Dancing in the Wheel of Life

A 32-Day Immersive Retreat · Hilo, Hawai'i · February 28 – March 31, 2027

Something magical happens when a group of dedicated people slow down together long enough to open channels of transmission and perception that are usually dormant. 

And if they are in nature, away from distractions, focusing on learning and creating, accompanied by the power and the love of the Intelligences of Nature… well… it is impossible to predict exactly what’s going to happen!

What is this retreat?

Not a course, a workshop, or a vacation. 

It is a full immersion in the secrets of Nature that reveal themselves through sixteen Intelligences — the Building Blocks of Creation. These great universal forces move through every facet of life - within every creature, including us. They have been heard, seen, felt and variously named since time immemorial. Ancient traditions around the world have honored them, sought a close relationship with them, and in some cases also given them a persona as beloved and sometimes feared gods and goddesses. 

We call them the Yeuàs. Four of them open as petals out of each Element. Together they form the Wheel of Life. 

This full journey at the Feet of Source and into the Wheel has been previously offered only twice. This third time might be the last because, as you can imagine, it is a big commitment and Mariabruna is not getting any younger (don't tell her 😁 🙃)

Two days with each Intelligence:
one for meeting it, one for going deeper.

We will drum and vision to imagine them in Nature, to feel them in our inner landscapes. We will play with the BodYnvocations, sixteen kinesthetic practices that bring each quality of nature into life through the body. We will listen to presentations, enter ritual when ritual is called for, and gather each evening in circle to share what we are discovering. 

We will expand our perception and discover ways to access and transmit their messages.

And in between - around and underneath it all - we will create. Paint, write, sculpt, collage, photograph, make music, make SoulCollage® cards, do nothing, walk, dream. The creativity space is open before we begin in the morning and stays open after we close at night. There will be "creativity stations" for different activities and you will receive guidance to use them if needed. How to engage in creativity will be your choice.

Long hours of open time, outside of chronological time. Nature. Beauty. Companionship. Flow. Depth. Play. Ceremony. The retreat will have sacred rhythm - not so much scheduled as held. It has enough structure to carry us in our adventure and enough openness to surprise us. 

You are invited to enter a sacred continuum. The experience of a lifetime. 

Paint, write, sculpt, collage, photograph, make music, make cards, do nothing, walk, dream.

The Creativity Space

Twelve years ago, in a farmhouse in the hills of northern Italy, ten people spent a month together during the first Sot0 immersive retreat. These are a few comments we received during and after the experience:

Receiving help

"It was a back and forth all day long, being in relation but also being only myself... I understood that the love from the Yeuas is like receiving help from the invisible realm while navigating this complex outer world."

Sense of completion 

"I was filled with a huge sense of completion afterwards and the tension I had brought with me eased off a great deal."

I'm not the same person

"On the long drive home, I realize that I am not the same person I was before this experience. I cannot wait to see what this new me will do in the world”.

The place - 'Io Mana

We will be at ʻIo Mana, Beth Marcil’s studio - a large, light-filled creative sanctuary on twenty acres in the hills above Hilo, HI, with astounding views of Hilo Bay and Waiau stream. Downstream, a private waterfall and its natural swimming pond are accessible from the land. 

'Io Mana honors the endangered Hawaiian Hawk - the 'io -- a native bird found only on the island of Hawai'i, and often seen soaring above the land where our retreat takes place. 

Blending the spirit of the hawk with the concept of  Mana - spiritual energy, creative power, and life force - the name evokes vision, creativity, presence, and a deep connection to place. 

Nested in the enchanting Hawaiian landscape, in the sacred presence of the volcanoes Mauna Kea, and Kīlauea - the one who continues its work of creation,  ʻIo Mana is a place of quiet, connection, and deep presence - where nature inspires and enriches us in every season and at all times of day or night.


How to enter this experience? 

Come prepared to be moved by what you discover in yourself, in Nature, in the invisible realm of Spirit. 

