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There are forces within us that do not dissolve through suppression, yet are ripe for transformation.
The Heart of Vajra-Yoginī retreat approaches these energies directly through the disciplined frameworks of Śākta Tantra and Vajrayāna Buddhism. Rather than pathologizing passion or attempting to eliminate it, we will examine how Tantric traditions refine and transmute affective intensity into clarity, devotion, and awakened awareness.
Vajrayoginī stands at the threshold of desire, obsession, longing, and craving. She signals an intensity that can either contract the heart – or awaken it.
She does not ask us to repress passion. She reveals how passion itself can be transmuted.
Across seven days, we will engage primary texts, structured mantra practice, visualization, and embodied ritual within a coherent philosophical arc.
The focus is neither therapeutic catharsis nor abstract scholarship, but the cultivation of a dynamic relationship with transformative energy itself.
Vajrayoginī functions not merely as an object of worship, but as a ritual and aesthetic technology — a deliberately constructed field of practice through which contraction can be metabolized.
This immersion is especially suited for:
Who This Retreat Is For
Prior familiarity with mantra or meditation is helpful, but no prior study of Sanskrit or the texts we'll be exploring is required.
What Participants Say About Sādhana School Programming
"[This is for] anybody who has an interest in expanding their awareness with a really, really experienced teacher..."
“I can be in a relationship with this life and its source in a profound intimate way.”
- Ali
- Jonah
The Yoginī and the Alchemy of Rasa
In Indian aesthetic theory, powerful emotions can either bind us or liberate us. When contracted around “me” and “mine,” they harden into craving. When entered consciously, they become rasa — distilled, luminous, expansive.
The Yoginīs mark a kind of sacred performance of this transformation.
Their iconography is often fierce, with various yoginīs appearing with the heads of animals – signifying their wild emotional nature. In Vajrayoginī's symbolism, she holds a skull-cup, drinking the poisons that are offered to her as nectar. She does not eliminate intensity — she refines it. She metabolizes it. She teaches us how to remain present inside energies that once drove us toward grasping.
In this way, devotion to the Yoginī becomes dynamic: not worship from a distance, but participation in a transmutative drama.
Through mantra, visualization, meditation, and ritual gesture, we begin to experience how the very energies of contraction can open into a more expansive understanding.
Who Is Vajra-Yoginī?
Vajrayoginī is a fierce embodiment of awakened wisdom — a ḍākinī whose blazing presence transforms desire into liberation. Revered at Sankhu as Bajrayoginī or Ugra-Tārā, she stands at the meeting point of tantric Buddhism and the wider Śākta current of sacred feminine power. Far from rejecting passion or craving, her path works directly with them. She is considered especially suited to those with strong desires because she does not demand repression; instead, she reveals how the very energies that bind us — attachment, addiction, longing — can be transmuted into clarity, compassion, and blissful awareness. In her iconography she drinks from the skull-cup, symbolizing the alchemical transformation of poison into nectar; nothing is wasted, everything becomes fuel for awakening.
To approach Vajrayoginī is therefore to approach radical transformation. She is both deity and method: an external form of devotion and an internal yogic process. Pilgrims who climb the stone steps to one of her hilltop temples in Kathmandu, Nepal enact physically what her practice enacts spiritually — effort, surrender, ascent. Her mantra and rituals are understood to plant seeds of direct realization, and traditional aspirations pray not merely for blessings in this life, but for rebirth in her pure realm and unbroken connection to her wisdom.
Vajrayoginī’s fierce compassion cuts through illusion with uncompromising precision, yet her ultimate gesture is intimate: she draws the practitioner into her own awakened heart, where craving becomes energy, fear becomes courage, and ordinary life becomes the path itself.
In this Retreat, We Will:
Textual Grounding
This retreat is philosophically anchored without being overly academic. Material will be presented clearly, without flattening its depth.
We will draw from:
Together, these sources illuminate:
Practice Arc
Across seven days, we will move through an emergent sequence:
Daily rhythm includes:
Jacob Kyle
Jacob Kyle is a meditation teacher, writer, philosophy educator, and the Founding Director of Embodied Philosophy. His guiding mission is to re-imagine the modern function of the yoga teacher in alignment with the teachings, texts, and traditions of yoga's profound history. He believes that by building a network of teachers who share a commitment to disseminating the deeper teachings and practices of yoga, we can build a world based on wisdom rather than ideology and divisiveness.
Jacob is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, researching Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Language and Meditation with advisor Diwakar Acharya. He holds an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions from Oxford (2023), an MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research (2017), and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (2007). Jacob is a passionate advocate of Kashmir Śaivism and a devoted practitioner of the Śaiva-Śākta Darśana.
