Ancestral Ground: A Maitri Retreat in the Body of the Earth

A 6-Day In-Person Retreat at Ari Bhöd

September 20 - 26, 2026

Led by Melissa Moore and Luchy Lopez

Early Bird Registration for the first 6 registrants is available until March 15th. 

Ancestral Ground is a deep, earth-rooted Maitri Space Awareness retreat that invites participants into an embodied encounter with lineage, psyche, and place. 

Drawing on Maitri Space Awareness as articulated by Chögyam Trungpa and developed at Naropa University, this retreat weaves contemplative posture practice with ancestral inquiry and elemental ritual.

Held as much as possible outdoors in the high desert land of Ari Bhöd, this six-day immersion brings the Maitri postures into direct relationship with earth, sky, wind, fire, and water—meeting the psychological energies of the Five Buddha Families as living, ancestral currents carried in the body and the land itself. We will open to that lineage together.

The Ground of the Work

Participants need at least one maitri space awareness retreat as a prerequisite. Maitri Space Awareness offers a radical and compassionate way of befriending the body-mind by inhabiting postures that evoke distinct emotional and energetic patterns. In this retreat, we go further, and the maitri postures become thresholds—gateways through which ancestral memory, cultural inheritance, and elemental intelligence can be felt, honored, and metabolized.

Guided by Luchy Lopez’s lineage-based ancestral work, participants will be invited to engage their ancestors not as abstract figures of the past, but as living presences—carried in posture, gesture, voice, and imagination. Each Buddha family will be explored as both a psychological pattern and an ancestral field, shaped by migration, survival, devotion, trauma, creativity, and resilience.

What This Retreat Explores

• Maitri postures, whether cooperating, will be practiced outdoors, allowing the body to meet the elements directly
• Buddha Family by Buddha Family inquiry, linking emotional patterns with our embodied ancestral lineages
• Ancestral invocation and elemental supplication, grounded in respect, consent, and cultural humility
• Movement, art, and simple ritual as ways of listening beyond concept to embodied truths
• Contemplative silence and guided reflection, supporting deep internal integration
• Mutual Agreement practice, emphasizing gentleness, precision, and mutual respect
• Culminating in a Wisdom Tale of our ancestry, a community ritual

This retreat is not about healing ancestors or fixing history. Rather, it is an invitation to stand where you are, feel what lives in the body, and allow the ground beneath you to participate in the clarity of awareness.

Who This Retreat Is For

This program is designed for practitioners who already have at least one Maitri Space Awareness Program. The work may touch tender material—personal, collective, and ancestral—and is held within a carefully structured, confidential, trauma-aware container.

Participants should come with:

• At least one program or experience in Maitri Space Awareness or familiarity with the Five Buddha Families
• Capacity for silence and embodied exploration – accommodations for any access needs will be provided
• Willingness to engage ancestry with amazement and humility rather than assumption and projections

The Invitation

To take a posture on the land.
To feel the weight of inheritance without collapse.
To let earth receive what has been carried too long.
To discover that ancestry, like the Buddha Families, is not fixed—but spacious, alive, and workable.

Ancestral Ground is a retreat of meeting—meeting the body, the land, and the unseen presences that shape how we stand, love, defend, create, and rest. 

Facilitators

Luchy López is a multicultural contemplative practitioner, movement guide, and performing artist born in Tangier and now based in Madrid. Raised among stories of respect across religions, cultures, and social worlds, her work is rooted in the possibility of deep human connection.

With a background in acting, dance, and costume design, Luchy created ACa (A Corazón Abierto / With an Open Heart) in 2007—an embodied, imaginal practice combining movement, storytelling, voice, music, and the faldala, a specially designed skirt. Through ACa, participants explore their symbolic inner landscapes in a playful yet profound state of awareness.

She has offered this work throughout Spain, Morocco, Mexico, and internationally online. In 2008, she founded FaldAlas, a social project connecting women across economic and social differences through intention and embodied practice.

Luchy has been engaged in contemplative practice since 1991 and is a graduate of the advanced Karuna Training program in Madrid. She is a mother of three grown daughters and a grandmother, and her ongoing work is deeply informed by ancestry, embodiment, and the wisdom of lived experience.

Melissa Moore, Ph.D. is a long-time contemplative practitioner and educator who has spent decades accompanying people through the tender territories of grief, change, and emotional transition. Trained initially as a contemplative psychotherapist at Naropa University, she later completed her doctorate in Psychological Anthropology at CIIS, grounding her work at the intersection of inner life, culture, and human meaning-making.

Melissa co-founded Karuna Training in Europe in 1996 and has guided Karuna Training in North America since 2014. A student of Vajrayana Buddhism since 1979, she brings a gentle, embodied understanding of grieving, ritual, impermanence, and what it means to stay open-hearted in the face of loss.

She has taught contemplative grief practices internationally and is the author of The Diamonds Within Us: Uncovering Brilliant Sanity through Contemplative Psychology. Her teaching style is warm, steady, and rooted in the belief that grief is not something to “get through,” but something sacred that deserves to be held with care.

Early Bird Registration for the first 6 registrants is available until March 15th.