Pack your curiosity, creativity, and wisdom. We will share our willingness to journey with the drum, to participate in ritual, to sit in circle and share openly, to respect silence when it is called, to create from wherever you are - beginner or practiced, tentative or flowing. 

This is an adventure of soul, body, and mind.

Beth will be here throughout to introduce techniques when needed, offer encouragement, and hold the creative space alongside you.

Who is this for?

This retreat is for seekers - those who sense that something in them is ready for wider horizons, and who are willing to give themselves time to feel, explore, reflect. For those who intuit intelligence and spirit in every aspect of nature, and wish to access and commune with it at a deeper level. For those who have sacred curiosity for what runs below the surface of matter. For those who wish to let their visionary capacities soar. 

No prior experience is necessary to join the retreat, but of course, if you have a favorite creative medium that is not among the creative stations we offer, you are welcome to bring whatever materials you want to work with.

What is required is genuine readiness to show up, day after day, for the full arc of the work - to laughter and tears, surprises and reckonings, validation of truths your soul has known since ever, glimpses and revelations about your inner nature .

We strongly encourage attending the full thirty-two days, but if a full month is not possible, you may join at the opening of any of the four eight-day cycles: 

🔸 First Intelligence of Fire on February 28 

🔸 First Intelligence of Earth on March 8 

🔸 First Intelligence of Water on March 16 

🔸 First Intelligence of Air on March 24 

It is necessary to arrive the day before and depart the day after each cycle. 

The full sequence of the 16 Intelligences:

Irì Feb 28-Mar 1 · Imè Mar 2-3 · Itù Mar 4-5 · Igà Mar 6-7 · Ebì Mar 8-9 · Efè Mar 10-11 · Elù Mar 12-13 · Edà Mar 14-15 · Unì Mar 16-17 · Uxè Mar 18-19 · Ujù Mar 20-21 · Upà Mar 22-23 · Asì Mar 24-25 · Akè Mar 26-27 · Avù Mar 28-29 · Azà Mar 30-31

We dance the Wheel incessantly. Join us to dance in it with new eyes.

A brief history of the School of the Origins

Sot0 was born in the summer of 2014, during the first 32-day pilot project, in a farmhouse in the hills of northern Italy, from a question Mariabruna had been living with for years: what if Nature is not a backdrop to human experience, but its source and its teacher? Alive, cogent, powerful and loving? 

No one theory could satisfy her search. The answer came through weeks of making things - paintings, shaping clay, and sounds, rituals, movements, drumming - in the company of ten women willing to follow the question wherever it led. By the end of that month, something had crystallized. Eventually its name was made clear: the School of the Origins and Mariabruna was told to bring it forth as a virtual itinerant place of learning and experiencing.

The sources of Sot0 are vast and ancient. They spring from the Vedas and Upanishads, from the Tao, from the ceremonial knowledge of Native American and other indigenous peoples who have always understood nature as alive, intelligent, and in some cases, as divine. The applied creativity that is at the core of the Sot0 practices was affirmed during decades of working with SoulCollage® and with process oriented creative methods, and from the contemplative practices of several lineages. And it is infused, in a profound way, from the Tuvan shamanic tradition - as transmitted by Mariabruna’s drum teacher Ai-Chu-Rekh, whose guidance opened in her a direct relationship between rhythm, vision, and the invisible world. 

The drum became a key. It still is.

In those first years the school organized itself around four paths: 

🔸 a path of Knowledge

🔸 a path of Sound

🔸 a path of Imagination

🔸 a path of Ritual

They were useful scaffolding. Over time, as the work matured and the paths wove into each other, they deepened into something less like separate roads and more like four faculties - four ways the whole person meets the world, Spirit, and the magic of Nature.


We call them now the Four Rivers we navigate in our journey of discovery.

Food for the mind

nurtures the capacity to observe, reflect, and think critically — to use the linear mind not as the only tool, but as the right tool when precision and discernment are needed. It is what allows us to meet the wisdom of nature without romanticizing it and welcome the knowledge intrinsic in ethical science.


