June 30 - July 5 2026 | Tree Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, PA

Four Fields Retreat

A five day non-residential retreat of ecological practices, silent meditation, inquiry, ritual & community exploration of socio-political transformations.

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FAQs

If you are drawn to a spirituality that does not numb you against social and ecological collapse, and does not confuse care with comfort or hope with denial, this retreat offers a place to arrive, to be supported, and to risk profound release.

With Fieldguides

Aarthi Tejuja, Adam Lobel, David Perrin, Fitzhugh Shaw, Geoff Cox & Jessica Locke

Meet the Fieldguides

Over five full days, we will move through four interwoven fields of practice:

❋ Land-based + Elemental Practices allowing the earth to nourish, challenge, and teach us.

❋ Meditative Practices of Rest + Awareness releasing from capitalist speed, urgency, and the attention economy into an effortless rhythm of being.

❋ Psychological + Imaginal Inquiry to engage fear, grief, and constraint, allowing new possibilities rather than rushing toward resolution.

❋ Mystical Practices of Unknowing to loosen our grip on certainty and control, and opening into what exceeds it.

Read the full description here.

Practicalities:

The event space opens at noon on June 30th for an optional period of arriving, rest, meditation, meeting each other, and meeting the land. The retreat officially begins with our Opening Ceremony on June 30 at 4pm.

Each day, a light breakfast, coffee, tea, and a full lunch is provided, but no dinner.

The retreat will close on July 5 at 4pm.

Cost + Registration

Registration is now closed for the Four Fields Retreat. Please write to Maggie at hello@davidbperrin.com to inquire about last minute spots that may be available or to be put on a list for future Four Fields Retreats. Thank you for your interest!

More About the Retreat

What does it feel like to live with persistent strain as authoritarianism rises, climate systems destabilize, war erupts, neighbors are taken by masked agents, and ecological loss accelerates? Does fear, exhaustion, and despair move through your body? Is your mind distracted in an attention economy? Although much of the wellness industry treats these as merely personal struggles, they are signs of systemic capture.

This retreat is an invitation to come as you are within this civilizational dis-ease, and to discover forms of support and awakening that do not rely on denial or bypassing. Freedom doesn’t mean escape. We  can explore the potential for collective liberation from capture—including the more-than-human world.

Held at an urban tree farm along the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, surrounded by both beauty and industrial scars, our gathering uses the privilege of retreat as a generative threshold to discover new forms of life on our damaged planet. In addition to practicing inquiry, meditation, elemental methods, and communal ritual work and play, we will bear witness to social and environmental injustice in this land of the three rivers. Expect days of both silence and communal discussion, teachings and ritual, and spontaneous openness to what is needed.

At the heart of the gathering are the Four Fields—ecological, psychological, meditative, and mystical. The Fields are a way of practicing with the living earth, emotional life, natural awareness, and the openness of being. Here personal transformation and collective, planetary care arise together. The Four Fields weave spiritual depth with social and ecological awareness, without collapsing one into the other or keeping them safely apart. They invite forms of life and solidarity that can remain open, responsive, and mature amid instability.

Meet the Fieldguides

  • Jessica Locke

    Jess is a cross-cultural philosopher who writes and teaches about Buddhism, spiritualities formal and informal, ethics and politics. She is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, where her favorite courses to teach combine intellectual history, radical politics and contemplative/experiential pedagogies. On temporary leave from her job at Loyola, she currently lives in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where she spends her time writing, exploring the four fields in a west African context, and raising two young children.

  • Aarthi Tejuja

    Aarti Tejuja is an embodied spiritual and ancestral coach, facilitator, and ritualist living in the mountains of North Carolina. Her work weaves together contemplative practice, embodiment, ritual, grief tending, ancestral remembrance, and relational repair. Raised Hindu in a Sindhi family from pre-partition India (now Pakistan) and later shaped by Buddhist practice, she now co-creates Moya and helps guide Antara, a mycelial network of land-based healing and contemplative practice.

  • Adam Lobel

    Adam Lobel, Ph.D, practices at the threshold of ecologies, Buddhist meditation and philosophy, contemplative education, and psycho-social political change. His work in the world weaves these practices together into the  Four Fields. Adam is a scholar-practitioner of philosophy and religion, focusing on Dzogchen Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary theory. He is active in contemplative design and research as part of the Generative Contemplative Initiative. A teacher of Ecopsychology and a Focusing professional, he is curious about cultural therapeutics for social upheavals. He leads ecodharma workshops, teaches in the Ecosattva Training, is a Guiding Teacher for One Earth Sangha, a GreenFaith fellow, and is active in environmental justice movements. He has been a professor of Ecopsychology and helped found 4 Elements Strategy, an ecological consulting organization supporting individuals and nonprofits on the front lines of environmental justice. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his partner and two kids where he protects lands from the petrochemical industry. For more on Adam’s practices: www.releasement.org

  • Fitzhugh Shaw

    fitzhugh has practiced meditation for over fifteen years and led programs for over ten. He is an ancestor wrangler; he is a tiller of soils; he is named after his great grandfather; he is impressed by the sky and the knowing eyes of animals; he is a child of his three grandmothers, sarah, sybil, and judy; he has never watched an episode of cheers; he is descended from scottish people, chickasaw people, german people; he is a father and a husband; he has worked in food and environmental justice for over a decade; he is a community organizer; he loves professional wrestling; he is a native solarpunk; he is a longtime resident of braddock, pa; he is at war with eco-cide; currently his works involves creating a community land trust in the mon valley to help return land to the commons and, eventually, rematriate the valley to its original stewards.

