From monkey mind to wild mind
Thursday 26 June – Sunday 29 June 2025
With Gerda Blees and Silavadin (Dutch spoken)
Costs: €225 (reduction rate €180)
Writer and zenbuddhist Natalie Goldberg had been writing and meditating for years, but for her these were different things. Until one day her Zen-teacher said: ‘Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough, it will bring you everywhere’.
She discovered that through writing she could bring herself from ‘monkey mind’ to ‘wild mind’. Wild mind is like the unmeasurable blue sky in which anything is possible. Monkey mind is also familiar to us, it’s our everyday mind that looks back and ahead and is constantly searching stimulation, like a monkey jumping from tree to tree.
Our practical mind is needed for daily life, but as monkey mind it can get in the way of deeper insight. Meditation and other buddhist practices are ways to put our minds at ease, so that it can open up to what is. That way we can acces wild mind. In this retreat we are discovering how to do that through writing. We will do excercises from the method of Natalie Goldberg, we will meditate, there will be talks about writing and buddhism, and there will be periods of silence.