Creative Expression

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Discover the wild edges of your creative practice using your body, voice, and imagination with the brilliant guidance of leading, creative luminaries and artists from around the world.

Hollyhock´s Creative Expression program image. Sitting person taking notes in a notebook.

Weaving Ritual: an Embodied Rebozo Retreat

With Collective Rebozo

May 8 - 12, 2024
In celebration of Mother’s Day, we are offering a 10% tuition discount if you attend with your mother/child. Please contact us for more information. In order to open and enter a new stage of life, we need to honour, integrate and celebrate where we’ve come from. This retreat, offered for…

Watercolour and the Art of Seeing

With David McEown

May 8 - 12, 2024
Explore watercolour’s magical flowing spontaneity and essential techniques as you paint directly from nature. Enhance your perception, way of “seeing”, and connectedness to the earth with this travel-friendly medium. Enjoy a dynamic watercolour demonstration; exploring paint as a form of meditation and play. Uncover the secret hydrodynamics of watercolour paint…

Giving the Wound Air: Expressing the Inexpressible In Your Own Words

With Susan Musgrave

May 12 - 17, 2024
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional,” - attributed to the Dalai Lama  It is hard work, when we are grieving, not to suffer; suffering — personal and universal — has become a condition of how we live. Yet we are bereft of time to grieve. Writing, especially poetry, fiction, journaling…
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Sketch by Sketch: Connecting with the World Through Drawing

With Emma FitzGerald

May 12 - 17, 2024
Learn to sketch without fear of making mistakes! Join celebrated author/illustrator, Emma FitzGerald as she leads participants through a series of exercises that build confidence and improves observation skills, while allowing for the happy accidents that make a drawing that speaks from the heart. Using pen and water colour paint,…

Translating Science through Writing and Art in Times of “Climate Boiling”

With AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd

May 17 - 22, 2024
In this time of boiling climate crisis we are inundated with data and information about the dire state of the world. But how do we tell these stories in ways that center our interconnectivity, interdependence and the power of our shared and common action? This four day intensive study will…

Untangled: Moving Past Fear in Knitting and Writing

With Matthew J. Trafford

May 26 - 31, 2024
Get unstuck in your creative project and grow beyond what's holding you back. Knitting and writing are both crafts that require working on projects for a long time. Stitch by stitch and word by word we build our creations, but sometimes this process can be overwhelming, intimidating, or paralyzing, leaving…

Exploring Ocean Mysteries: The Science and Poetry of The Salish Sea

With Marjorie Wonham, Ph.D. and Melanie Koenderman

May 31 - June 5, 2024
The ocean has long inspired curiosity and imagination in scientists and poets alike. Join us in a lively, embodied, place-based experience of the beautiful waters and life of the Salish Sea. In this unique program we will explore ocean shorelines and ocean poetry, and create our own poems that deepen…

Dance of Connection

With Bettina Rothe

June 9 - 14, 2024
Come home to yourself, find connection and nourishment in community, and with the land. Together we take refuge in our primary language "rhythm", and find belonging in the dance. Release old patterns of relating that no longer serve and expand your repertoire of how you can relate with others on…

Contemplative Mind, Spontaneous Brush: Ink, Colour and Japanese Washi Papers

With Heather Midori Yamada

June 19 - 23, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 20, 2024.
Relax body, breath and mind with short guided meditations and simple perceptual exercises. Follow brushwork demonstrations using Japanese sumi ink and watercolour on various Japanese washi papers (provided). Inspired by surrounding natural subject matter, and mixed media approaches of layering, tearing and collaging cultivate personal and unique expressions in abstract…

The Embodied Voice

With Amy Thiessen

June 19 - 23, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 20, 2024.
Step into the wisdom of your body & unleash the power of your voice. Our voice is both the channel through which we excavate past traumas and conditioning as well as a vehicle through which we may find healing and reconciliation with the various facets (voices) of our being. In…

Flying SOULO: Your Story on Stage

With Tracey Erin Smith

June 23 - 28, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 24, 2024.
Transform your life stories into a Solo Theater Show or a Keynote Talk. Using improvisation, writing exercises and one-on-one coaching with award-winning director Tracey Erin Smith, uncover the stories that need to be told and transform your experience into a powerful and entertaining show or talk. "Tracey is a true…

Tapping the Stream: A Spring Writing Retreat

With Betsy Warland and Shaena Lambert

June 23 - 30, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 24, 2024.
Tapping the Stream is a week-long retreat - free from interruption - to explore the direction of a work in progress, as well as to foster creativity through community with other writers. “Tapping the Stream is the most wonderful workshop I have ever attended. The facilitators helped me get back…

Wild Soma Being and Becoming: Embodied Practices for Collective Thriving

With Andrea Nann, Julia Aplin, Roula Said and Shannon Litzenberger

June 23 - 28, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Mar 24, 2024.
In this time of intersecting social, political, and planetary crises, how do we embrace and honour all that is arising in us as bodies? What if we listen closely to what we feel in our hearts, what we sense in our bones, and what we know in our guts? Can…

Nature Paints Itself

With Jeremy Herndl

July 7 - 12, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 7, 2024.
What if the world created us humans to speak its names, sing its rivers and winds? What if nature paints itself, using our deft human hands and the tactility of sight to emulate its textures, colours and spaces? In this workshop we shall enter the space of nature, the garden,…

