To All –
I warmly invite you to The 8th Annual Summer Retreat in August 2012. Year after year people come from all over the world to gather for this extraordinary week. They come for rest, for refreshment, for friendship, and a spiritual adventure that will reset the moral compass of their lives.

Guiding us through the week will be the extraordinary Lama Marut. A powerhouse of a teacher, he kicks the props out right away. For Lama Marut, teaching is not a dry, academic exercise. It’s a moment to open the door. While he’s fearless in his aim, he will lead you through with warmth, humor and the utmost care.

This is not a religious retreat. Lama Marut will be talking about Tibetan Buddhist ideas, many of which are unique in the world, but he’s not teaching them because they’re Buddhist, he’s teaching them because they work. They enhance every tradition.

This year the subject of the retreat is wisdom and compassion, the two wings without which the human spirit can’t fly.

Diamonds stand for ultimate truth or wisdom. This doesn’t mean the mere accumulation of facts or the ability to make distinctions. It refers to how reality is really working. You may be surprised - it’s not what you think. Lama Marut will unlock this mystery with a key found in the oldest printed book in the world, The Diamond Cutter Sutra.

Hearts refer to living with an open heart. We have an intrinsic desire to live this way, but our tendency is to look out for ourselves. We don’t live out of “do unto others” because we don’t know why we should. Ultimately, it doesn’t quite make sense - it never seems to be to our advantage. Our problem is not that we’re bad, our problem is that we don’t know what we’re doing. Love that is uninformed has no power. Wisdom and compassion must coexist.

My husband, Rick Blue, and I will give these teachings on love based on ancient texts considered so radical they were kept secret for hundreds of years.

Wild Cards You’ll learn to play a masterful hand. Cindy Lee is a magical, lyrical, and exceptionally insightful teacher, with long experience on a spiritual path. She and Lama Marut will speak out of their own experience on how to fearlessly put these principles into play.

Shoot the Moon is the term for a key maneuver in the classic card game Hearts. Normally to win at Hearts you play it safe and avoid acquiring any hearts at all by passing them off on your fellow players, but there’s a radical tactic you can use to turn the tide: you “shoot the moon”, reverse the norm, and go for all the hearts. If you succeed, the win is huge.
On a bigger scale, when you quit playing it safe, you stop cutting a deal with suffering. So ante up; get in the game. It’s going to change your life.

Our magnificent team of yoga teachers, Michael and Stephanie Johnson of Clearlight Yoga, Julie Upton, David Thornton and Dr. Pattie O’Brien will be teaching at all levels various kinds of yoga, from Tibetan Heart Yoga, a practice of the Dalai Lamas designed to open the heart, to the rarely taught yoga of Lady Niguma, which gently and systematically redistributes the life forces in the body. Bob Arnold will offer Tai Chi, the Chinese art that brings balance to the body and harmony to the mind.

There will be meditation, and personal meditation instruction. There will be open time to simply relax, and some silence in the middle of the week. We do this so that you can absorb what’s being taught on a very deep level. There are people balk at this, but the actual experience is wonderful, and you’ll find it comes as a relief. It might turn out to be the first real break you’ve ever taken.

The venue is beautiful, and the atmosphere of the retreat is warm and welcoming. If you’ve never done anything like it before, this would be a wonderful way to start.

So take the time to browse our website and if we haven’t answered your questions, please feel free to contact us.

I sincerely hope you’ll join us - you’ll relax, and refresh yourself, and return home with the means to be happier than you ever imagined.

Lindsay