Start your registration to let us know what calls you to this gathering of men.
Knowing where each man is coming from and what they are coming for will help us to strengthen the retreat experience.
Retreat Details:
DATE: October 15-18, 2026
LOCATION: River’s Bend Retreat Center—Philo, California
COST: $975—includes comfortable lodging and healthy, meals meals.
SUBSTANCES: This is a substance free event.
Men of goodwill from all walks of life are welcome.
AF is a place for men of all races, creeds, and sexual orientations.
Teachers
Jef Szilagyi
Eliyahu Sills
Musicians
Amir Etemadzadeh
Eliyahu Sills
Staff
Ryan DeMatteo
Bryan Vidinsky
Dameian Hartfield
Jayme Roderick
The River’s Bend Retreat Center:
The majestic River’s Bend Retreat Center is situated along the Navarro River at the far West end of the Anderson Valley. The 80-acre property is also adjacent to Hendy Redwoods and is located in the stunning contours down a quiet road in Philo, California.
River’s Bend was selected for this gathering because of its extraordinary beauty and simplicity, and because it offers a healthy variety of spaces and elements that will bring magic and grounding to the retreat experience.
ACCOMMODATIONS:
Every man will have a single bed in a shared room. Limited private room, and queen bed upgrades and limited camping/camper van discounts are available.
HEALTH REQUESTS:
Please let us know if there’s any personal health needs you have to make your participation happen.
The stars made a circle,
and in the center we danced.
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
About Ancestral Futures:
This gathering in a place of immense beauty will offer a dynamic and supportive space for you to connect with a community of men and reflect on the blessings and challenges in your life.
Together, over these 4 days and 3 nights, we will build a community of energy and spirit to foster renewal, connection, and transformation. We will call upon the centuries-old traditions of music, ritual, and poetry to find the yet-to-be-spoken truths in our hearts and build a healthier, more viable future for ourselves and our communities.
We’ll lean into the wisdom of the circle, the know-how of Internal Family Systems practices, and the stunning immediacy of the ecosystem. We will remember again a vital ground and reconnect with the forgotten but needed energies in our own nature that tend to be washed out by modern life’s isolating and oversaturating patterns.
We know this: men become stronger in their hearts and clearer in their purpose through authentic encounters with one another. So we gather, ready to be genuine and brave.
The mornings will have the vitalizing experiences of meditation, breathwork, and other practices. The days will be filled with large and small group sessions that bring us closer to matters of the heart. Lunches will offer downtime to enjoy the river and the land. While our evenings will be filled with evocative, old-world rituals that care for the soul.
Throughout, healthy, fresh, and nourishing meals will be provided Coco Johnson and her catering team.
Come, join us in this “caravan of soul” as we wash away the dust to feel the beauty and the tender hardships of life’s winding roads.
Limited Space — Apply Early
Ancestral Futures: Our Purpose and Our Roots
Ancestral Futures Men’s Retreat is a five-year project that seeks to carry forward the traditions of the Shem Center’s Male Spirit Retreats, Mosaic Multicultural Foundation’s Men’s Conferences, and the I-Group practices of the ManKind Project, among others.
Our goal is to create healing events for men of goodwill from all walks of life who are negotiating the tapestry of their experience and quality of their relationships.
Ancestral Futures will emulate and innovate on our creation-spirituality, mytho-poetic, and cross-cultural lineages. In particular, we will explore how Internal Family Systems practices can increase the capacity for men to strengthen their understanding of themselves.
Every Ancestral Future’s Retreat will have a core theme. This year’s theme is the Silk Road, and we will call upon the music, poetry, stories, and food of those ancient centuries to awaken a fuller connection to the caravan of soul in our gathering.
In large part, the Silk Road was chosen for its power to break the spell of limited convictions and reconnect us to the long chain of humanity. In this way, we can both unbind the mind and heart to better know what’s possible.
Together, we will support one another in opening ourselves up to personal meaning and in more honestly entering into this phase of our lives, between what’s been and what will come to be. When we hold our moment, we honor the ancestral and bless the forthcoming.
