This is the only retreat Flint Sparks will be teaching in person for the remainder of 2024. Contact: awakeningtogethermn@gmail.com or Website: https://www.awakeningtogetherzen.org/ for more infomation.
Register here: https://www.awakeningtogetherzen.org/events/2024FallRetreat
The retreat will be held in person in St. Paul, MN and online.
The retreat takes place October 10-12, from 8-5 daily.
Here is the retreat description:
The Zen path describes itself with a fourfold phrase:
A distinct transmission beyond collected teachings,
Not established on words and language.
Directly pointing to the heartmind,
Encounter original nature and enact awake awareness—Be Buddha!
The path to wakefulness and liberation is relational—relating to oneself, with one another, with teachers. And with the objects, circumstances, and actions of everyday living. We can bring forth inherent freedom in each moment, relating and responding to life as it is, with natural wisdom and spontaneous compassion. Giving ourselves fully in this way, we can encounter, recognize, enact, and reveal what Zen calls our “original nature.”
The Zen tradition has handed down to us scraps of story which serve as encouraging evidence that this kind of relational awakening and living is possible. These enlightening stories are poetic distillations that reveal—and can offer to us—moments of liberating realization. Teachers present these encounter dialogues as skillful means to tease and invite the mind and heart to loosen the grip on habitual hindrances. Engaging these stories helps us meet life with free- flowing immediacy. But first they help us see where we are stuck in our conditioned answers to life. And where we are stuck is precisely where we encounter and realize freedom.
In this retreat, we’ll meet four of these stories and the fourfold phrase of Zen above. We’ll plunge into this way of relating through zazen and other Zen forms of moving, living, and loving together. We’ll enact it through silence and through dharma teaching, discussion, and activity.
Please join us as we encounter it together.