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School of Sankalpa
A living school of consciousness, perception, and embodied inquiry
A space for those drawn to explore the deeper questions of human experience through contemplation, direct experience, discernment, and a willingness to stay present with what remains unknown.
The map may change. The inquiry continues.
Welcome. I’m Tanis.
I offer spaces for sincere inquiry, quiet recognition, and embodied practice—where experience can be encountered deeply, questioned honestly, discerned carefully, and gradually integrated into the way we live.
For more than twenty years, my work has been an exploration of consciousness and the inner life.
Yoga Nidra became one of my primary maps for that exploration. I studied it, practiced it, taught it, and refined the art of guiding it deeply. Eventually, that particular investigation reached a place of completion.
The questions did not. The inquiry continued.
My work now reaches beyond any single practice or spiritual framework. Through meditation, Sankalpa, contemplative inquiry, shared field, retreat, sacred place, and the ordinary experiences of being human, I continue to follow the questions that remain alive.
What is consciousness?
What can direct experience actually tell us about reality?
How do we distinguish an experience from the interpretation we place upon it?
Can the sacred be encountered without immediately defining what it is?
What happens to spiritual knowing when the maps through which we once understood it begin to change?
What becomes possible when we are willing to stay with mystery without rushing to resolve it?
This is where your inner knowing is honoured, your desire becomes sacred, and your life becomes the path.
A School Built Around Living Inquiry
The School of Sankalpa is home to this evolving body of work.
Some of what lives here is the culmination of decades of study, practice, teaching, and lived experience. Some is still unfolding.
Here you’ll find developed bodies of work in Yoga Nidra and Sankalpa alongside meditation, contemplative exploration, retreats, shared inquiry, and emerging explorations of consciousness, perception, direct experience, and the sacred.
The School is a place to enter experience more deeply. To examine the maps through which we understand ourselves and reality. To become more discerning about what we believe, how those beliefs have formed, and how they shape what we perceive.
It is also a place for mystery—for experiences we may deeply encounter without immediately knowing what they mean.
The inquiry is spiritual. The laboratory is human life.
Explore the Work
The work within School of Sankalpa has developed across different periods of my own inquiry. Some offerings are alive and unfolding now, while others hold bodies of work developed through many years of study, practice, direct experience, and teaching. You can enter wherever you feel most drawn.
Current Offerings
This is where you’ll find the work I am actively exploring and facilitating now, including live gatherings, meditation, shared field practice, and other spaces emerging from my current inquiry into consciousness, perception, direct experience, and the sacred.
Templed Retreats
Templed is a retreat experience I co-facilitate with Joanna Haines, created in relationship with the particular landscape and people who gather. Through contemplative and embodied practice, meditation, intentional walking, silence, conversation, nature, and rest, we explore presence, right relationship, and our relationship with what we understand as sacred.
Our next Templed retreat will take place at 42 Acres in Somerset, England, June 4–10, 2027.
Courses
Explore self-paced courses developed through years of study, contemplation, direct experience, and teaching. Here you’ll find A Path to Sankalpa, alongside the Yoga Nidra teachings and courses that grew from more than twenty years devoted to that particular map of consciousness.
Some of these courses represent work that feels complete in its development, while others sit closer to questions that continue to evolve. Together, they form part of the larger body of inquiry that has shaped School of Sankalpa.
Free Recordings
A collection of freely available Yoga Nidra practices recorded across many years of my teaching and exploration. The library includes practices created during different periods of my relationship with Yoga Nidra, so you may notice my language, understanding, and way of guiding evolve throughout the collection.
These recordings remain available as a resource for rest, practice, and your own exploration of inner experience.
Your Life Becomes the Path
Extraordinary experiences can open something in us, and then we return to ordinary life. What we perceive to be true shapes what we believe, and those beliefs influence how we understand ourselves, one another, and the world. Inevitably, they also participate in how we live.
This is what makes perception itself so worthy of inquiry. We can begin to look more carefully at what we are actually experiencing and the meaning we give to those experiences. We can become curious about the assumptions shaping our interpretations and the spiritual, cultural, psychological, or philosophical maps we have inherited and learned to see reality through. And when those maps begin to change, we have an opportunity to notice what else changes with them.
Sometimes transformation begins through a change in perception. When the way we see changes, the way we understand ourselves, relate to others, make choices, and participate in life can change with it.
“I cannot speak highly enough of my experience training with the School of Sankalpa. The wisdom, guidance and kindness of Tanis, Kristen and Catherine provide the perfect container for growing as a teacher and practitioner of Yoga Nidra. I’ve come away from this training feeling embodied and expanded, and am so thankful I made the choice to explore the practice of Yoga Nidra with the SOS. I cannot wait for the modules and offerings that are yet to come. All love and gratitude.
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“I approached this training with no expectations, in the best possible way, but with a deep knowing and faith that I needed to be there. Far more than a teacher training, this experience was profoundly transformative and liberating for me in so many ways. The space that was created and held by all was safe and sacred, the knowledge and wisdom that was shared was clear, well presented and still had a spark of magic to it, the experience of immersing myself along with fellow students was incredible. If your heart has guided you towards this training, then trust it, take the leap, and surrender yourself to the timeless experience that learning with Tanis, Heather and the entire faculty provides. Deepest gratitude for this experience, something I will never forget and that marks a pivotal time in my life. ”