Beyond Words

Poetry and Music

as Passion, Prayer and Practice

with Kim Rosen and Jami Sieber

9-day retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii

Every experience in the human spectrum is a doorway to awakening. Inside each moment, from the blackest to the brightest, there waits the song, the poem, the Great Silence we have sought.

For over 20 years now, Kim has gathered circles of kindred hearts to discover the essence of True Nature in one of the most exquisitely beautiful and fierce landscapes on the planet. In this retreat she is joined by musical alchemist, Jami Sieber. The vortex created by Jami's cello and chant in oceanic resonance with the poems, songs and silence emerging from the circle is a constantly evolving miracle. A font of creative outpouring erupts. Poetry and song as well as deep personal inquiry and healing stream between the notes of wind, rock, dove cry and cello.

In these retreats we immerse ourselves in intimate meeting with the poems we love and the poems we write. They become our teachers, healers and companions. We invite the magic that unfurls as poetry intertwines with music. In addition there are sessions of breathwork, chanting and movement. We enter silence together and alone. The retreat culminates in a "mysterium": a exploration beyond ordinary words that spans poetry and music, night and day, sound and silence, waking and sleeping, aloneness and communion...

"I feel I've shifted to a deeper, more 'me' place, and the shift feels permanent. I will never forget being held in my friend's arms as I let the poem take me into the grief I've never been able to allow before. I carry the poems I learned in my heart and even more, the freedom I've discovered by letting them be my teachers."

-Lyn, a university professor from Vancouver

Information and Registration

On the Big Island of Hawaii, creation and destruction are a constant red glow on the horizon from the Volcano. The spinner dolphins leap from the sea and the mountains are threaded with the burial caves of the ancestors. "Hale Kai", a Balinese temple built on sacred ground a five minute walk from Ho'okena Bay where the spinner dolphins play and whales sing their wisdom, will be the home of these retreats. In both retreats, our days are planned to allow plenty of free time for hiking, exploring and swimming with the dolphins and the miraculous tropical fish which abound.

2010: March 9th-March 18th

2011: February 11th-February 20th

Download a pdf of this year's flyer.

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Speaking the Heart

Poetry as Passion, Prayer and Practice

Workshops & Classes with Kim Rosen

Poetry is the language of the soul. It comes from beyond the mind, affecting your body, your feelings and the very biochemistry of your awareness. True poetry can be a force of awakening. It speaks heart to heart and reinvents the mind on the way. When you enter the world of a poem, when you take it into your body and heart, it becomes an inner teacher that can lead you beyond the boundaries of the familiar into the undiscovered "Self within self", as the poet Lalla says. When you speak a poem aloud, you receive its medicine and can offer it to others, thus becoming a voice for truth and healing.

These retreats and workshops will focus on both writing new poems and taking the poems we love to heart so they become teachers that live within. Through an alchemy of music and spoken poems, an environment of authenticity and sacredness is fostered in which the true voice of each can emerge through spontaneous writing, movement, silence and the art of speaking poetry aloud. Prior knowledge of poetry or writing is not necessary (nor is the capacity to memorize anything!)

"Not only did the workshop heal something deep inside of me but my own poetic voice is changing as I discover the ability (me whose brain is like a sieve!) to learn poems - my own and others' - by heart. I'm paying more attention to the rhythm and cadence of my language, and hat comes out is blessedly different and surprising."

- Patti, a poet from Santa Cruz

Dates and Information

"Learning my poem by heart pressed me up against all sorts of limitations I had set for myself about what I was allowed to say and how much I was allowed to feel, not to mention what my memory could hold! Now it is inside me, and I am a greater, truer, more human being because of it."

Monnie, a nurse from Berkeley

Please see Calendar and contact Kim for information on dates and costs.

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The Poetry "Dive"

Join us in an ocean of sound, song, poetry and chant. In this participatory evening, waves of music and poetry work their magic to melt defenses and open consciousness to its own source. On the way, we sound, speak poetry, journey, chant, drum, write and dance as the currents of the moment beckon us.

Please see Calendar and contact Kim for information on dates and costs.

"Kim Rosen has succeeding in combining words, melody, drama and spiritual message into a delivery that is quite remarkable. On behalf of myself, Emmanuel and all those fortunate enough to hear, we thank you."

Pat Rodegast, author of Emmanuel's Books I, II, and III

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Invisible Poets Society

A Gathering Place

Since May, 2007, I have been meeting with small groups of poetry lovers in the invisible universe accessible through conference calling. We meditate together, share poems that are shaping our lives, do “Poetry Dives” (spontaneous writing ignited by the poems shared, music and whatever emerges in the moment) and join in the rich communion of truth-speaking that poetry can foster. One Sunday morning, for instance, we had voices from Dublin, Hawaii, Vermont, Washington, California and British Columbia. Poems shared were from Mary Oliver, Ellen Bass, Shel Silverstein, Galway Kinnell, Dr. Seuss and others as well as some written by those in the circle.

Each time we gather, the power of mixing intention, openness and poetry is stunning. What a generous intimacy we create across so many miles! (It makes me wonder if the miles are the illusion and the immediacy we (re)discover through these strange new technologies is the truth.)

Invisible Poetry Society meetings approximately once a month for 2 - 2.5 hours for a series of meetings. Please see Calendar and contact Kim for information on dates and costs.

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Speaking the Unspeakable

Poetry at the Threshold of Life Transitions

a workshop for individuals, communities, helping organizations, hospitals and hospices

contact Kim to organize a workshop in your community

At the core of the indigenous in every culture, the alchemy of poetry wed with music has been used to open, awaken and heal consciousness from the dawn of word and song. Poetry is born when a surge of experience breaks through the skin of prose and a new language comes to life, more intimate than ordinary speech, and vaster than thought. Music undoes the strictures of the mind allowing the ineffable to be known, reflected and expressed. The arrival of poetry and music at the most mysterious thresholds of our lives -- death, birth, personal crisis, transition, celebration -- offers us a world in which the unspeakable can be spoken, the unfaceable faced and the unknowable known in the vast reaches of self beyond the mind.

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Passion, Poetry, Beauty

Poetry Concerts

Since 1990, Kim has been exploring a new dimension of the ancient marriage between poetry and music. With world-class musicians such as Jami Sieber, Gary Malkin and Chloe Goodchild, she has created an innovative dialog where music that spans the spectrum from world rhythms to prayerful stillness is interwoven with spoken poems from around the world and across time. Converts vary ... always including the poetry of such masters as Kunitz, Rilke, Rumi, Goethe, Oliver and Dickinson.

Each concert is an invitation to rediscover what mysics, poets and shamans have known for centuries: when you join powerful rhythms with the language of the soul, the mind can't contain the experience and bursts open to an unsayable "Ahhh!" of pure wonder.

For upcoming poetry concerts, click here.

"Have you ever been deeply moved by a piece of music? Have you ever been captured and compelled by a word, phrase, or poem? Now for a moment imagine those experiences combined in a way that is so powerfully delivered by two women that it transcends the physical people involved and alchemizes to create a space in which magic and miracles can and do occur. Jami's improvisational and deeply emotive electric cello act as both a backdrop for the experience as well as a second, wordless poet."

- Paula, a business coach from Pennsylvania

Photo by Karen Moskowitz