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School of Sankalpa
A living school of contemplative and spiritual inquiry
A space for those drawn to explore the deeper questions of human experience and existence through contemplation, direct experience, discernment, and a willingness to remain with what we do not yet understand.
The map may change. The inquiry continues.
Welcome. I’m Tanis.
For as long as I can remember, there has been a question underneath my life:
What is this?
I have taken that question seriously.
For more than twenty years, it has led me through meditation, spiritual traditions, Yoga Nidra, Sankalpa, contemplation, pilgrimage, direct experience, and some profound encounters with consciousness that have radically challenged what I thought I understood about reality.
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.
Increasingly, I find myself returning to a deceptively simple question:
How do we know what is actually true?
What can direct experience genuinely reveal about reality, and where does interpretation begin? How do we know when a spiritual understanding describes something true rather than simply providing a meaningful way to understand what we have experienced?
These questions open into larger inquiries about consciousness, oneness, God, divinity, Creator and creation, and the frameworks through which human beings have tried to understand what we are and what this is.
The distinction feels consequential because what we understand to be true can fundamentally orient how we understand our existence, our relationship with the divine, and what we believe we are here for.
I don't know where the inquiry will lead.
I am willing to stay with the question.
A School Built Around Living Inquiry
The School is a place to enter experience more deeply. To examine the maps through which we understand ourselves and reality. To ask what our experiences can genuinely reveal, where interpretation begins, and how we know when something we understand to be true is actually true.
There is room here for mystery too. For experiences that are profound, difficult to explain, or capable of disrupting what we thought we knew. We can encounter those experiences fully while remaining careful about what we claim they reveal.
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 the questions I am living and exploring now.
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
What we understand to be true shapes how we orient ourselves to life.
Our experiences contribute to that understanding, as do the meanings we give them and the spiritual, cultural, psychological, philosophical, and religious frameworks through which we interpret them.
Some of those frameworks may have been inherited. Some may have been chosen. Others may have emerged from experiences so profound that they seemed to reveal reality itself.
Looking again can be disruptive.
A change in what we understand to be true can alter how we understand ourselves, consciousness, God or the sacred, spiritual practice, relationship, purpose, and the way we participate in life.
This is why discernment has become such an important part of my work. What did I actually experience? What can the experience itself reveal? What meaning did I give it? What framework shaped that meaning? And how do I know whether what I understand about it is true?
For me, these questions belong within spiritual life.
They are part of taking it seriously, and sincerely.
