Events

Being told that nothing is the matter challenges our ideas about reality. Being asked what we think we lack helps us appreciate that the questioner knows what it is to feel that lack, which opens us to what they have to say about it.

The Book of Serenity is collection of 100 koans and poems, which was assembled for Yelu Chucai, a minister of Ghenghis Khan. The book was lost in the wars and rewritten and when it finally arrived out on the steppes, the ministers sat up all night in a yurt reading and discussing it.

Centuries ago, Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China, traveled the mysterious journey from India.
Students, for years, would pose the classical question: Why did he come from the West? That question,
fundamentally, is our question. Why are we here?

When you walk through the gate, you meet the old masters. They were ancestors and adventurers who explored consciousness and handed down a tradition of freedom. You see these old men and women face to face or even more, see with their eyes, know for yourself the way they moved in the world. You can learn a different way of listening to your life, and even the dark bits of life become luminous.

You might be sitting on a hillside in Summer, or tumbling in a car wreck, or being kissed, or hearing a song, when suddenly everything changes. Making yourself available to this awakening depends on the the freedom that comes from knowing who you really are.

In this retreat we will invite our Ancestors, in the largest sense, to join us and let us know where they have been traveling this past year. We all have ancestors whom we might want to come to terms with, or forgive or celebrate or ask a blessing of.

Life keeps throwing us into darkness, the unknown, the unforeseen. Things are lost for a time, we fetch around in the dark and feel our way in a world without defined edges. This can even be a blessing. And then something tells us it’s time to come back into the light. How do we get found? That’s a meditation question.

Learn more about the different styles of retreat offered by PZI. Silence, companionship, creativity, ordinary mind: they’re all here.

Plan ahead, by checking out this list of all currently scheduled PZI retreats.

Save the dates! We’d love to have you along.