Teacher & Facilitator
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7 Days of Contemplative Sādhana
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Slack community + reflection
7 Days of Contemplative Sādhana
Live Virtual Sessions Daily
Lifetime access to recordings + guided practices.
Slack community + reflection
7 Days of Contemplative Sādhana in Taos, New Mexico, USA
Lodging, meals, and retreat fee included
Lifetime access to recordings + guided practices.
Limited space available!
Attend in-person in Taos, New Mexico
Check-in: July 11, 3:00pm MT
Check-out: July 17, 11:00am MT
Accomodations:
Location: Hyperslow Retreat Center at The Historic San Geronimo Lodge
A $500 deposit secures your spot, and is fully refundable. Upon deposit, we will contact you to make your full reservation.
No. Formal Vajrayoginī initiation (abhiṣeka) belongs within a specific initiatory context, lineage stream, and sequence of practice. In traditional Vajrayāna settings, such empowerments presuppose vows, teacher-student commitments, and a structured progression through preliminary practices. Those conditions matter, and we are not attempting to replicate or substitute for them in this retreat. Our intention is different. Rather than initiating participants into a particular lineage transmission, we will work with the teachings, principles, ritual structures, and symbolism found in Yoginī literature from the perspective of non-dual Tantric sādhana. This includes philosophical study, contemplative visualization, mantra at an appropriate level, and engagement with the aesthetic and transformative dimensions of the Yoginīs as they appear across Śākta and Vajrayāna sources. The retreat is therefore educational and contemplative, not initiatory. It is designed to deepen understanding and embodied engagement with the Yoginī’s symbolic and soteriological framework, while respecting the integrity of formal lineage-based empowerment traditions.
The practices are proportional to the context. This is a structured retreat environment, not an initiatory or high-voltage tantric intensive. The depth we pursue is informed by the safety, integrity, and pacing of the container. While we will be working conceptually and contemplatively with powerful themes — passion, craving, identity, contraction, ego-structures — the methods are scaled to support clarity rather than overwhelm. Intensity in this retreat is not theatrical or destabilizing. It arises from disciplined attention. Participants will be encouraged to remain responsive to their own constitution. A trauma-sensitive approach is foundational: no one is asked to override their nervous system, force catharsis, or push beyond what feels steady and grounded. Practices are invitational, not coercive. You will always have agency in how deeply you engage. Working with passion and craving here means observing, refining, and re-patterning attention — not reenacting psychological extremes. Dissolving "contractions," as discussed in the Tantric context, refers to loosening rigid identification, not erasing functional selfhood. The emphasis is on integration and expansion, not shock or collapse. The retreat is designed to be serious, but stable. Transformative, but contained.
Both formats offer full access to the teachings, guided practices, and textual exploration. The philosophical arc, mantra instruction, and contemplative structure are the same.
The difference lies in the field of practice.
The in-person retreat allows for immersion in a shared physical container. Practicing together — chanting in the same room, moving through ritual space collectively, holding silence in proximity — creates a density of attention that is difficult to replicate online. Subtle elements such as pacing, gesture, breath rhythm, and group resonance are felt somatically. The maṇḍala becomes not only conceptual but spatial. For some practitioners, that shared field supports greater focus and depth.
The virtual experience offers a different kind of benefit: integration within your existing life context. You engage the material in your own space, at your own rhythm, without travel demands. For many, this allows for steadier nervous system regulation and immediate application of the teachings into daily practice. The online format also makes the retreat accessible to those who cannot attend in person while still maintaining coherence and rigor.
In short, the in-person retreat emphasizes immersive collective field; the virtual retreat emphasizes accessibility and integration. Both are designed to be complete and meaningful pathways into the material.
The in-person retreat follows a steady, spacious rhythm designed to support depth without overwhelm.
Each day includes:
Two formal teaching sessions (approximately 2.5–3 hours each)
These sessions combine textual study, guided meditation, mantra practice, visualization, and structured integration. Mornings typically emphasize conceptual orientation and core practice instruction; afternoons deepen and refine what has been introduced.
Shared meals daily
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included. Meals function not only as nourishment but as grounding and informal integration time.
Generous self-guided practice periods
Between sessions, you will have dedicated space for personal reflection, journaling, walking, rest, or privately practicing the techniques introduced that day. This time is essential — the retreat is not designed as continuous programming, but as an alternation between structured transmission and embodied assimilation.
There may also be optional morning silence, informal evening sitting, or lightly guided integration practices depending on the day’s arc.
The overall cadence is intentional: disciplined sessions balanced by spaciousness. The goal is sustained depth across seven days, not intensity through compression.
FAQs
This retreat is an invitation to enter that field consciously, to transmute passion into clarity, and to discover that what once drove contraction can become the very radiance of liberation.
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