Therese Fitzgerald & Leslie Rawls
True Ease
March 26-30
4 nights
$260 ($130 deposit) Dana
This earliest of Spring gatherings is an invitation to taste the ease of Buddhist liberation, “the greatest relief.”
The Dharma talks will explore the Three Doors of Liberation—wishlessness or aimlessness, emptiness, and signlessness. These teachings can encourage us to become who we are rather than to seek outside ourselves in a striving way. We will learn how to focus on “non-separate-selfness,” seeing and experiencing connectedness and interbeing. We will investigate looking beyond the mere appearance of things. We will examine our perceptions closely and critically in order to have the best chance at seeing reality clearly.
We will practice sitting meditation periods of twenty-five minutes 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. She is the senior facilitator of the Charlotte Community of Mindfulness and the former editor of The Mindfulness Bell, a journal of mindful living. Leslie lives in Charlotte NC with her husband and two teenage children.