Mountains & Waters Pilgrimage

This program has been cancelled, please consider registering for
”Way of the Bear” which is also based in Yosemite.

“The world around you is sacred. Its appearance is miraculous, as is yours. Though this is clear everywhere, it's clearest in the mountains. It's clearest in the waters.”
– Dogen (13th century Zen philosopher)

Following the course of an ancient river, whose primordial gestures have carved a 3,000 foot deep canyon between even more ancient mountains, we will walk with wonder and intention to remember our own timeless kinship within the more-than-human-world. Immersed in the fields, forests, ravines, lakes, passes and peaks of the “Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne” (ancestral lands of the Miwok Peoples), in the heart of Yosemite, we will backpack in beauty for five days with an intimate group (up to nine participants + three guides).

This pilgrimage will be devoted to reweaving our pan-ancestral threads of kinship and belonging to the Earth and our relations. Present-centered, spacious, silent hiking will be our primary practice as we journey thirty miles through this sacred and majestic landscape.

First called Ahwahnee (“the Creator’s Mouth”), Yosemite Valley was sculpted over eons by the births and deaths of glaciers, and tended for millennia by human hands. It is a place outside of modern time, shaped by deep time. It has been homeland and habitat for countless generations of human and other-than-human folk. And it is an expressive and expansive place to practice clearing away the dust from our senses, cultivating qualities of peace and presence, and feeling our way back into an embodied awareness of the animacy that surrounds us everywhere in this living, breathing world.