About the School of Sankalpa

A Living School for the Questions Beneath How We Understand Ourselves and Reality

School of Sankalpa is a school for learning how to remain inside living spiritual inquiry.

It is a place where direct experience, contemplative practice, inherited spiritual maps, discernment, relationship, mystery, and human life can all be brought into conversation.

At its heart are two questions:

What is this?

and

How do we know what is actually true?

These questions invite us to look closely at experience and at the understandings we build around it. They open into inquiry about ourselves, consciousness, God, the sacred, reality, and the spiritual, philosophical, cultural, and religious maps through which human beings have tried to make sense of existence.

Within the School, we explore these territories through contemplation, meditation, embodied practice, conversation, spiritual traditions, sacred geography, and lived experience. We bring careful attention to what we experience, how we interpret it, what shapes that interpretation, and what we come to understand as true.

The Meaning of Sankalpa

The word Sankalpa has been central to my work for many years. It is often translated as intention or resolve, although the territory it opened for me became much larger than either of those words.

My exploration of Sankalpa gradually led me into questions of identity, desire, conditioning, longing, impulse, intuition, and recognition. Where does a desire come from? What is moving beneath it? How do we discern between something shaped by our history and something that feels more deeply known? And what happens when an inner recognition begins to shape the choices through which we live?

Sankalpa became a doorway into these questions. Over time, the School grew beyond the study of any single practice. Something essential within Sankalpa remained: the willingness to look closely at what is moving within us and to allow what we discover to enter the way we actually live.

Where the School Began

The School grew from more than two decades of my study, practice, and teaching of Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra became one of the primary maps through which I explored consciousness. I studied its traditions and structures, practiced extensively, taught and trained others, wrote and recorded practices, and continually refined the precision with which I guided attention through inner experience.

Eventually, that particular investigation reached a natural place of completion.

The map reached completion. The inquiry did not.

What Yoga Nidra gave me continues to inform the way I work. It developed my sensitivity to attention and language, deepened my interest in changing states of consciousness, strengthened my respect for direct experience, and taught me a great deal about what can happen when guidance becomes increasingly precise and when, at times, guidance gives way to silence.

My active inquiry has since moved into other territories, including meditation, Sankalpa, shared field, sacred place, contemplative and spiritual traditions, and larger questions about consciousness, God, truth, and how we know what we know. The School gives these explorations somewhere to be lived, examined, and developed while allowing different frameworks and possibilities to remain in conversation with one another.

A School That Grew Through Relationship

The School itself came into being quietly. A small circle of women encountered the work and felt something meaningful within it. Their participation, encouragement, and belief in what was emerging helped give the School its first form, and what began through those relationships gradually became a place where a larger body of work could live.

That origin remains deeply important to me because relationship continues to be part of how the School develops. Conversation, shared practice, different perspectives, and the questions that arise when people enter an inquiry together can reveal something that solitary exploration cannot always show us. The School continues to be shaped through this meeting of individual experience and shared exploration.

Experience, Truth & Discernment

Direct experience has always been central to my work.

An experience can be profound, transformative, beautiful, unsettling, mystical, or seemingly undeniable. We can know with certainty that something happened within our experience. What that experience ultimately reveals about reality is a different question.

We encounter experience as human beings with histories, nervous systems, language, culture, beliefs, expectations, spiritual frameworks, and existing understandings of reality. These can influence what we perceive and the meaning we give to what we experience.

This is where discernment becomes important.

Within the School, we can allow an experience its full depth and look carefully at what actually happened, what we perceived, what meaning we gave it, and what we have come to understand as true because of it.

Spiritual traditions and other bodies of knowledge offer extraordinary maps for exploration. I am interested in entering those maps deeply and examining the assumptions they contain. What does a particular framework tell us an experience means? What does it assume about consciousness, God, the sacred, or reality? And how do we know whether what it tells us is true?

There is room here for mystery and for the limits of what we currently know. There is also room for the possibility that something may genuinely be knowable.

I want to remain willing to discover that something is true, to discover that something I believed was true may no longer hold, and to say

I don't know when I don't know. Uncertainty itself can remain open to inquiry.

For me, that is part of taking spiritual inquiry seriously.

An Evolving Body of Work

The work within the School exists at different stages of development.

The Yoga Nidra courses and recordings represent a mature body of work developed through more than twenty years of study, practice, and teaching. My work with Sankalpa grew from those foundations and became a wider exploration of identity, desire, recognition, and how something recognized inwardly begins to become lived. My current work continues through meditation, shared field, retreat, sacred place, contemplative inquiry, and the questions I am living now.

There are maps here that I have studied deeply and bodies of work I have developed over many years. There are also questions I am currently investigating and mysteries for which I have no answer. I want the School to be spacious enough for all of these to coexist.

The Invitation

The School of Sankalpa is for those who want to take spiritual life seriously and remain open where certainty has not yet emerged.

It is for people willing to look closely at their own experience, the meanings they have given that experience, and the spiritual, philosophical, cultural, psychological, or religious maps through which they understand themselves and reality.

Perhaps some of those maps have served you deeply. Perhaps some are beginning to open into new questions. Perhaps you have had experiences that changed you and still do not know exactly what they mean.

Here, we can contemplate, practice, question, discern, and seriously examine what we understand to be true. Mystery has a place within that inquiry.

This inquiry is lived. What we understand ourselves to be, what we understand reality to be, how we understand our relationship with God or the sacred, and what we believe we are here for can fundamentally shape our orientation to existence and the way we live.

There may be things we discover with clarity. There may be understandings that change when we look again. And there may be questions we cannot answer.

All of it can be met sincerely.

The inquiry is spiritual. The laboratory is human life.