Cancer support, healing, and transformation in the safe space of loving community.

This program has been canceled.

Grappling with cancer is one of life’s greatest challenges. We may become quite ill, lose our ability to function normally, or lack sufficient emotional or financial support. We may lose a breast, our uterus, and most certainly our hair—causing us to reflect on how we identify as women, mothers, lovers, or nurturers. However, when gently and skillfully embraced, facing our mortality and the fragility of life can be a vehicle for profound healing and awakening—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Whether it's cervical, ovarian, or breast cancer that radically alters our lives, the question is, how can we navigate this potentially confusing and often heartbreaking terrain in the most empowering way? And how can we face our fears directly so that we may live our lives more fully?

Courageous Women, Fearless Living will provide you with the guidance and companionship you need to assist you on your way. Integrating body, mind, and heart, we will discover ways to meet all of our experience directly and courageously: our pain, fear, sorrow, anger, joy, and gratitude. Led by an extraordinary team of experts in the field, this program will include meditation instruction, healing visualization practice, yoga sessions, whole-being health care and nutrition tips, small group discussions, art therapy, ritual, sacred dance, and community building.

See photo gallery from a previous year, which will perhaps give you the best taste of this program and the diversity of women who attend.

Providing instruction in mindfulness meditation practice, Shambhala senior teacher Judith Lief will show us how to meet and hold all of our experience—moment by moment and breath by breath. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience in meditation and hospice work, Judith will demystify meditation and introduce us to the healing power of presence.

International leader in the field of integrative medicine, Victoria Maizes, MD, will present the latest information regarding nutrition, herbs, supplements, and mind-body interventions in the treatment of cancer. She will also share her expertise in managing the side effects of conventional treatments.

In her commitment to women’s health and well-being, yoga instructor Linda Sparrowe will lead gentle, transformative yoga sessions throughout the retreat. She will show us how to relate to ourselves on and off with mat with kindness, spaciousness, and grace.

Celebrating and appreciating the feminine spirit, Sofia Diaz, a long-time student of sacred movement, will offer South Indian temple dancing performance and will lead us in fully expressing our own feminine beauty and power.

If you have attended one our Courageous Women, Fearless Living in the past and can not attend the full four day retreat, we are also offering a Courageous Women, Fearless Living Reunion Weekend June 25th to 27th.

Acharya Judith Lief is a contemplative hospice pioneer, meditation instructor and former dean of Naropa University. A close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Judith is the author of Making Friends with Death, available from Shambhala Publications.

Victoria Maizes, MD, is executive director of of Dr. Andrew Weil's University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and an associate professor of Medicine, Family and Community Medicine, and Public Health. Dr. Maizes lectures nationally on integrative medicine, women’s health, wellness, aging, communication skills, mind-body medicine, nutrition and herbal medicine.

Linda Sparrowe is a writer, yoga teacher, mentor and practitioner with deep roots in yoga, the Vedas, Sanskrit and women’s health. Editor-in-chief of Natural Solutions magazine (formerly Alternative Medicine), she is also the author of several books, including The Woman’s Book of Yoga and Health and Yoga: A Yoga Journal Book.

Sofia Diaz offers a unique approach to Hatha Yoga, sacred movement and feminine spiritual practice, deriving her style of teaching and body philosophy from the South Indian temple arts. She lectures at Naropa University and teaches throughout North America.

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SCHOLARSHIP INFORMATION

Since living with cancer often involves considerable medical expense, Shambhala Mountain Center would like to offer as many partial scholarships as possible to those in need who would like to attend this program. See below to access the application form.

If you would like to donate to the Courageous Women, Fearless Living Scholarship Fund, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please arrive between 2 and 5pm on Wednesday, June 23. Program ends with lunch at 12:30pm on Sunday, June 27. View Detailed Program Information.

Here is what our past participants in the Courageous Women retreat say about our programs:

"This experience will remain etched in my heart and mind forever. . .as a constant Light guiding compassion from within. Thank you."

"Thank you for sharing this sacred land. You worked so hard to show us love and compassion. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I felt so loved. This may have saved my life – I had lost hope, but now...I want to go on."

"For me, the five days we spent together in this blissful healing environment was wonderful from so many perspectives. I loved the nutritional guidance, the yoga, the meditation, the healing visualizations and most of all the courageous women, so full of life and vigor."

"This program is a life changing experience. Very mindful, very wakeful. Thank you!"

"My sense of humor was back when I realized that staying in a tent [ indoor housing is also available] reminded me of Girl Scout camp, only most of us were over 50 and about half of us were bald. My tentmate and I got in trouble for talking after lights out, and the last time that happened I was 13 years old!"

"I loved it!!! I would come back gladly and gratefully – if you can put up with all of our needs. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

"This program will help me to begin my 'new life' – perfect timing, perfect content. I just finished radiation one month ago and had no idea what to do next! Now I know I am reborn."

"Thank you so much for this retreat. I missed my husband during the entire time, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I feel open and loving and inspired. THANK YOU for your supreme generosity."

"YOU MUST DO THIS AGAIN – It is so needed! The experience of spaciousness and lack of judgment was incredible. I felt I could really be myself."

"It was a powerful experience! Everything was so well integrated and nourishing. The spiritual dance was so beautiful and the following dance was such a release…for 15 minutes every one of us forgot we were dealing with cancer. What a gift. We received so many gifts – art/music, mandalas, yoga, meditation, the Stupa, laughter, tears, love, grace, patience, understanding and Jeremy, Judith, Rinpoche, and Linda AND 80 beautiful women! I am ready to come back next year."