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For full information and registration visit www.showingup.ie
We offer reduced-cost places to survivors and can support other retreatants with advice on a fundraising practice called ‘raising a mala’ to cover their retreat fee in full or in part. Please enquire to Niamh at bearingwitness2025@protonmail.com
From May 26 – 31 an Irish and international group of retreatants will come together to bear witness to this painful part of Ireland's recent history, supported by a dedicated retreat team and community and by the Three Tenets: Not Knowing, Bearing Witness and Taking Action, as conceived by Bernie Glassman, Roshi of Zen Peacemakers.
Anyone with an interest in this topic and its history and legacy is welcome to join us.
The retreat will be based in and around Cloughjordan ecovillage, for access to Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. Due to a limited supply of accommodation in the area, retreat places are limited to 40.
*Please note that while this is a Zen Peacemaker-inspired retreat, it is not organised by Zen Peacemakers International.
Roshi Frank De Waele (spiritual leader of the retreat)
https://www.zensangha.be/leraar/
Niamh Barrett
BA Hons, Post-grad Dip. Journalism, Certificate to teach MBSR (IMA)
Niamh began her training in teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 2007 with a foundation year at the University of Bangor in North Wales, and completed her training with the Institute for Mindfulness-Based Approaches (Germany), graduating in 2010. Prior to this, her working life was in documentary film and television production, latterly as a director on the environmental programme, 'Eco Eye'.
In 2010 she began teaching the MBSR programme in Kilkenny and Waterford and since 2013 she's offered it in Wicklow, Dublin city and online. She is also a mindfulness-teacher trainer and supervisor. Niamh has been a committed meditator for twenty years and regularly attends silent retreats and further training, receives supervision while teaching and adheres to the Good Practice Guidelines.
For a number of years she has been exploring the intersection of mindfulness and social engagement through her own practice, retreats and teaching. Beginning in summer 2019 she facilitated a group through a six-month, long-form mindfulness and social engagement project, showing up. In 2019 the showing up programme engaged directly with the ongoing housing and homelessness crisis in Ireland. With the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, these offerings moved online to facilitate mindfulness and 'connection circle' sessions to groups of foster carers, healthcare workers, school principals and members of the general public who wanted to connect in a mindful and meaningful way with others during the pandemic. The project continued online with anti-racism study groups and broadened to offer mindful engagement with the ecological emergency once back in-person.
Since 2017, Niamh has been participating in council circles and studying the Way of Council. Since 2023, she has organised council circle workshop training weekends in Ireland with trainers Jared and Ann Seide of U.S. organisation Beyond Us & Them.
Niamh is a student of Frank De Waele, Roshi in the tradition of Zen Peacemakers. In May 2025, along with Roshi Frank, she will co-lead a Bearing Witness retreat in Ireland on the theme of the Ireland's mother and baby homes.
