Therese Fitzgerald & Leslie Rawls
Generating True Presence
April 11-15
4 nights $240 ($120 deposit) Dana
This retreat will be a time to focus on how to generate presence or intimacy with ourselves and life. Daily dharma talks will reflect on the Buddhist teachings of the "Dharma Seals" – impermanence, interbeing, dissatisfactoriness, and extinction of concepts – as fuel for the practice of being present with ourselves and all beings.
We will practice twenty-five minute periods of sitting meditation interspersed with indoor walking meditation several times each day. There will also be outdoor walking meditation, mindful meals in silence, yoga, and focused discussion groups that will encourage and ground us.
Recommended for both beginning and experienced meditators, this retreat will be conducted in partial silence.
Therese Fitzgerald is a native Charlottean who brings decades of dharma experience both at the San Francisco and Tassajara Zen Centers with Richard Baker-roshi, and then with Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh who ordained her as a teacher in 1994. Therese is co-founder of the Community of Mindful Living in Berkeley CA, and Dharma Friends, based on Maui. She works as a Dharma mentor and meditation retreat leader, and she offers weekly meditation sessions at Maui Community Correctional Center.
Leslie Rawls began studying Buddhism in 1970. She became a student of Thich Nhat Hanh in the early 1990s, and he ordained her as a minister in the Buddhist Order of Interbeing in 1995. Leslie lives in Charlotte NC with her husband and two teenage children. She is the senior facilitator of the Charlotte Community of Mindfulness and the former editor of The Mindfulness Bell, a journal of mindful living.