In-Person and Online: Finding Care in the Overwhelm – Hope as a Counterculture Practice (Weekend Retreat)
with Leslie Booker and Dara Silverman
Saturday and Sunday, November 22nd-23rd, 2025 | 10:00am – 4:00pm ET
In-Person Location: New York Insight at 115 West 29th Street, 12th Floor
As transformative justice leaders Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes have taught us, hope is a discipline and a practice that inspires us to live a whole and integrated life.
In this two-day non-residential retreat, we’ll explore care for self and others as a way through in a tumultuous world, and to cultivate love without spiritually bypassing. To find a way to connect to our own sense of well-being and joy while remaining present to injustice and violence. We’ll explore how to be in community with others exploring the same questions.
Join long-time friends and collaborators Booker and Dara as they weave together somatic (body-based) practices and the heart practices of the Buddha’s Brahmaviharas; expressions of loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Together, we’ll cultivate these capacities and deepen our understanding of how to embody hope, love, and presence.
As a group, we’ll be together in the questions:
- How can we hold hope without bypassing the realities of injustice and hardship?
- How do we stay rooted in joy and well-being while staying fully present to the world around us?
- How can meditation and somatic practice support our engagement with the world (rather than provide an escape?)
Is this for me? If you are interested in learning more about your body, responses under pressure and capacity to be in relationship with other people – this is for you. If you are an organizer, consultant, trainer, coach or activist, this is a place for you to deepen and build your commitment to a just world. This retreat is a place to deepen in your somatic awareness, embodied practice and learnings.
Everyone is welcome to participate, regardless of experience with meditation or body-based practices.
In-Person Registration:
Please register below. If you are able, registering at the “Supporter” level enables others to attend at the “Subsidized” level. Thank you for your generosity! (Please note that the registration price includes a base level of teacher support, and you will have the opportunity to donate more after the program.)
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Online Registration:
If you are registering via a mobile device such as a phone or tablet, you can scroll right and left and up and down within the below form if it is partially obscured or cut off.
CLICK HERE to open the registration form in a new browser window.
Volunteering
All of our programs rely on volunteers to support our teachers and staff with various tasks and responsibilities. Volunteering allows you to participate in our programs at no cost. To inquire about volunteering opportunities, please fill out our inquiry form, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Teacher(s)
Leslie Booker
Booker is a heart – centered, spirit – driven activist and meditation teacher committed to creating a culture of belonging through her teaching and writing. She completed Spirit Rock’s 4 year Retreat Teacher Training in 2020, and shared the practices of yoga and mindfulness with New York City’s most vulnerable populations for over a decade. Booker has co – authored and contributed to several publications including the trauma – informed anthology Practicing Liberation and its accompanying workbook, for folks working towards social justice. She is a co-founder of the Yoga Service Council at Omega Institute and the Meditation Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. In 2020 she was invited to be a Sojourner Truth Leadership Fellow through Auburn Seminary and was voted by her peers as one of the 12 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement.
Booker moved to Philadelphia in August of 2020 to vote in a swing state, and currently serves as the Guiding Teacher of New York Insight.
W | LeslieBooker.com
IG | TheRealBookerProject
FB | LeslieBooker
Dara Silverman
Dara Silverman is a white, queer Jewish consultant, somatic coach, and trainer with 25 years working with organizations and in movements for social, racial, economic, and gender justice. Previously, she was the founding Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the Executive Director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) in New York City.
Dara has had a meditation practice for the past 20 years. She completed the Dedicated Practitioner Program at Spirit Rock in May 2024 and is currently in the Community Dharma Leaders Program at Spirit Rock. She is certified through the International Coaching Federation as a Professional Certified Coach. Dara began studying Somatics in 2011. In 2013, Dara became a certified Somatic Coach and taught at the Strozzi Institute from 2017-2023. She now runs Embodying Racial Justice, which brings embodied practices to multi-racial and white racial justice communities across the US. She lives on Wappinger and Lenape land in Beacon New York, where she grows ten kinds of berries.