YOUR INVITATION TO REFINER'S PLAYGROUND
JULY 17-18, 2025
BOULDER, CO
Comfort Inn &Suites
4777 North Broadway Street Boulder, CO 80304
720-896-4102
Please use this phone number or link below to book your rooms. Ask for the Refiner’s Playground Group Rate of $159/night.
https://www.choicehotels.com/reservations/groups/IT18R9
** SPACE IS LIMITED FOR THIS VENUE **
Cut off day for reduced room rate: June 17, 2025
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SUFFICIENCY
“There is a sufficiency at the heart of life
and when we awaken to it, life is fulfilled.
It is not a matter of conditions being
sufficient, rather that reality is sufficient and complete in itself…
At the most fundamental level, reality does not lack anything.”
From Delving, by Daishin Morgan, 2021.
We come from sufficiency and we return to sufficiency, the home we never left.
We have all had moments when this truth is directly experienced. When we’re truly absorbed in something – playing music, writing, hiking to a favorite lookout, or just chopping vegetables – where we lose track of the “I” who decides each move. There’s just the flow, the action itself. We have all that is needed. There is no lack, no wanting.
“People who’ve had a glimpse beyond the veil, the ones who’ve seen through the illusion of agency, don’t suddenly become drooling vegetables. If anything, they often report a sense of profound liberation, a lightness. The burden of being ‘me,’ with all its attendant fears and desires and responsibilities, is lifted. Decisions still happen, but they arise from a deeper, more intuitive place, or simply as the most obvious response to the situation.” ( From NIRVANANUKE, The Ultimate Unveiling, Thomas A. Vik).
Sufficiency is not just a concept. It is reality that can be known directly. The challenge often is our perceived experience of something lacking ‘out there’. Certain feelings and thoughts are considered not ok and need to be hidden. Difficult health issues arise, financial troubles, tension in our workplaces and relationships. Things don’t turn out like we wanted. We get impatient and want to be somewhere other than where we actually are. We quite naturally resist these experiences, constricting, fighting or fleeing the moment in an attempt to get back in control.
In the Refiners Playground we are learning to experiment with this idea of control. Remember when we were taught “Internal vs External Locus of Control’? Our agency was tied to cultivating greater Internal Locus. Now it seems we’re playing with ‘No Locus of Control’! We allow the Unmanifest to inform and guide us. It’s sufficiency is our sufficiency.
Our ego, our own private sense of “I/me” has its own special needs and priorities. It wants to be in charge. It wants to explain everything.
You know the mind that has been talking with you so long —
the mind that can can explain everything?
Don’t listen.
You were once a citizen of a country called ‘I Don’t Know.’
Remember the burning boat that brought you there? Climb in.
( From What the Silence Said, Marie Howe, 2021)
When we gradually stop resisting and relax into the “I don’t know” experiment, something surprising often happens: we find we have the capacity to stand fully in the moment we are actually in. We don’t need to go to India or Japan or quit our job and live in a monastery or an ashram. We have what we need. We don’t need a quieter location or a quieter body-mind than the one that is here right now.
This is not spiritual bypassing or a fluffy positive thinking affirmation. Rather, we are released to feel what we feel —grief, fear, anger, sadness, joy, without the added ego drama of fear, revenge and what not. New creative actions emerge spontaneously without our having to think about them.
We become more whole.
In this Summer 2025 refiners Playground we wish to explore what we are learning about the sufficiency of reality. We expect this to be another deep and liberating conversation among friends. Please plan to join us.
WHAT IS THE REFINER'S PLAYGROUND?
We are an open community of spiritual explorers who meet on a quarterly basis to share our current learning, questions about and experiments on the nature of reality. In particular, we seek to know the True Self directly while examining all of the hilarious ways we try to be something other than this! Our two day retreats are typically attended by 18-20 people from around the country. The dialogue is rich, at times profound, always compassionate and frequently hilarious. Come as frequently as you like and stay for as long as you like.
WHAT HAPPENS IN A TYPICAL GATHERING?
We meet in groups that range from 18-20 people. We share our stories of what we understand through direct experience and/or are currently learning through our own active experiments on the nature of being. There are no long-winded speeches or dazzling intellectual discourses. We tend not to agree or disagree with each other and seldom give others advice. We have no front of the room instructors or teachers as we all serve this role. We find that when we share our experiences with one another, as co-explorers- we each become more clear and confident about taking our next steps.
WHAT WE CURRENTLY KNOW
People who most benefit from the "Playground" are those who have:
A life long yearning to know what is true about themselves and the universe.
Grown tired of the typical self-help menu with its implied assumption there is some "defect" in us that requires improvement.
Believed more licenses, degrees or certifications will leave them finally and forever feeling "enough".
Many years' experience feeling alone, judged, misunderstood and have simply grown tired of this. And even more tired at having contributed to or led the charge themselves!
If you have experience with any of the above, welcome to the club! You will likely enjoy the solid food of the "Playground". The hard truth is that no amount of suffering or achievement can satisfy the deeper longing tugging at our soul. Our secret desire is wholeness and only our essential nature knows how to weave the fragments we present it into a coherent whole. Our hard work and effort to fix ourselves usually make matters worse, or at least continues the entertainment.
There is another way.
WELCOME
You are welcomed to come for as many sessions as you like and can leave whenever you like. Regardless of how much experience you have with deeper work, you will likely find in the Refiner's Playground a quality of dialogue and loving presence unlike anything you have ever experienced before.
INVESTMENT
$695 per session (includes breakfast and lunch). $2,495 when you sign up for the next four events. A savings of $285!
Bring a family member, partner, significant other at no additional cost!
Your Trusted Guides
Jim and Dan bring a half-century of experience wading around the inner landscape of human experience in ways that result in greater light, buoyancy, presence and power. We each have our unique spiritual path. We come in not as experts or even as facilitators who speak from the front of the room but as guides who walk alongside. We're aware of the terrain but cannot predict what will happen. Hence, the focus on playful experimentation.
The Refiner's Playground is:
“Time to lay down the armaments we use to fix ourselves and to come home. There is an un-changing center within us that isn’t concerned with anything other than NOW. I often see and recognize the Essential that lurks beneath those moments we naturally resist. I speak directly to it and am learning how to move with it and allow it more play in myself and in us. I am here to usher in an intimate, liberating partnership with the Essential in each all of us! We ARE this!” - Dan Holden
The Refiner's Playground offers us:
“A unique opportunity to embrace the perfection each life experience offers in burning away the dross of our deluded self perceptions, allowing the true, infinite, essential beings that we are to find fuller creative expression now. I am here to playfully master the art of finding, mining and refining the very best in us, allowing it to creatively express itself in response to the perfect challenge or opportunity that presents itself in each moment.” - Jim Anderson