Refugia The Retreat: Nourish Your Life at the Roots

July 19-25, in beautiful Boulder, Utah

With Erin and Carl

The Invitation

Step out of the ordinary and into the magic of a full week of somatic and soulful practices in nourishing company on powerful, sacred land.

We'll spend the week nourishing your life at the roots, with a spacious schedule that will include practices of presence, practices of depth and soul, and practices of reconnection and remembrance.

Refugia the Retreat is an invitation to reconnect with self, soul, kindred humans, and the living Earth.

Immerse yourself in the healing waters of deep learning, embodied practice, and soulful community.

Through many doorways, we'll invite you to come home to the unforgotten wisdom at your core, in a spacious, timeless, magical place where the land itself is our most powerful teacher and inspiration.

We warmly invite you to take a potent pause. Slip out of the busyness of everyday life and experience the expansion of time and self. Slow down to the speed of life and deeply restore yourself, so you can return to your life anew, inspired, refreshed, and deeply resourced.

Steep yourself in the healing waters of primary satisfactions, enlivening learning, embodied practice, inspiring wild lands, and soulful community.

Click here to complete your application.

From Karen Maezen Miller:

"What do you practice? Whatever you practice, you'll get very good at. Some people become more fearful or cynical; some more arrogant or vain; some greedy, some needy; some combative or closed-minded. That's what they practice. And then there are a few who grow as solid as a mountain and as wide-open as the sky."

Want to join Refugia: The Retreat? We're delighted.

Please click below to fill out a simple application.

Apply Here!

We will begin mid-afternoon on July 19th with a gathering on the Boulder Mountain Lodge grounds at 4:00pm.

We will conclude by noon on the 25th with our final gathering on the Lodge grounds.

You're welcome to arrive early and/or stay later to extend your time in this gorgeous place.

refugia practices of presence, practices of depth and soul, practices of reconnection and remembrance

We couldn't be more excited to invite you to one of our most favorite places on Planet Earth!

Boulder, Utah, is a very special little town on the edge of a vast wilderness, protected as Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.

We've been spending time here whenever we can over the past few decades.
Whenever friends or loved ones come to visit, we love to introduce them to this magnificent place, as if introducing them to a beloved friend. We are sooooo excited to host a retreat here and to invite you to join us!

For our retreat gatherings, we'll be meeting on the beautiful grounds of the world-famous farm-to-table restaurant and beautiful lodge, Hell's Backbone Grill and Boulder Mountain Lodge.

While we'll be gathering each day to practice together, we're keeping the schedule spacious, so you have plenty of time to choose your own adventure in this gorgeous place and fall in love with this vast and enspirited land. You'll be nourished and inspired by our group practices and have plenty of time to do your own thing.

You might like to spend your free time hiking in any one of many extraordinary nearby locations, or take one of many nearby spectacular scenic drives, or rest and enjoy simply being. If you're into fishing, there are several places to catch local trout. The local landscape includes gorgeous agricultural properties, vast desert lands, alpine lakes, aspen forests, sagebrush and juniper trees, magical rivers and creeks, spectacular slickrock formations, big skies, the energetic traces of the ancestral Puebloan people who inhabited this land for generations, and a museum where you can explore their history. We have many recommendations for beautiful places to explore!

As a group, we'll take a few field trips to special sacred places we can't wait to share with you. (We'll plan our field trips based on the weather, so timing is TBD.)

You have several options for how to organize your retreat experience.

The cost for the 6-night 7-day retreat with Carl & Erin is $695.

This does not include travel, food, or lodging.

For many years, as a family, we've enjoyed the combination of primitive camping on local BLM lands, bringing some of our own food, and dining at the fantastic Hell's Backbone Grill.

You can choose to book a room at the lovely Boulder Mountain Lodge, where all rooms will be reserved for Refugia Retreat participants. (This is an easy option that allows you to walk out your door and join us for practice!) You could also choose to camp and drive back to the lodge to join us for practice.

You could bring your own food, dine locally at HBG, Little Bone Food Truck, and other local establishments, or you can weave any combination of these options.

Here is some information that can help inform your choose-your-own-adventure retreat choices:

Where to Stay

Book a room at the Boulder Mountain Lodge! There are a variety of room types (ranging from a sweet Essential Queen room to Luxury Suites with a full kitchen and living room). You can use this booking link to make a reservation. (Only for Refugia Retreat participants.)

During this week, the lodge is reserved for Refugia Retreat participants. Use this link to book your room.

If you'd rather camp, there are a number of designated campgrounds in the area. You could bring a tent or rent a van or camper. None of these campsites takes reservations as they are all on a first-come basis:

Deer Creek Campground - 6 miles from the Lodge down the Burr Trail. Vault toilet, but no potable water or dumpsters.

Calf Creek Campground - 8 miles from the Lodge on Hwy 12. Toilet, potable water, no dumpsters.

If you do not need facilities at a designated campground, you are welcome to camp anywhere on the Monument or in the Dixie National Forest.

You're welcome to bring beloveds with you to stay, even if they won't be participating in the retreat.

There are also a few local Airbnbs (please check the distance from the Airbnb to Hell's Backbone where we'll be meeting before you book) and a few little motels.

