Generating True Presence
A Meditation Retreat With Therese Fitzgerald and Wendy Johnson

Wednesday, March 21-Sunday, March 25
Camp Mitchell
Petit Jean Mountain, Morrilton, Arkansas
 
This retreat will be dedicated to generating presence or intimacy with ourselves and our lives. 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.

Participants will also practice 25-minute periods of meditation interspersed with indoor walking meditation several times a day, as well as outdoor walking meditation, mindful meals in silence, yoga, focused discussion groups, and private practice interviews, which will encourage and ground us.  Partial silence will be maintained throughout the retreat.

This will be a four-day retreat. In special cases participants may attend for three days, but the teachers would like to wholeheartedly encourage participants to set aside the time to attend the full retreat and benefit from the entire program of meditation, study, and contemplation. This is the first retreat of this length since 1994, when Therese Fitzgerald first gave a retreat in Arkansas.

Therese Fitzgerald trained 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. She works as a Dharma mentor and meditation retreat leader, and she offers weekly meditation sessions at Maui Community Correctional Center.      

Wendy Johnson has been practicing Zen meditation since 1972. Ordained as a lay Dharma teacher by Thich Nhat Hanh, Wendy has also trained at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California for more than three decades, combining engaged meditation and organic gardening practice. Her book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, will be published by Bantam Books early in 2008.

You are also invited to attend a public talk that will be held Tuesday, March 20, 2007,  from 7:00 –8:30 P.M. at the Ecumenical Buddhist Society, 1015 West Second Street, Little Rock, Arkansas.

For more information and registration, visit http://www.ebslr.org/event_fitzgerald_johnson.html