berlin, the city of division and creative emergence, to bring a new potential, care, and solidarity in response to the deep troubles of our times.
Our Guides
Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Debold are responsible for guiding the retreat. They each have over thirty years experience as meditators, and have been supporting others in developing their capacity to meditate for two decades. They are also pioneers of emergent dialogue, a practice that gives rise to emergent interbeing, where human beings experience and engage from the intelligence of the shared space that is ever-present between us.
Elizabeth is a developmental psychologist with a life-long passion for evolving how we are men and women. Her experience is that creating living, intersubjective spaces through dialogue provides a new way of understanding ourselves as embodied human beings.
An author, writer, and editor of evolve Magazin, her work explores the intersection of cultural and gender development. Along with Thomas Steininger, she guides the development of evolve World, which is both the home of evolve Magazin’s cultural impulses and a community of practice. In 2016, she founded One World in Dialogue, which creates opportunities for global ritual as a form of sacred activism.
Thomas is a philosopher, practitioner, and spiritual mentor, who has immersed himself in the practice of meditation and in exploring the evolution of human consciousness, particularly the current transition from a hyperindividual “I” culture to a co-conscious “We.” An authority on cultural evolution and the different spiritual and religious currents that have formed our postmodern world, he brings this perspective to his position as publisher of evolve Magazin, the leading German magazine on the future of consciousness and culture. He is also the voice of Radio evolve, a weekly webcast. He has co-founded and developed a process of emergent dialogue, an advanced practice in conscious communication.
Sources of Wisdom and Depth
During the retreat, we bring together the teachings of women and men, sages and saints, poets and composers to inspire us to abandon ourselves to the depth of meditation so that we can embody the wholeness of nonseparation. Readings, and sometimes music, chosen for each day as appropriate to the progress of the retreat, bring our own awareness into resonance with the consciousness of these extraordinary humans. Each retreat is different, tailored to the situation as it arises. The themes of the retreat are developed in this way, taken in deeply during meditation, and then explored together through emergent dialogue practice.
Pictured here are voices we have worked with in past retreats: St. Francis, J. Krishnamurti, St. Clare, Vimala Thakar, Lao Tzu, and Thich Nhat Hanh.
