2023 Snow Lion Winter Retreat
With Arawana Hayashi and Gaylon Ferguson
December 27, 2023 - January 2, 2024
Program is fully booked
This hybrid retreat is offered in person at Sky Lake, with a Zoom option available. It is open to all beginning and experienced meditators.
You are warmly invited to join our annual holiday meditation intensive, an opportunity to fully immerse oneself in five days of mindfulness-awareness practice. We live in challenging times. Practicing mindfulness together invites steadiness and stability, a settled confident openness to the personal and societal struggles of daily life. Awareness rises like the full moon of insight into compassion-emptiness, limitless loving-kindness for all living beings.
In addition to daily meditation practice, participants hear talks, have lively group conversations about practice and meditation in action, engage in embodiment practices, and meet with experienced meditation teachers.
Topics to contemplate in this year’s retreat will include: the four foundations of mindfulness, making friends with oneself and others, synchronizing body and mind, the bravery of turning towards–rather than seeking escape from–suffering. We can experience the enormous difficulties in our world today and cultivate the courage to engage fully with life.
Some of the days we’ll be in silence, which encourages opening to our direct experience of sense perceptions in the brilliantly vivid environment of Sky Lake at this time of year: snow-covered trees, silent woods, and the sounds of winter birds.
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Scholarships:
We would like to make this retreat possible for as many as reasonably can be accommodated.
Please be in touch with us via email by December 7 so you may be considered.
Please include in your email: name, in person or hybrid, partial or full retreat, how much discount you need to attend. We will make the decisions quickly so people may plan accordingly.
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Leaders
Arawana Hayashi
Arawana’s career has been in dance, both in the theater and in communities, with a focus on cultivating individual presence and group awareness and creativity. She began to meditate and study with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche in 1974, and has been teaching Shambhala Training and Dharma Art practices since 1980. She currently works with the Presencing Institute, creating with colleagues an art form called Social Presencing Theater, which brings the contemplative teachings of Shambhala art into the field of social change. She is the author of Social Presencing Theater: The Art of Making a True Move.
Learn more about Arawana Hayashi
Arawana’s career has been in dance, both in the theater and in communities, with a focus on cultivating individual presence and group awareness and creativity. She began to meditate and study with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche in 1974, and has been teaching Shambhala Training and Dharma Art practices since 1980. She currently works with the Presencing Institute, creating with colleagues an art form called Social Presencing Theater, which brings the contemplative teachings of Shambhala art into the field of social change. She is the author of Social Presencing Theater: The Art of Making a True Move.
Learn more about Arawana Hayashi
Gaylon Ferguson
Gaylon Ferguson, PhD, is a senior teacher in the Shambhala and Buddhist traditions who has been leading meditation retreats since 1976. He was a member of Naropa University’s core faculty and is the author of Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With. Additionally, his article, “Making Friends with Ourselves,” was selected for inclusion in The Best Buddhist Writing 2005 and his essay “No Color, All Colors” appears in the book, Mindful Politics.
Learn more about Gaylon Ferguson
Gaylon Ferguson, PhD, is a senior teacher in the Shambhala and Buddhist traditions who has been leading meditation retreats since 1976. He was a member of Naropa University’s core faculty and is the author of Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With. Additionally, his article, “Making Friends with Ourselves,” was selected for inclusion in The Best Buddhist Writing 2005 and his essay “No Color, All Colors” appears in the book, Mindful Politics.
Learn more about Gaylon Ferguson
