Come write songs and make new friends in the mountains of northern New Mexico at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center (and one time home to the late and famed songwriter, Leonard Cohen). Nestled in the small valley of Jemez Springs, the retreat is located on the Jemez river; natural hot springs are onsite and available for daily use for all retreat participants.
Retreat features daily songwriting assignments and guided mentoring from instructors, morning meditation instruction, and nightly song circles.
Retreat is modeled on a) developing your own singing, writing and artistic voice b) cultural exchange/cultural immersion and c) building community through cowriting; participants are paired with a different cowriter each day, including retreat facilitators, and will leave the retreat with at least two new cowritten songs.
Leave this experience with a renewed sense of connection to your own creative practice and a sense of peace.
About the facilitators:
Kristina Jacobsen, Founder and Facilitator, Sing Me Back Home Retreats:
Kristina Jacobsen, PhD, is a singer, songwriter, ethnographer and ‘peregrina’ who leads the Songwriting Major at the University of New Mexico. In July 2022, she completed the Camino Francés and received her “Compostela” (certification of completion) when she walked from Burgos, Spain to Santiago de Compostela, Spain (498 kilometers). A Fulbright Artist and Scholar (Italy 2019-2020), Kristina has been nominated for three New Mexico Music Awards. Her oeuvre is informed by a world of global music—all deeply considered and then seemingly wrapped up quietly but with profound sentimentality in her spacious and intimate songs—includes sonic touches of American honky tonk and folk music. She delivers her songs in a yodeling alto that can warm your heart, bite off a searing denunciation, or celebrate good times with equal fervor. Her travels, from the American southwest and Scandinavia to Sardinia, resound in every note in a rich melting pot of culture and human connection.
A long-time practitioner of mindfulness, Jacobsen completed her introductory MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) training at Duke University’s Center for Integrative Medicine and graduated with a Certificate in Mindful Leadership (with Mark Lesser and Nikki Mirghafori) from Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center in 2021. She enjoys bringing mindfulness into the songwriting process in beautiful places around the world. Kristina speaks Italian, Spanish, Norwegian and some Navajo.
Kristina is the author of the award-winning book, The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (2017), and the co-author of The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook: Exercises for Writing, Visualizing, Sounding and
Performing Data, with poet Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (forthcoming, Routledge 2024). A gifted teacher, she is a huge believer in the power of walking and contemplative practice to deepen our songwriting craft and our sense of connection to nature, to ourselves and to one another.
Meredith Wienpahl (née Wilder), Cofacilitator:
Meredith has been interested in songwriting for over twenty years. From an early age, it became her guide to understanding the world around her. She wrote, recorded, and released a solo album in 2008 ("Self-titled") and fell in love with the process of collaborating with friends to fine-tune the songs she wrote on her own. Her second solo album "The Coming of the Night" was released in 2016, and she was lucky enough to sing the album from start to finish in a cathedral in Albuquerque, NM. From 2011-2016, she wrote with the band Wildewood and recorded three albums ("While the Light Lasts," "Wildewood," and "The Other Side"). They toured throughout the US and, most notably, opened for The Handsome Family on the west coast. Meredith has written and recorded with numerous songwriters from New Mexico and Colorado, including the one and only Kristina Jacobsen, and continues to feel grateful for and inspired by the songwriters that take the time to go on retreats and share their ideas. Her music can be found on meredithwilder.bandcamp.com.
Also check out other Arts events in Jemez Springs, Literary Art events in Jemez Springs, Music events in Jemez Springs.
