Your Unique Gift, Our Shared Purpose: A Retreat for Mutual Soul Support
April 11 and 12 from 9am-6pm // at Journey Space in Glen Echo, MD
Led by Sam Hinds and Sabra Saperstein in collaboration with The Nectary // Register here
Full weekend registration $150
Saturday-only registration $75 SOLD OUT
Your calling may not speak in words. Come learn to listen.
What is this retreat about?
You have a gift only you can give. Not just your job or a goal, but something you were born to do for the world.
We call it your Vow — the unique purpose or calling that lives inside you. You might recognize it as the thing that lights you up, the contribution you feel drawn toward even if you can't fully explain why.
Most of us never get help discovering our Vow. Modern life doesn't offer the kinds of rituals and community experiences — like the vision quests of older cultures — that help people find their deeper direction. That gap is part of why so many people today feel lost, anxious, or like something important is missing.
This two-part retreat is built around supporting your ability to access this gift through relational imaginal practice.
What will we actually do?
Imaginal practice involves getting very quiet, paying attention to images, feelings, and intuitions that arise. This retreat will focus on various approaches to imaginal practice in supportive connection with others.
Day One: Relational Imaginal Practice
The first day is devoted to building the skills and the relational container that make this work possible. Through authentic relating exercises, shared imaginal practice, and Communal Reverie — a facilitated group meditation and sensing practice — we'll slow down together, tune into our inner worlds, and learn to share what we notice. You'll also work in pairs or small groups, practicing how to hold space and witness someone else's inner life without judgment, and how to receive that witnessing yourself.
Day One is complete in itself, and for those interested in just learning the basics of imaginal practice it can be attended without continuing to Day Two. Single-day tickets are now sold out; full weekend still available.
Day Two: Vow Attunement
The second day turns the same practices toward a specific question: what is the unique contribution your soul is here to offer? Drawing on the skills practiced during Day One, we'll use imaginal practice to sense more directly into your Vow — the calling that lives inside you. This is slower, more focused work, done in community with people who are also listening for their own deeper callings.
Why do this with other people?
One key idea behind this retreat is that your purpose doesn't exist in isolation. When everyone starts living from their deeper calling, something remarkable happens — those individual purposes start connecting, like pieces of a larger puzzle. Your gifts start to complement others' gifts. Together, we become capable of building something none of us could build alone.
Who should come?
This retreat is especially powerful if you come with people you already care about — close friends, creative collaborators, or anyone you feel a strong sense of shared direction with. But you're also welcome to come on your own.
You don't need any background in meditation, psychology, or philosophy. You just need genuine curiosity about the deeper currents of your own life and a willingness to be open.
What will you leave with?
After Day One, you might leave with:
A firsthand experience of imaginal practice and what it can open in you
New capacity to be present to another person's inner life — and to let your own depths be witnessed
A felt sense of what it means to slow down and listen from the inside
Connection with a group of people who take this kind of inner work seriously
After Day Two, you might leave with:
A deeper sense of what your Vow — your unique calling — might include
Practices for continuing to attune to Vow on your own
The experience of having your deeper purpose witnessed and reflected back by others
A sense of how your gift might fit within something larger than yourself
About Sam Hinds
Sam is a therapist, poet, and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and group practice. He created Communal Reverie — a core practice used in this retreat — as a way of helping groups access subtle forms of collective wisdom. He's been facilitating this work for years across individual, dyadic, and group settings.
About Sabra Saperstein
Sabra is a cook, coach, ceremonialist and community weaver. She is serving as the Hearth Holder at the Nectary, tending to the meals, the daily rhythms and the internal relational field of the Nectary fellows. She takes great joy in creating a flow of nourishment and beauty, cultivating a foundation of deep resource and coherence in a group field.
Register here.