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Booking via link below. A €300 deposit is required and the completion of application form. Balance to be paid by 1st June 2025. Application Forms: For an application form please email info@mindfulness.ie
Dates: August 10th - 16th 2025
Venue: De La Salle Pastoral Centre, Castletown, County Laois
Cost: We are keeping the fees as low as we can as we do not seek to make any profit from our retreats. It is important to us that we keep the retreats we offer as affordable as possible so that they can be inclusive. We offer the option to pay by installments. Please get in touch with us on info@mindfulness.ie if this is something you wish to avail of.
Standard shared single: €775; standard single occupancy: €890; single en-suite: €990.
Donations:
To allow us to be able to continue to be sustainable and inclusive in the current climate we would very much welcome donations so that we can continue to offer places at reduced rates. We hope to offer rates which continue to reflect our intention that anyone who would like to attend can do so, through collective generosity. Please consider making a donation, no matter how small.
Suitable for:
The retreat is open to anyone with previous experience of similar types of silent retreat of 5 days or longer. It is important that you have had some experience of being on retreat, in silence, before undertaking a retreat of this length.
The Retreat:
This retreat is an opportunity to put aside time to dedicate it to your personal practice, without the usual pressures of daily life. You are invited into silence, supported by others also practising in silence. This can be such a supportive environment in which to immerse ourselves in living wakefully, coming closer to our own experience, coming to know 'the stranger who was yourself.'
For mindfulness teachers and teacher trainees, personal meditation practice is an essential foundation for thsi work, and participation in silent teacher-led mindfulness meditation retreats is part of all Good Practice Guidelines. This retreat satisfies the MTAI criteria for a mindfulness teacher's annual retreat.
This retreat will explore aspects of the discourses of the Buddha which are the foundation for the so-called 'modern mindfulness movement.': Part of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Awakening Factors and the Karaniya Metta Sutta, the Buddha's words on Loving Kindness (or boundless friendliness). These are profound teachings that encourage us to place the path of freedom and compassion in the classroom of our lives, nurturing a heart that is receptive and unshakeable. Developing the capacity to encounter our own inner and outer experience with equanimity and curiosity creates a foundation for meeting the experiences of our students and clients, in offering mindfulness-based interventions.
Each day will offer a sustained schedule of formal meditation practice (both Insight and Metta), group meetings with the teachers, talks and instructions, all within an underlying environment of silence. There will be periods of guided mindful movement each day.
Access: We welcome people with disabilities to our retreat. Please contact us with your specific needs relating to disability, long-term illness or health condition.
We offer rates which continue to reflect our intention that anyone who would like to attend can do so, through collective generosity. Please consider making a donation, no matter how small.
Supporter's rate:
Pay for yourself and help support one person to join on a Bursary with any further donation you feel able to offer.
Concession rate:
For those in financial hardship who cannot afford our full priced rate (see below for more) - talk to the organisers about your situation and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Cancellation policy:
Cancellations up to 1st June 2025 will incur a €50 administration fee.
Cancellations after 1st June 2025 will incur the loss of the deposit.
The organisers may waive cancellation fees in exceptional circumstances, at their discretion.
Prior to your retreat, we will send some more information about what to expect whilst at Castletown.
Born in Berne (CH) and raised in Swiss-German. After early intuitions sparked my interest in meditation as a teenager, I came across Buddhist instructions via contemplative exercises in a Christian context and Aikido. Learned to sit still in the Soto Zen traditions in Switzerland, Italy and France. First Vipassana retreats in the insight meditation movement. From the mid-1980s onwards I lived in the monasteries of Ajahn Chah’s communities in England and after two years as a novice, I became a monk (bhikkhu) in the forest tradition of the Theravāda lineage at Chithurst, (GB) under Ajahn Sumedho’s tutelage .
The following years were devoted to contemplative training and communal practice in the English-speaking monasteries of the Ajahn Chah lineage. The training continued with a different emphasis after a move to Thailand (1992) and several years of language and Sutta studies with Bhikkhu Payutto (now Somdet Buddhaghosajahn). I enjoyed the privileges of a double life: long periods of practice in forest monasteries (mostly those of Ajahn Chah’s disciples) alternated with periods of study with Bhikkhu Payutto. Besides my commitment to the monastic communities, meditation practice and Buddhist studies, I was continuously engaged in understanding Western and Buddhist psychology and their roles in contemplative life.
1998 brought a return to the West: I experienced formative years in Dhammapala Monastery’s small community in Switzerland. Monastic and extensive extramural meditation and Dharma teaching. Explicit training in Buddhist psychotherapy and Focusing in England as of 2001.
In spring 2005, after 20 years of monastic life, I left the monastic fold and lifestyle. Since then I have been teaching as an independent meditation and Dharma teacher in Europe and overseas; as of 2010, I’ve been running a private psychotherapeutic practice.
My psychotherapeutic training took place at the Karuna Institute, (Devon, UK); I am an accredited member of the English professional associations for psychotherapists (UKCP) and for Core Process Psychotherapy (ACPP) and have an M.A. in Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy Practice (Middlesex University, London).
Around 2012 I started Atammaya Cologne and in 2015 co-founded Bodhi College for whose programmes and trainings I’m a regular teacher. My wife and I live in Germany’s Rhineland area.
I started my professional life as a Gynecologist at the University Hospital in Berlin, Germany, doing clinical work while trying to make a name for myself through conducting and publishing research papers in gynecological oncology. I had fallen in love with the universality of the Buddhist teachings as a searching teenager and it surely helped me stay sane through medical school and residency.
In 2003 my husband, baby daughter and I moved to Los Angeles “for just one year” as I enjoyed my maternity leave. I met Trudy Goodman, a Zen and Insight meditation teacher who had just started an organization called “InsightLA” a few months prior.
Trudy and I deeply connected and she encouraged me to train as an MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) teacher to share with my patients once back home in Berlin. While we were still in LA, we started teaching MBSR together – which turned out to be a very high-in-demand class, which Trudy and I enjoyed teaching immensely. We ended up staying in LA and I was a part of growing InsightLA from its tiny beginnings into a thriving, wonderful big community, which I still call my spiritual home today and through which I do a lot of of my teachings.
I trained as a Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) teacher, became an MBSR teacher trainer, and the head consultant and trainer for the national mindfulness facilitator training for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the biggest health care provider in the US. I realized that the combination of my medical and mindfulness training is a powerful combination to train fellow clinicians to teach mindfulness as well as helping patients cope with their health issues.
In 2015 my dear friend and colleague from the VA, Dr. Greg Serpa, and I published the book “A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness”, which became required reading for numerous mindfulness teacher programs around the world. My second book , “Outsmart Your Pain” on practicing mindfulness for chronic pain, was published in 2021.
On the Buddhist side, I received teacher transmission from Trudy in 2011 and then also completed the 4-year Dharma/Retreat teacher training through Spirit Rock Meditation Center and IMS (Insight Meditation Society) under Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. In 2016 I received together with 25 of my Dharma siblings.
When I’m not meditating, teaching, or writing I can be found training for and running ultramarathons and hiking the gorgeous mountains of California– all good methods to help me stay (more) sane, patient and centered while we parent and guide our three teenagers/young adults.