Dancing from the Inside Out

With Margie Gillis

July 7 - 12, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 7, 2024.
Move into your body’s experiential wisdom and reveal the soul in motion. Develop your sensitivity to the connection between thought, feeling, spirit and body as you listen in to your body’s inner wisdom, impulses, conversations and emotions. Becoming sensitive to and engaging with this inner life provides information both for…

Singing in the Vocal River

With Rhiannon

July 12 - 17, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 12, 2024.
Hear your own song and learn new ones as you find your place in the world of music and invention. Co-create vocal magic in a safe, dynamic circle of singers, delving into the possibilities of spontaneous composition and the language of storytelling. Working alone, in pairs, and in ensemble, meld…
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Something Opens My Wings

With Margie Gillis and Thomas Atum O'Kane, PhD

July 12 - 17, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 12, 2024.
“Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.” - Rumi Through meditation, movement, creative imagination and the soulful mystery of the Something, we will evoke the states and stages contained in Rumi's poem. Both Margie and…

Healing Family & Ancestors: Ritual & Resonant Family Constellations

With Jill Purce

July 26 - 31, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 26, 2024.
Transform inherited patterns into magical blessings, bringing harmony, joy, and order into your daily life. Activate the unconscious field of the ancestors, making it a rich source of wisdom and illumination. This healing program uncovers and restores aspects of the psyche that are normally closed to therapeutic methods, transforming negative…

Between the Human Animal and the Animate Earth

With David Abram

July 26 - 31, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Apr 26, 2024.
How can we open a fresh and unshakeable solidarity between ourselves and the other animals, plants, and elemental forces that compose this breathing biosphere? The deepening contortions of climate change – intensifying droughts, monster floods, flaring wildfires and heart-wrenching geopolitical cataclysms – all ensure that our species is tumbling toward…

Science, Art, Sound, & the Sacred

With Merlin Sheldrake, Cosmo Sheldrake and Rupert Sheldrake

July 31 - August 4, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until May 1, 2024.
Explore the entanglements between science, art, sound, and the sacred in a beautiful, wild setting. What we call art and science both arise from our faculties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity. We will spend part of our time outdoors – in gardens, on seashores and in forests – connecting with…

Writing to Awaken: Memoir as a Path of Healing

With Mark Matousek

August 4 - 9, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until May 5, 2024.
This transformational five-day program uses personal writing as a path of self-discovery, authenticity, and spiritual growth. When you learn to express the whole truth about your life experiences – for personal use or publication – you come to understand the mythic dimension of your personal struggles, triumphs, confusions, longings, digressions,…

Depth Ecology Camp

With Nora Bateson, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Rex Weyler and Kairn Mahon Carrington

August 14 - 18, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until May 15, 2024.
With Special Guests Merlin Sheldrake, Erin Robinsong and David Abram. Humans do not stand apart from the earth and its living systems. To address our global challenges, we must start from our roots as creatures of this Earth. What does it mean to take action and adopt a genuinely ecological…

Kanikapila: Expanding the Magic of Ukulele

With Kimo Hussey

August 14 - 18, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until May 15, 2024.
If you play the ukulele, you likely understand the joyful power of this small but mighty instrument. At Hollyhock this summer, discover kanikapila, the magic that erupts when playing and creating music together. With Hawaiian ukulele master Kimo Hussey as your guide, go beyond rudimentary play and explore the myriad…

Slow Art, Somatic Practice, and Creative Rest

With Shauna Kaendo, Registered Art Therapist | BFA, RCAT and Trudi Smith, Registered Clinical Counsellor | MC, MA, PhD

August 14 - 18, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until May 15, 2024.
Bringing our bodies into the conversation through creative process. In this therapeutic arts program, we get curious about what self-care practices can look and feel like both individually and in community. Through creative meanderings we will experiment with solo and collaborative art-making processes, for example, bilateral drawing, collage, watercolour, bookmaking,…

Cyanotypes on Fabric

With Sarah Fuller

August 24 - 28, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until May 25, 2024.
This alternative photography workshop focuses on the historical Cyanotype photo process, using objects and plants from the Hollyhock ecosystem to create one-of-a-kind images on fabric. Participants will learn how to create Cyanotype prints on fabric and will be encouraged to use natural elements from the Hollyhock ecosystem to create photograms.…

SAORI: The Zen of Weaving

With Terri Bibby

September 22 - 27, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Jun 23, 2024.
"Terri flawlessly combined the techniques of SAORI with the philosophy. I didn’t want the week to end" - Past Participant Explore the beautiful SAORI weaving philosophy from Japan where there are no rules and no mistakes. This philosophy encourages you to “look out through eyes that shine” and see beauty…

Harmony Within: A Journey of Songwriting and Reconnection

With Leah Abramson and Samantha Parton

September 27 - October 2, 2024
Book now and get 10% off accommodation prices. Offer valid until Jun 28, 2024.
Writing can be a powerful tool of self-expression and intimacy with one's deepest thoughts and feelings. The “Harmony Within” workshop explores songwriting as a medium, a practice, and a journey through which we can reconnect with our creative source, our vulnerability, and our inner wisdom, harnessing the healing power of…