Cultivating Joy in Your Practice – with Emily Hsu
New Year’s is a great time to recover and heal from the past year, renew our energy and inspiration, and set an intention for the year to come. Going into retreat with a supportive community gives us the opportunity to rest, restore, and transform our minds to benefit ourselves and those around us. Join Emily Hsu for a 5-day residential retreat aimed at bringing joy into 2020!
Cultivating Joy in Our Life and Practice
…even in turbulent times
Is it possible to experience joy all the time, as an underlying basis of being? How do we cultivate a deeper sense of joy in our life and spiritual practice, without closing ourselves off from the reality of suffering? (And how do we keep our practice from being rote and stale, or like a duty?) What prevents us from experiencing more joy? In this retreat we will explore the nature of joy and ways to awaken and deepen it, to develop a stable wellness of being, and to counteract obstacles to maintaining a happy and joyful mind.
This retreat will be partly taught from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, but will be beneficial for anyone who is interested in meditation and enhancing joy and well-being. The retreat will include dharma talks, meditation, exercises for developing joy, a New Years fire puja, nature and R&R.
What: a silent, residential retreat
Where: Harmony Ridge, a retreat center in Grass Valley
When: 12/28/2019-1/1/2020
Cost: $550 per person
The cost includes a semi-private room and bathroom (with one or two roommates) and prepared meals. Harmony Ridge is a lovely retreat center with walking trails and plenty of space to relax.
A $165 deposit is required to register and reserve your spot, full payment due by 11/25/2019 to continue holding your spot.
We have payment plans and scholarships available, please email diamondlight.sac@gmail.com to register or ask any questions!
Cancellation policy: To register for the retreat, we ask for 1/3 of the retreat fees as a non-refundable deposit to register and reserve a spot. We need full payment of all retreat fees by 11/25/2019 to continue holding your spot.
If you cancel your registration after 11/25/2018 we will do our best to fill your spot and refund your retreat fees. If this is not possible, we cannot issue a refund. Please understand that Diamond Light is a small, volunteer run dharma center, and the students attending pay for the retreat. There are not additional funds to accommodate last minute cancellations and refunds.
About Emily: Emily Hsu is an FPMT registered teacher who graduated in 2004 from FPMT’s seven-year Masters Program of Sutra and Tantra, an program based on the geshe studies curriculum, at Istituto Lama Tsong Khapa in Italy. In 2005 she completed a ten-month solitary retreat to integrate the material, and since that time has mainly been teaching and doing some retreat every year. She taught at Ocean of Compassion (Gyalwa Gyatso) Buddhist Center and other Bay Area centers for ten years, with the last four years as resident teacher until leaving in 2016 to do longer retreat.
Emily teaches both introductory and advanced courses in Buddhism, meditation, and leads retreats, with particular emphasis on emptiness, bodhicitta, Lamrim, the nature of mind, and calm abiding (shi-ne or shamatha) meditation.