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Watching the Mind: A Beginner-Friendly Daylong Retreat (Online Only)

Name: Watching the Mind: A Beginner-Friendly Daylong Retreat (Online Only)
Start: 2024-10-19
End: 2024-10-19
Rating: 5

5.001 review

October 19, 2024

Retreat Highlights

Just as the quiet beauty of snow-covered mountains hosts an indescribable peace, our awareness is home to a lucid wakefulness within that the practice of meditation helps to unleash. This new year, experience the wonder of awareness by engaging, sustaining, and deepening into the vibrant heart of meditation practice within community. Mixing our experience, no matter what it is, with practice, we discover how meditation can provide a powerfully transformative container for everything that arises.
Our annual weeklong retreat includes meditation sessions, dharma teachings, and guided yoga. Teachings, offered by Lama Willa and Lama Liz, will explore the nature of awareness as an innate embodied and loving resource for human flourishing. We will pay special attention to the importance of stability, self-compassion, ease, and freshness, while considering how meditation can become a resource of skillful action.
Small group dharma meetings with the main teachers will be available as part of this retreat. Special events include the Refuge Ceremony (optional), and the Bodhisattva Vow Ceremony (optional). If you are onsite at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge for this retreat, noble silence will be observed. The schedule is intentionally spacious, providing a container that allows for relaxed between-session application of the instructions. Suitable for all levels.

About this Retreat

Your Guides

Kathe

Tracie

Kathe McKenna

Kathe McKenna currently serves as President of Natural Dharma Fellowship’s Board of Directors. She is deeply engaged in shepherding this unique, collaborative Buddhist dharma vessel. She helped launch the feisty, multi-faceted human service provider, Haley House, and led it through 50 years of organic growth. Kathe’s roles as mother, wife, and grandmother have enriched her vision and sparked her commitment to breaking down the barriers that solidify inequality – from dusty back roads in Mississippi to chanting and drumming with the Nipponzan Myohoji monks from the Peace Pagoda. Faced with the joint pincers of capitalism and the degraded state of our environment, Kathe is moving her attention in this new direction.

Tracie Palmer

Tracie graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and and earned her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She practiced law for ten years as a Philadelphia prosecutor and later as a civil trial attorney specializing in catastrophic personal injury and civil rights law. Tracie is currently a Master of Divinity student at Harvard Divinity School with a focus on Buddhism and chaplaincy. Her interests include illness, death and dying; grief, accompaniment, and ways of honoring our shared humanity across differences. After committing in earnest to a long-standing interest in the Dharma, Tracie found a spiritual home at Natural Dharma Fellowship in 2016. After four years in the Margha program, Tracie was invited to co-teach the Philadelphia Margha program alongside her dear Mitras, Gina Michaels and Heather Marg Bracken. She is deeply grateful to her teachers Lama Willa and Lama Liz and inspired by their teachings on embodiment and the divine feminine. She is also fortunate to be a student of Brendan Kennedy. Tracie currently lives in Boston with her beloved wife Cynthia. When she is not at school, you’ll likely find her in Provincetown communing with nature and the lingering lessons of Mary Oliver.

Details of this retreat

Live Online!

Curious about meditation from a Buddhist perspective? Join us for a daylong online-only retreat to explore how to observe the body-heart-mind in this present moment, cultivate compassion, and practice in community.

The Sanskrit word for meditation is bhavana, which means training the body-heart-mind to skillfully engage with what is here and now. During this daylong online-only retreat, we will learn how to let go of our incessant reliance on the conceptual, thinking mind to open into the expansive awareness of our true nature. We will explore how meditation can help us to cultivate compassion for ourselves and others, and experience the power of practicing in community.

Schedule
Saturday only: 9:30 am - 4:00 pm ET with breaks

Zoom Link
The Zoom link will be sent several days before the retreat to all those registered by then. If you register after that time, you'll receive the link soon after submitting your registration. If you don't see an email from Natural Dharma Registrar or Wonderwell Mountain Refuge, it may have mistakenly gone to your spam folder or to Promotions or Updates in Gmail.

Important: Please put this email address in your Contact or Safe-Send list to make sure you receive our emails:

register@naturaldharma.org

Program Cost
It is Natural Dharma Fellowship’s aspiration that no one be turned away from our teachings because they are unable to pay the full price. In order make our offerings affordable for all who wish to attend, we suggest a three-level fee structure:

May All Beings Benefit! – supporting access for all and assisting with the care and maintenance of Wonderwell Mountain Refuge
A Middle Way – covering the base cost
Held in Sangha Loving-kindness – offering ease when financial resources are limiting

The pricing options for a particular retreat are based primarily on its length and are intended to give you an idea of what it costs to offer that retreat. The amounts listed are suggestions. You may write in any amount that fits your financial situation. Any amount offered above the Middle Way level will be considered a tax-deductible donation and will be acknowledged as such in writing.

Access to Recordings
NDF offers unlimited access to recordings, which are accessed in your user dashboard (more information about user accounts provided in a pre-retreat letter). If you have a user account, please register with the same email you use to log into your dashboard. If not, an account will be created for you using your registration address.

Availability will vary depending on the type of event and the backlog for our precious resource volunteers. Thank you for your patience.

Wonderwell Mountain Refuge Full Calendar

Schedule

7:00 – 8:00 am Sunrise Meditation (with walking)
8:00 – 10:00 am Breakfast Break
10:00 – 11:00 am Dharma Teaching
11:15 am – 12:00pm Meditation Practice
12:00 – 2:00 pm Lunch Break
2:00 – 3:30 pm Yoga
4:00 – 5:00 pm Dharma Teaching
5:15 – 6:00 pm Meditation
6:00 – 7:30 pm Dinner Break
7:30 – 8:15 pm Meditation

Note: Schedule is approximate and may change

What's Included

Teachings,
Online Teaching Material

What's Not Included

Meals
Accommodation,
Personal Computer

Customer Reviews

5.00 out of 5.0 average rating

Kristen • Aug 12, 2021

5.0

Verified

Stellar!

Lama Liz and the Natural Dharma Fellowship community is so incredibly welcoming and kind. I have never seen a community so unbiased and open in my life! This is a community for new and experiences practitioners of Buddhism and is tremendously welcoming to all variations of faith of practice.

Watching the Mind: A Beginner-Friendly Daylong Retreat (Online Only)

Retreat Highlights

About this Retreat

Your Guides

Kathe McKenna

Tracie Palmer

Details of this retreat

Schedule

What's Included

What's Not Included

Customer Reviews

Kristen • Aug 12, 2021

Stellar!

Select your options

Sliding fee scale

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