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A Retreat for Mindfulness Teachers


Presence-Based Leadership in a Diverse and Ever-Changing World

with Rhonda Magee & Kurt Hoelting

August 27, 2019 - September 2, 2019

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This retreat for mindfulness teachers will offer a time of deep immersion in Alaska’s sublime beauty and solitude, with daily kayaking, shared mindfulness practices, and deep listening, as we explore issues of presence-based leadership in a diverse and ever-changing world. 

As Head Guide with Inside Passages, Kurt Hoelting will lead our outer journey of exploration, through daily kayaking excursions in Alaska’s Inside Passage, and attention to the natural history and wild legacies of the amazing Tongass region. Rhonda Magee will host conversations and lead practices supporting the skills and awareness needed to respond with wisdom -- as practitioners and teachers -- to the resurgence of racism, inequity and institutionalized trauma within our contemporary culture. Our purpose will be to listen deeply and speak from the heart to each other as we explore the implications of these challenges for our work as teachers, in the service of healing for ourselves and those we serve.

Such deep listening and heartful speaking is ultimately an opportunity for healing, and for the cultivation of joy. Our practices of mindful sitting, walking and yoga at the beautiful Keene Channel Lodge, combined with our daily kayaking explorations, will anchor our experience in the body, and in the vastness of Alaska’s primal landscape. Our conversations will help us bridge this practice of presence back into our lives as teachers, and as presence-based leaders. 

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Your Guides

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Kurt Hoelting brings twenty-five years experience as a wilderness guide and meditation teacher. The founder of Inside Passages in 1994, he draws upon a deep local knowledge built over three decades as a commercial salmon and halibut fisherman and wilderness guide in Southeast Alaska.

He is certified as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher through the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, and has taught MBSR to veterans at Seattle’s VA Hospital since 2007. Kurt has an M.Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School, is an ordained UCC minister, and has co-led Inside Passages retreats in Alaska with noted teachers from secular, Buddhist, and Western teaching lineages, including MBSR founder Jon Kabat-Zinn, poet Gary Snyder, Zen teacher Norman Fischer, Fr. Gordon Peerman, and Rabbi Rachel Cowan, among others. He is the author of The Circumference of Home, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in 2011.


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Professor Rhonda V. Magee is a teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction interventions for lawyers, law students, and for minimizing social-identity-based bias. A full-time law professor at the University of San Francisco, she teaches Torts; Race, Law and Policy; and courses in Contemplative and Mindful Law and Law Practice. She is a trained and highly practiced facilitator, with an emphasis on mindful communication. She is a nationally recognized thought and practice leader in the emerging fields of contemplative legal education and law practice, and contemplative teaching in higher education, with an emphasis on mindfulness as a means of teaching for effectiveness in diverse learning communities, developing more just law and policy, and enhancing collaborations for transformative change towards a more equitable world.


Retreat cost: $2450. Some scholarship applications available upon request. Costs include lodging and all meals for five days and six nights at Keene Channel Lodge, all group facilitation, kayak guide services, kayaks and related gear, and transportation by charter vessel to and from the lodge from Petersburg.

Cost does not include airfare to Petersburg, Alaska, from the Lower '48, or any meal or lodging costs in Petersburg before or after the trip. (See details about retreat information & schedule.)

For more information, Contact Us.