Wabi-Sabi retreat
Friday 7 June -Sunday 16 June 2024
Lead by Vajradharshini
Costs: €630 (reduced/student rate: €495)
An intensive meditation retreat around the theme of Wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic, which finds beauty and truth in our simple, ordinary experiences.
The Dharma teaches that everything changes, nothing is ever complete and real satisfaction seems always out of reach. These are the harsh truths of human life. And yet… there is a beauty in being human. Transformation isn’t about moving away from life, it’s about going more deeply into it.
With the help of meditation and wabi-sabi, we’ll look deeply into our experience of the 3 marks of existence (laksanas), impermanence, insubstantiality and dissatisfaction. There we can find the doorways to true freedom.
We’ll take a down-to-earth approach to Dharma practice. And draw widely on the Buddhist tradition and on contemporary art and culture, weaving them together to create an engaging and enjoyable retreat. You can expect a week of reflection and meditation, with some long periods of silence.
The title of the retreat, A Modest Awakening, comes from an article by Andrew Olendzki. It’s a reminder that transformation isn’t about moving away from life, but going more deeply into it. It’s here and now in our ordinary human life that we have the opportunity to wake up.
“If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognise it? ” Ernst Haas