Creativity

is the door opened by the imagination. Through making — in whatever form calls to you — we engage our intuition, integrate what we are learning at levels deeper than concept, give form to the invisible, and anchor insights and revelations. Hands-on creativity helps us develop a personal relationship with the invisible Emissaries of Nature, carriers of its messages, helpers, allies, and guides.


Visioning

is the collaboration between the two hemispheres, the practice of entering alternate states of consciousness where non-ordinary archetypal and spiritual dimensions can be experienced directly. The drum may guide us there. So do dreams, silence, movements and sounds. An alternate state of consciousness may be accessed while dancing, painting, journeying with the drum, singing.  




Transmission

is the most intimate of the four. It cannot be taught, only received, developed and shared. It is the organic, unhurried way wisdom arrives when we stop insisting and start listening. It transforms us into vehicles of what we have come to this planet to do. This is the birthright the school helps you recover and express in a way that is uniquely yours.


These four do not operate in sequence. On any given day, in any given hour, all four may be alive at once.


A second pilot project followed in January 2015, in the fog-wrapped hills of Corralitos, California. 

Sixteen qualities of nature, thirty-two days, another small circle of seekers. The first Sot0 programs open to the public followed that summer in Italy. 

The language evolved, the structure refined itself, but the original questions and their connection with the ancestral "original" mind continue to guide us. 

We invite you to experiment with the questions and develop your own personal relationship with the Yeuas. 


We look forward to welcoming you to the third incarnation of this full-immersion experience.

🔸 If you are interested in more details, please complete this form

Your Guides

Founder and Guide

Mariabruna Sirabella has spent a lifetime asking what it means to be fully alive and guided by spirit - and creating opportunities for others to explore the same question.

Her path has moved through many disciplines and several continents. Her early research at the University of Bologna brought her into direct contact with healing rituals and trance dances in the tribal areas of southern Italy and India - an encounter that shaped everything that followed. Years of practice as a psychotherapist, trauma specialist, and somatic practitioner in California deepened her understanding of what transformation actually requires: not instruction, but ground. Not answers, but the right conditions for something new to arise from within.
The drum entered her life through her teacher Ai-Chu-Rekh, a master of the Tuvan shamanic tradition, whose teaching gave her a direct and embodied relationship with sound as a vehicle for visioning, healing, and communion with what is larger than the self.
She is the creator of BodYnvocations© - a kinesthetic practice rooted in the Four Elements and the universal cycles of nature - and has been one of the lead trainers of SoulCollage® internationally, training hundreds of facilitators around the world. She has taught and presented in the United States, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Switzerland, France, Taiwan, and Israel.
SoT0 - the School of the Origins - is the synthesis of all of it: every tradition she has studied, every method she has practiced, every threshold she has crossed. It began in 2014 with ten people and a month-long experiment in a farmhouse in Italy. It is still, at its core, a living experiment because it is new and personal for everyone that enters it.

Midwife of Creativity

Beth Marcil has been making things with her hands for as long as she can remember. What began as a child's instinct - that making was good for the spirit, that it opened a quiet space to listen - became a lifelong vocation and a form of service.

An honor graduate of Ringling College of Art and Design, Beth has worked as a professional artist and creative guide for over thirty years. She set down her roots in Maui, Hawaii, where the rhythms of the natural world - storms rolling in from the sea, the sudden return of silence - have shaped her understanding of creative process as inseparable from the cycles of life.

Her work is built on a single conviction: that creativity is not a talent reserved for the few, but a birthright waiting to be reclaimed. In her hands, a paint brush, a pair of scissors, a collaged image, become tools for remembering who you are. Process over product. Intuition over technique. The child self and the adult self, meeting in the middle.


Beth is a certified SoulCollage® Facilitator and Trainer and brings to her work a deep literacy in mixed media, visual journaling, and intuitive painting. In the context of this retreat, she is not here to teach a method. She is here to hold the creative space open - to introduce techniques when useful, to encourage when the inner critic is loud, and to sit with you in the particular silence that comes just before something wants to be made.

©Mariabruna Sirabella. All Rights Reserved


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