Refugia retreats began in August 2016. It is a collaborative effort combining environmental Education, spirituality, and self-discovery.

At Refugia Retreats we are committed to creating spaces that foster life. Spaces where individuals are invited into deeper self-discovery, where ideas are fostered and nourished, and where communities are invited to re-envision the world around them.

Using retreats, facilitation, and eco-spiritual direction (coaching), Refugia explores the confluence of social & environmental justice, personal and communal wellbeing, and the interdependent web of life while creating spaces for participants to connect at the personal, community, ecosystem and systems levels.

Refugia envisions a world where every human has access to slowness, depth and connection as a way of life. To learn more about who Refugia has worked with and the types of events that Refugia has coordinated, please see our Calendar page.

 WHY ‘REFUGIA’?

Refugia is a scientific term referring to places that become safe spaces for organisms and life to endure in the midst of upheaval. Author and professor, Kathleen Dean Moore, in her book, Great Tide Rising, describes it like this:

"What the scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation never touched some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer-fern under a rotting log. There, under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest. Between stones in a buried stream, a slick of algae and clustered dragonfly eggs. “Refugia,” they call them: small places of safety where life endures. From the micro-environments of the refugia, mice and toads emerged blinking onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, meadows returned to the mountain. "