Feel free to reach out to the folks at Boulder Mountain Lodge, and they will be happy to provide recommendations! Contact HBG and BML with any questions about planning your visit: 435-335-7460 / info@boulder-utah.com

Where to Eat

Hell's Backbone Grill - This charming James Beard-nominated restaurant is open for dinner from 4-9 pm Thursdays - Mondays (closed Tuesdays & Wednesdays). Reservations are recommended but not required.

Little Bone Food Truck - The newest addition to the HBG world! Little Bone is open 7 days a week for breakfast & lunch, and for dinners on Tuesdays & Wednesdays when the restaurant is closed. No reservations needed.

There are a few other dining options in town (Burr Trail Grill, Small Canyon Kitchen food truck), though most primarily offer lunch.

If you make a trip to the nearby town of Escalante, we recommend a meal at the Escalante Outfitters! Great pizza, sandwiches, and salads, and an all-around good business.

Though service is often slow, we love visiting the Kiva Koffeehouse. A truly unique and beautiful place!!

Groceries - Boulder doesn't have a proper grocery store in town, so please be sure to bring essentials or favorite treats with you. Boulder does have a mini-mart (Hills & Hollows) that has basics and snacks. They do a nice job (often with good organic options and occasionally local produce), but we wouldn't necessarily count on them to have specific items.

Getting There

From Salt Lake City, Boulder is approximately a 4-hour drive. The drive will take you through some truly breathtaking, spectacular scenery, and we recommend leaving extra time to pull over, take in the view, and snap some photos as you stare in awe.

What to Bring

Boulder is remote! The nearest medical clinic, pharmacy, and ATM are 40 minutes away in Escalante. But if you bring your essentials, you should be able to find most everything else you need nearby. Make sure to bring your swimsuit (the Lodge has a hot tub and there are many places close by for a dip in the creek), rain gear (could be monsoon season!), a good sunhat, sunscreen, and layers. And binoculars for birders!

We invite you to wear comfy clothes for movement practice and whatever hiking you might like to do. It will likely be hot during the day and can get cool at night, with possible summer rain and wind. Be prepared.
We invite you to bring a journal and pen, a water bottle, and whatever else you need to be comfortable.

We are so excited to see you in Boulder!!

Our Approach

We love to create experiences that are invitational, respectful, nourishing, and grounded in the sacred ordinary. This week of retreat is guided by mindfulness, embodied presence, compassion, and reverence for nature and wilderness, including the human soul.

Please know that neither the facilitators nor other participants will attempt to fix you, force you, or advise you. Your humanity and uniqueness are welcomed and respected. Participants are encouraged to engage in the retreat in ways that feel supportive, and you need not participate in every aspect we offer.

Scholarships & Community Support

We believe access to practices and retreats like this truly matters. If you feel called to attend this retreat but are experiencing financial hardship, we are happy to offer a limited number of scholarship-supported spaces. These are available by request and are intended to support those who would otherwise be unable to participate. Camping offers an inexpensive/free way to organize your lodging. If you need a discounted rate for the retreat fee, please reach out to us.

We gratefully welcome contributions to our scholarship fund from those who feel moved to support our work. Donations are used to offset retreat fees for scholarship recipients. Thanks so much for helping to make these experiences more accessible to members of our wider community!

If you’d like to inquire about a scholarship or contribute to the scholarship fund, please contact us.

Come be healed by the land, and remember your own embodied presence as a healing force in the world.

It's going to be a potent, powerfully nourishing, kindhearted retreat that offers spaciousness, beauty, and deeply soulful support to nourish your life at the roots.

Our practice will be dedicated to the well-being of all Life, including you.

Want to read more about the name Refugia?
Click here.

We will be practicing what our friend Francis Weller describes as "primary satisfactions."

He describes primary satisfactions as the ways humans have been nourished over the last 50,000 years on the planet. Our DNA is made to be satisfied by things like sitting by a fire, eating meals together, making music or art, foraging, engaging in rituals, undertaking rites of passage, gazing at a starry sky, admiring light on water, singing, dancing, grieving and praising together…

Many of these primary satisfactions are no longer so present in the day-to-day life of modern humans, so we end up turning toward secondary satisfactions. These secondary satisfactions can include a whole range of distractions and addictions and tend to be oriented toward seeking status, wealth, power, influence, and so on. Secondary satisfactions are rooted in a craving that can rarely be slaked. When we are searching for secondary satisfactions, we may distract ourselves through excessive screen time, doomscrolling, hours on social media, tuning in to too much news, competing with others, or compulsive busyness. Through these channels, the quality of our lives and our souls is diminished. However much we get, we are left unsatisfied, and rarely carry a felt sense of “enough.” We all know that slightly sick feeling of having eaten junk food, yet still being hungry for something real and nourishing.

For us, this distinction between primary and secondary satisfactions is helpful as we adjust our inner compasses to turn more in the direction of primary satisfactions, and allow ourselves to deeply receive the nourishment they offer.

Appreciating things like a walk in the canyon, sharing a meal with beloved others, making incense offerings with prayers rising on the smoke from our porch, savoring a good poem, sitting with a coffee as the sun rises, reveling in birdsong, listening well to a friend sharing their heart, doing movement practices, sitting in a soulful circle with others, or participating in beautiful rituals to nourish the sacred and offer gratitude to the unseen world behind this one.

Tools and practices we'll engage in during retreat: