Sanctum – Guided by the Elements

Much of our lives is organised around doing: understanding, deciding, producing, improving and responding.

Sanctum creates a different kind of space.

For five days, on a secluded island in the Stockholm archipelago, we step away from the usual stream of demands, digital input and everyday activity. We slow down. We spend time in silence and nature. And we explore what becomes possible when we do not immediately have to understand, achieve or change anything.

Sanctum is an Emerge Institute retreat, created by Pamela von Sabljar and Jonna Lundberg in collaboration with the Ekskäret Foundation. It brings together contemplative practice, nature and developmental perspectives within a carefully held environment for deeper inquiry.

At its heart is a simple movement: from constantly shaping our experience towards becoming more available to it.

Sanctum is organised around four elemental Paths – Earth, Fire, Water and Air.

They are not stages to complete or levels of advancement. They represent different movements that may become important at different moments in our lives.

 

The question is not which Path is “highest”, but which movement is alive for you now.

Sanctum is primarily an individual journey, undertaken in the quiet presence of others.

We call this solo together.

Participants spend much of the retreat in silence, contemplation, nature and individual practice. Yet the experience takes place within a shared field: other people have also set these days apart, chosen to become quiet, and committed themselves to paying attention.

Silence is therefore not isolation. It becomes something held together.

The retreat is largely phone- and laptop-free, allowing the constant stream of information, messages and demands to recede. There are periods for optional conversation and opportunities to speak privately with a facilitator or Elder, but there is no requirement to explain or share what arises.

Your experience remains your own.

Sanctum is not designed around optimisation or peak experiences.

There is nothing particular you are expected to discover. No insight has to be produced. No transformation needs to occur.

Contemplative practice instead cultivates another quality of attention: slowing down sufficiently to encounter experience before immediately analysing, categorising or acting upon it.

Nature is central to this. Ekskäret is a small private island of forest, granite, sea and sky in the outer Stockholm archipelago. The island is not simply a beautiful setting for the retreat. It becomes part of the practice – a living environment through which we can rediscover forms of attention easily lost in everyday life.

This includes time for walking, sitting, creativity, sauna and sea, contemplation and simply doing very little.

Sanctum forms part of Emerge Institute’s wider exploration of human development and our relationship with a changing world.

Much developmental work concerns strengthening the self: becoming more reflective, autonomous, capable and able to hold complexity. These capacities matter deeply.

But development may also eventually ask something else of us.

Can we loosen the structures we have worked so hard to build? Can we encounter reality without immediately making it conform to our existing maps? Can we become more receptive – to other people, to the living world, and perhaps to dimensions of reality that exceed our ability to conceptualise them?

Sanctum creates a protected space in which these questions can be approached not primarily as ideas, but as lived practice.

It is an invitation to become quieter, more receptive and more deeply attentive to the life in which we are already participating.