Cultivate the inherent qualities of the mind: relaxation, stability and strength.

Deepen your connection to your practice and open your heart. Intensive practice provides a profoundly fresh view of our life—so precious in this increasingly hectic world. Designed for both newcomers and experienced students, this retreat can be attended as a whole or in weekly segments. It will include sitting and walking meditation, private interviews with a meditation instructor, and contemplative study of the four foundations of mindfulness. Meals will be taken in Zen oryoki style, and periods of silence will be observed.

For a deep immersion into the path of meditation and warriorship, we invite you to attend the entire dathün. You may also participate in one or more of our weeklong segments. Register below if you wish to attend Week I. To register for the full dathün or another week click on the appropriate link below:

Full dathün: July 26 – August 23
Week II: August 2 – 9
Week III: August 9 – 16
Weeks III & IV: August 9 – 23 (Note: Attendance in Week IV requires participation in at least one of the earlier weeks.)

Acharya Gaylon Ferguson, a senior teacher in the Shambhala tradition and member of the core faculty at Naropa University, has led meditation retreats since 1976. He is author of Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With.

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Due to restrictions on water usage at Shambhala Mountain Center, laundry for participants staying two weeks or more will be done professionally off site. The fee is $20 for those staying for two weeks and $40 for those staying for three weeks. This fee is not included in the total cost of the program below.

Extend Your Stay. We are offering a 25% housing discount for additional nights. Come early and relax before your program starts or stay an extra day or more after this program to savor your retreat experience.

Please arrive between 10am and 4pm. Early arrival is encouraged. No program activities are scheduled for the departure day. View Detailed Program Information.

Excerpt from Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With by Gaylon Ferguson

Introduction

This book encourages spiritual awakening. Initially, I called it “waking up from the nightmare of materialism.” The approach presented here begins with wakefulness as our original, basic state of being alive. The journey of meditation practice follows as a natural unfolding of this innate awareness and kindness. The result of walking the spiritual path is experiencing the openness and warmth of life in community. These are the three main sections of the book: (1) contemplating wakefulness and sleep; (2) the practice of meditation as a way of uncovering our original nature; and (3) gathering with others as the expression of wakeful compassion. It seemed particularly important, given that we live in a time of such pervasive fear and doubt about each other's fundamental goodness, to end by reflecting on the essential importance of establishing sane communities. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called this the dream of beloved community.

Before you take the journey through what's written here, let me say something about how I came to write this. I entered the path outlined here in the early '70s at Tail of the Tiger Buddhist Meditation Center in northern Vermont. There, following some summer seminars in buddhadharma, I received instruction in sitting practice from the Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I do not recall the words he used to convey the meditative state, but the atmosphere sitting with him was vivid and seemed the essence of the communication.

Following some years of practice—including in particular several month-long meditation retreats—I began leading group meditation retreats in the mid-1970s at the suggestion of my teacher. I was still a relatively inexperienced meditation instructor, having just taught two courses in mindfulness and insight at the recently formed Naropa Institute. The first group retreat I led was a small (perhaps twenty participants) month-long program in northern California. When the retreat's co-leader informed me that she needed to leave for an important weekend with our teacher in Boulder, Colorado, I greeted this news with much late-night pacing, worrying, and general anxiety about the well-being of the fledgling meditators temporarily left in my care. I was not quite twenty-four.

The month passed uneventfully—one night a bat got into a participant's room, and we gently coaxed it back outside. In the long hot days of sitting, there were several earnest requests for mid-day treks to a local river. We persevered, as it says in the Chinese classic, rising near dawn for sitting and walking, and then sitting and walking again and again until nine or so every evening. The mostly vegetarian food we all helped prepare was decent, and the overall spiritual companionship of the group supportive and encouraging.

I do not recall anyone attaining enlightenment—or even any of the temporary experiences of satori and kensho I had read about years earlier as an impressionable teenager poring over Three Pillars of Zen and the writings of D. T. Suzuki in my messy college dorm room. Over the course of the month I gave several nervous, stammering talks on the relationship of awakened nature and meditation practice, and I met one-to-one with each of the participants. Amidst the meandering recounting of stories of previous engagements with other spiritual practices and encounters with various swamis, roshis, lamas, Druids, Gurdjieff teachers, and Krishnamurti (this was, after all, not that far from the 1960s), I eventually noticed a theme.

All of us tended to approach our meditation practice with either much more exertion than was necessary (or helpful), or, tiring ourselves out from a day of gung-ho sitting, we lapsed into looseness. Basically, we were either trying too hard or not making enough effort. I remembered the Buddha's early instruction on finding a middle way between excessive tightness and looseness. As with learning a dance like the Argentine tango, this simple yet profound teaching is something one has to actually do to understand fully. Tightening and loosening are said to be skills used by even advanced meditators practicing mahamudra meditation.

Eventually a key connection dawned: tightening and loosening are directly related to joining nature and training, two important principles along the path. There is the need for both trust in our innate wakefulness and confidence in the path to uncovering that nature. When we are excessively tight, vigilantly on guard, there is not enough appreciation of our fundamentally awake nature. Right meditation is not a matter of successfully manipulating our experience. Practicing with relaxed appreciation of basic wakefulness can become a part of living a life of non-aggression. On the other hand, if—hearing the message of original goodness—we confidently lapse into daydream upon daydream, then clearly there is not enough application of discipline and exertion. The teachings in this book are based on appreciating original nature while training in meditation.

Beginning with a three-month intensive training program in 1999, I received a second wave of classic instructions in the practice of Buddhist meditation, this time from Trungpa Rinpoche's lineage heir and eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. In the dozens of weekend, week-long, and month-long group meditation retreats I have taught over the last decade, these two dharma streams have merged into one river of instruction. The book is dedicated to these two meditation masters, holders of the treasury of oral instructions of the Practice Lineage, because they are the source of the meditation teachings in this book and in the group retreats it is based on. If there are mistakes in transmitting this pure gold, the fault is solely my own.

A Note on the Book's Format
Natural Wakefulness contains, alongside teachings about this particular approach to the spiritual path, a sequence of guided contemplations and meditation exercises. Occasionally there are also dialogues—question and answer exchanges—with comments and insights from many meditators practicing these instructions in group retreats. The questioning voices in these dialogues appear in either quotation marks or italicized type like this: If we're all naturally awake, why do we need to train in meditating? These exchanges are essential to the experience of reading this book. They display and celebrate the interweaving of confusion and insight that is the experience of walking the path for many of us. Your own questions and discoveries while reading and meditating become an important part of this shared unfolding of basic wisdom. Welcome to the twenty-five-hundred-year-old conversation!