'Spring Mind' Sesshin 2022 leadership registration: by invitation only

Where: Cloud Mountain and online home hermitage hybrid sesshin

"Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon,

Summer with a breeze, winter with snow.

When foolish things don’t stick in the mind,

This is your best season ."

With Wumen’s words and Spring in the air, the great season of sesshin beckons once more. And with a degree of Covid breathing space opening up at last, we’re breathing life back into our home dojo, with a hybrid in-person/online Spring Sesshin – culminating in a Spring Jukai to which all are welcome to attend in person, and share in a celebratory picnic afterwards.

Sesshin rhythm and depth of practice found its way with considerable ease into online forms, in these Covid years, drawing on what our bodies seem to know about how to come all the way home in silence and attentive stillness, even when sitting ‘alone together’ online.   But at last it feels possible to move carefully back into a limited degree of in-person sesshin once more, while also opening the dojo wide open to an online space of practice ‘ beamed in’ to the dojo in hybrid form.

The traditional seven-day Spring Sesshin has always been the deep well of practice from which all the other forms seem to freely draw their power of transformation and strength of me-and-you connection.  Please join us for this Spring celebration of body and mind and the deeply quiet place where you are – which is always where practice begins fresh, over and again.

Online participation is open to all, but in-person participation is limited to the three people doing Jukai, and around ten or twelve other people approached to participate in person for their extensive sesshin and leadership experience, an ability to help conduct this hybrid form while maintaining sesshin form and leadership roles, with numbers carefully limited to permit social distancing in the dojo.

The timetable of silence, zazen, sutras, dokusan (both online and in person), and evening teisho will closely follow the pattern found to best fit online sesshin participation, with longer rest breaks built in.  We will enter sesshin on Saturday evening and follow sesshin timetable through to a closing ceremony on Friday morning, then a rest afternoon on Friday, before regathering for the Jukai ceremony at 10am on Saturday morning, followed by community picnic to celebrate the dojo reopening (ending 3pm).

So ~ let no foolish thing stick in your mind and don’t delay. Secure your place online now, here

COVID safe policy:  No in-person dojo attendance with symptoms, or within one week of testing positive with Covid. A negative RAT result before entry is greatly appreciated. Isolating on site will be necessary if symptoms appear during sesshin and Covid confirmed by RAT. Use masks indoors if unvaccinated or vulnerable in terms of underlying health issues. Take all appropriate care with social distancing, and Covid-safe sanitation practices in all food handling etc. Attendance on Saturday – also open to all on this basis.