From Fire to Light:
Embodied Wisdom Practice for Transforming Trauma:
A hybrid retreat with Drs. Nida Chenagtsang, Joe Loizzo, Diego Hangartner, and Chantelle Brown
April 23 - 26
Pure Land Farms Tuscany, Italy
This in-person/online hybrid retreat explores the uncharted interface between embodied approaches to transforming trauma and the powerful embodied wisdom and healing arts of the Tibetan Tantras. In this intensive weekend, Drs. Nida and Loizzo continue their historic dialogue on “Vajra Therapy,” exploring how the top-down arts of healing imagery and empowering narrative meet the bottom-up arts of self-massage, movement and breath-work to forge a crucible for transforming our habitual trauma body into fully awakened and embodied humanity. They will be joined by Mind & Life researcher Diego Hangartner and decolonizing family-systems therapist Chantelle Brown, who will help unpack how this embodied work transforms the microcosm of the human nervous system, at the same time as it transforms the macrocosm of our social and natural environment.
Our main focus together will be tasting how the flow of inner fire/sublimated energy fuels the clear light of the supreme yoga (atiyoga), the embodied transformational form of emptiness meditation also known as the great communion (chagchen/mahamudra) or great perfection (dzogchen/mahanispanna). We conclude by exploring how the lucid intuition and joyful engagement accessed by this profound practice can be applied through the work of embodied psychotherapy and psychosocial change to transform our individual and collective trauma into the diamond nervous system and rainbow planet prophesied by the Clockwork Kalachakra Tantra.
REGISTRATION
This program is co-sponsored by Nalanda Institute and Sowa Rigpa Institute at Pure Land Farms Tuscany.
For more details and registration for the in-person retreat, please visit the Nalanda Institute.
The online program is hosted by the Sowa Rigpa Institute.
Dr. Nida Chenagtsang | Tibetan Physician and Buddhist Teacher, SRI Founder
Dr. Nida Chenagtsang is a traditional Tibetan physician, author, and lineage holder of the Yuthok Nyingthig, the spiritual heart of Tibetan medicine. Born in northeastern Tibet, he trained at Lhasa Tibetan Medical University, completed his clinical work at the Tibetan Medicine hospitals in Lhasa and Lhoka. Alongside this rigorous medical training, Dr. Nida immersed himself in Vajrayana Buddhism with teachers from all the major Tibetan traditions and spent extensive periods in meditation retreat in Tibet. A pioneering researcher and teacher of Sowa Rigpa, he is the founder and academic director of the Sowa Rigpa Institute and trains students in over forty countries worldwide. His life’s mission is to make the Medicine Buddha’s lineage and the wisdom of Tibetan medicine accessible and alive for people today.
Dr. Joe Loizzo | Psychiatrist and Buddhist Scholar, Nalanda Institute Founder
Joseph (Joe) Loizzo, MD, PhD, is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and Columbia-trained Buddhist scholar with over forty years’ experience studying the beneficial effects of contemplative practices on healing, learning and development. He is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in Integrative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he researches and teaches contemplative self-healing and optimal health. He has taught the philosophy of science and religion, the scientific study of contemplative states, and the Indo-Tibetan mind and health sciences at Columbia University, where he is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Columbia Center for Buddhist Studies.
Diego Hangartner | Mind & Life Researcher
Diego Hangartner, PhD, PCC, is a clinical pharmacologist and certified coach (PCC), using neuroscientific, performance and clinical scientific insights, combining them to strengthen mental fitness and wellbeing. He spent many years at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in India, studying, translating and publishing several Tibetan works, and organized many large events with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Asia, Europe and the USA. Diego was COO of Mind and Life Institute in the US and co-founder and director of Mind and Life Institute in Europe until 2015. Today, he continues his research and teaching with the Max Planck Institute, The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich University of Applied Sciences, and is a lecturer at the Business School of the University St.Gallen.
Chantelle Brown | Decolonizing Family-Systems Therapist
Chantelle Brown, LCSW is meditation teacher, graduate of Nalanda Institute’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Program, and a clinical social worker at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Chantelle received her MSW from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and holds a post-graduate certification in Couple and Family Therapy from the Ackerman Institute for the Family. Chantelle is a cultural worker and relational therapist working at the intersection of social justice and clinical practice utilizing contemplative methods for personal and collective transformation. Her work revolves around her commitment to providing culturally attuned, trauma-informed care to patients and families while advocating for health equity within medical systems. Chantelle has a special interest in taking an integrative approach to addressing intergenerational trauma of those who have survived the Middle Passage and beyond.
