Residential Retreat - September 6 - 11, 2019
Guided by Santikaro

at The Portiuncula Center for Prayer, Frankfort IL

This retreat will explore our bodies as a field for mindful curiosity and insight. Bodies are sensate experiences, sources of pleasure and pain, jumbles of perceptions, emotional echo chambers, and fields of concocting. The wisdom teachings of Buddhism play a key role in our inquiry by enabling us to refine mindfulness, relax into deeper concentration, and awaken compassion. Buddhist mindfulness practices start with body and help us uncover the realities of an embodied sense experience. Through awareness our sensitivity grows, and we discover kindness & compassion, as well as clarity & insight.

Learning Intentions: Skillful means for living more fully within our bodies will be offered. Developing the first establishment of mindfulness (mindfulness of the body) will lead into the other three establishments (mindfulness of feeling tones, mind, and dhammas). Meditation exercises will explore balance, relaxation, comfort, and caring.

This retreat will be suitable for beginners and experienced meditators alike.

Santikaro is a teacher of Dhamma & meditation according to the middle way of the early sources. He lived as a Buddhist monk for 19 years training under and translating for Ajahn Buddhadasa, a Thai Theravada master. After retiring from the monkhood in 2004 he founded Kevala Retreat, a modern expression of Buddhist practice, study and social responsibility located in rural southwestern Wisconsin with his wife, Jo Marie Thompson.

He is also a student and teacher of the Enneagram, the Dhamma of Social Justice and is interested in the healing of addiction & trauma within a Buddhist framework. Diagnosed with lymphoma in 2010, he learned much through the process of treatment & recovery. He is actively teaching throughout the USA and internationally.

Questions? Please contact the retreat registrar.