  • David B Perrin

    David B Perrin is a guide, facilitator, mentor and docent. For David, (dbp) meditation and contemplative life, service and activism, creative expression and the arts, and a love of the Earth have been woven throughout his life. Collaborator, syncretist, and facilitator of ‘circle’ in a myriad of forms, David wears many hats for all seasons. He is the instigator of the 4th Season.

  • Geoff Cox

    Geoff is a leadership and embodiment coach, conflict mediator, somatic trauma bodyworker, and meditation teacher. Originally trained as an acupuncturist, Geoff’s coaching centers on parts work, somatic coaching, conflict transformation, spiritual mentorship, Aletheia Coaching, and Somatic Experiencing. They leads retreats and workshops on trauma‑informed meditation, embodied leadership, conflict, and nature connection around the country, and has taught classes, workshops, and retreats at the University of Virginia for the past eight years. Geoff is committed to exploring and supporting embodied spiritual depth and wholehearted engagement with life and earth during a time of rapid social and technological change, uncertainty, and climate disruption. Learn more at geoffcoxhealingarts.com

FAQs

  • This retreat is for anyone curious about the interrelationships between personal “spiritual” practice/meditation practice and ecological-social transformations. No prior experience or background is needed. It will be a full five day retreat, however, so there needs to be some commitment to relaxing into the schedule and periods of silence, inquiry, and elemental rituals. However, it will be gentle, and each step of every activity will be described.

  • You are welcome to sign up for just the afternoon of June 30-July 3 (the first 3 full days). In other words, it is fine to leave early on Friday and not stay for the weekend. We will make space for a good exit for those leaving early. We want to avoid a situation in which people are coming and going, which will make it more difficult to create a grounded space. We also want people to enter in with ceremony and communal connection. 

    There will also be an opportunity to come for only the Saturday event, which will include a bearing witness site visit to Braddock, PA. So if you want to just check it out and not commit to the whole retreat, come just for Saturday.

  • This is not a retreat from the world, nor a training for heroic engagement. It is an experiment in collective support — one that allows encouragement, care, and action to arise spontaneously among people who recognize their shared conditions and are willing to stay present in them together.

  • Through meditation and inquiry, silence and dialogue, ritual, shared meals, ceremonial fires, and extended time with the more-than-human world, we will practice ways of being together that can hold fear and tenderness, grief and beauty, uncertainty, joy, and possibility—without rushing to closure. The Four Fields assist us to inquire into the extremes of urgency and complacency, attuning to what might be truly helpful.

  • We live within societies reckoning with a long history of ancestral, racial, gendered, and economic oppression. Within this reckoning, interpersonal dynamics arise which can feel intense. First, we are committed to weaving a relational field that is brave, genuine, and accountable, with clear community values and communication practices naming entrenched social hierarchies, and centering marginalized voices. Second, we are interested in the challenge of this work as part of our practice, not merely an obstacle to get beyond. This supports us in skillfully working with, learning from, and metabolizing or composting the heat of intensity so that it may become fuel for healing and learning. Third, we are curious about ways to face, heal, process, and end oppression, without furthering a culture of righteousness and cancellation. We want to call ourselves “in” to this ongoing work. This supports us in not re-traumatizing both marginalized communities and people in dominant social positions. We recognize this can be challenging and messy terrain, but we also know repair and healing can happen.

  • These are Seneca, Shawnee, and Osage lands, which have a long history of broken colonial treaties and industrial, petrochemical violence. We will also bear witness to the impacts of the steel, fracking, and plastic industry in our region.

  • A: This is a non-residential retreat which means there will be no sleeping accommodations provided. However, we want to help anyone coming from out of town find a good, affordable place to stay. For those coming from out of town:

  • We will offer delicious, ethically-sourced, vegetarian meals with close to zero waste. Light breakfasts, coffee and tea, and full lunches will be served on July 1-5. There will be dairy-free, vegan, and gluten free options.

  • We have created a tiered payment plan. We are looking into the option of travel scholarships. And we wholeheartedly encourage those who can pay more to help support other participants to be able to participate.

  • Adam Lobel and some of the other fieldguides were deeply involved with the Shambhala tradition and do not want to deny, erase, or ignore the spiritual and psychological suffering caused by the patriarchal forms in that community. In fact, the Four Fields approach arises in part in direct response to the limitations of fixed hierarchies and insular spiritual cultures. In the Four Fields, and in this retreat, there are no gurus. The Fields themselves are our teachers and no one can be a master of these fields. We are committed to weaving a relational field that is brave, genuine, and accountable. We are committed to a policy of zero sexual relations between retreat leaders and participants. We are committed to a clear grievance process if any harms arise. We will turn towards and do our best to skillfully work with any communal ruptures that might arise; we see such communal challenge  as part of the retreat, not as something to be ignored.

  • Feel free to reach out to either Maggie at hello@davidbperrin.com, or Javin at javin.leelobel@gmail.com.

Join us for this living experiment in the Four Fields.

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