ZMM Retreats

Upcoming Retreats at Zen Mountain Monastery

Explore Zen Mountain Monastery through one of our upcoming retreats. Please don’t let financial issues prevent you from attending a program at the Monastery. If you can’t afford the program fee, there are options. If you are looking for retreats at the Zen Center of New York City, click here.

Click here to read about our response to the coronavirus outbreak and the online programming we’re offering while our centers are temporarily closed.
intro To Zen

INTRO TO ZEN WEEKEND

Experience Zen training for yourself. Our most popular retreat and a great place to start.

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Coming To The Monastery

COMING TO THE MONASTERY

How to enter the schedule and life of the Monastery for the first time. Come visit us on Mount Tremper.

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ONE-MONTH RETREAT

Each month we’re joined by individuals seeking an immersive experience of Monastery life.

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RETREAT CATEGORIES

– Arts

– Buddhist Studies

– Introductory

– Meditation Intensives

– Women’s Retreats

Upcoming Retreats at Zen Mountain Monastery

For the Love of Life: An Art Practice Series (over Zoom)

with Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei

July 3 - August 28, 2020
Buddhadharma teaches that our life can be experienced as a miraculous display of awakened nature in which all phenomenon spring from the same source, the ordinary magic of mind. In this new series, we will practice the wonder of how to meet the many aspects of ourselves, our materials, and objects with loving attention...

Active Hope: A Six-Part Series, Based on the Work of Joanna Macy

with Amy Shoko Brown

July 13 - August 17, 2020
 Joanna Macy’s book, Active Hope, offers a way to strengthen our capacity to face our world crises so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power.  Meetings provide a structure for sangha practice with what Macy calls "The Work That Reconnects" - coming from gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth in facing the mess we’re in.  While there will be some discussion, we’ll focus on experientials and heart-felt sharing...

Sacred Activity: A Seminar on Work Practice

with Mn. Gokan Bonebakker and Prabu Gikon Vasan

July 16, 2020
Work is something most of us spend a lot of our time engaging; a fundamental human activity. With the intention to wake up to our life, we can find ways to use work as a gate of practice: a way to study the self and to see more and more clearly. This is not easy, or simple. Most of us have a lot of conditioning around work...

Introduction to Zen Training Weekend (Online)

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

July 17 - 19, 2020
This online version of the Monastery’s popular monthly Introduction to Zen Training is an opportunity to engage these time-honored practices and begin a meditation practice at home or strengthen a practice that has already begun. Designed for those new to Zen training, this retreat introduces the Monastery’s Eight Gates program, an approach for taking up the whole of our lives as a path of spiritual practice. Led by a training staff of Monastics, Home Practicing Seniors and Teachers, this online immersion experience...

One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

July 20 - 26, 2020
Welcome to One Continuous Thread, a way to bring elements of a formal zazen intensive into your daily life. You will be able to view and participate in parallel with ZMM's Interdependence Sesshin via live webcast. We've designed this retreat keeping in mind the unique circumstances that each person finds themselves in...

Beginning Instruction

with MRO Teachers and Senior Staff

July 26, 2020
Zen Mountain Monastery
A chance to receive beginning instruction in Zen meditation and an orientation to the Sunday program, which you will join following this brief class. You will have a chance to try out different meditation postures and set-ups, so plan to wear loose, comfortable clothing. Please plan to sign on promptly at 9:45, and in order to experience the full service…

The Still Point

with Mn. Gokan Bonebakker

July 31, 2020
“We seem to have lost the ability to just be quiet, to simply be present in the stillness that is the foundation of our lives. Yet if we never get in touch with that stillness, we never fully experience our lives.”  —Daido Roshi This evening retreat offers the chance to develop your relationship to zazen. We’ll do this through exploring meditation as well as guided study and reflection. We will look at the subtleties of meditation posture, at ancient and contemporary teachings on mindfulness meditation and at zazen as a practice of training the mind...

Half-Day Sit

with MRO Seniors

August 1, 2020
Zazen is the art of being. Being is a simple thing; it is the act of existing conscious and aware and to be taken underneath the conceptual mind, to the heart of the miracle of being. Let us reach our deepest, most direct experience of being together creating a refuge to live and meet the challenges and joys of letting go...

Green Bodhisattva Poetry

with Margaret Gibson

August 6, 2020
In this workshop we’ll explore how the practice of poetry can open up a Bodhisattva way of being with the planet: acknowledging the undeniable new fact of life: climate crisis. We will explore how the practice of poetry can assist in keeping our minds and hearts focused and open, our power of attention awake and intimate, writing poems that demonstrate interdependence...

Precepts I: Entering the Way of Compassion

with Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi

August 8, 2020
The moral and ethical teachings of the Buddha are fundamental to all schools of Buddhism and they are a vital aspect of training within the Mountains and Rivers Order. Easily misunderstood as a simple list of rules, the Precepts are a profound expression of compassion grounded in open-ended awareness and wisdom...

Beginning Instruction

with MRO Teachers and Senior Staff

August 9, 2020
Zen Mountain Monastery
A chance to receive beginning instruction in Zen meditation and an orientation to the Sunday program, which you will join following this brief class. You will have a chance to try out different meditation postures and set-ups, so plan to wear loose, comfortable clothing. Please plan to sign on promptly at 9:45, and in order to experience the full service…

Introduction to Zen Training Weekend (Online)

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

August 14 - 16, 2020
This online version of the Monastery’s popular monthly Introduction to Zen Training is an opportunity to engage these time-honored practices and begin a meditation practice at home or strengthen a practice that has already begun. Designed for those new to Zen training, this retreat introduces the Monastery’s Eight Gates program, an approach for taking up the whole of our lives as a path of spiritual practice. Led by a training staff of Monastics, Home Practicing Seniors and Teachers, this online immersion experience...

One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

August 17 - 23, 2020
Welcome to One Continuous Thread, a way to bring elements of a formal zazen intensive into your daily life. You will be able to view and participate in parallel with ZMM's Interdependence Sesshin via live webcast. We've designed this retreat keeping in mind the unique circumstances that each person finds themselves in...

Beginning Instruction

with MRO Teachers and Senior Staff

August 23, 2020
Zen Mountain Monastery
A chance to receive beginning instruction in Zen meditation and an orientation to the Sunday program, which you will join following this brief class. You will have a chance to try out different meditation postures and set-ups, so plan to wear loose, comfortable clothing. Please plan to sign on promptly at 9:45, and in order to experience the full service…

One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

September 21 - 27, 2020
Welcome to One Continuous Thread, a way to bring elements of a formal zazen intensive into your daily life. You will be able to view and participate in parallel with ZMM's Interdependence Sesshin via live webcast. We've designed this retreat keeping in mind the unique circumstances that each person finds themselves in...

One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

October 19 - 25, 2020
Welcome to One Continuous Thread, a way to bring elements of a formal zazen intensive into your daily life. You will be able to view and participate in parallel with ZMM's Interdependence Sesshin via live webcast. We've designed this retreat keeping in mind the unique circumstances that each person finds themselves in...

One Continuous Thread: Home Practice Intensive

with Shugen Roshi & Hojin Sensei

November 16 - 22, 2020
Welcome to One Continuous Thread, a way to bring elements of a formal zazen intensive into your daily life. You will be able to view and participate in parallel with ZMM's Interdependence Sesshin via live webcast. We've designed this retreat keeping in mind the unique circumstances that each person finds themselves in...