How Our Retreat Went
To listen to the talk I gave on Sunday during our retreat, please click here.
Listening note: the link above will take you to Soundcloud. You do not need an account to listen, however, you will need to open the link through a browser if you don’t have an account. If you try to open the link on a portable device vs a laptop it may try to open the link through the app, which won’t work unless you have an account.
This past weekend, Aug 14-16, we hosted our 4th annual camping retreat weekend here at Empty Mountain. After some last minute changes in people’s schedules, we wound up with 4 folks arriving on Friday, 2 folks arriving on Saturday morning and 1 person arriving on Saturday at dinner time. With an additional 3 people who came up just for the day on Sunday. So at our peak on Sunday, there were 12 of us in total.
Our retreat schedule was as follows:
Friday August 14
Arrival Time, 4-6 pm
BYO Dinner (eat whenever you like)
Welcome & Intro Circle followed by Guided Deep Relaxation, 6:30 pm
End of Day & start of Noble Silence, 8:00 pm
Saturday August 15
Wake Up, 6:30 am
Sitting Meditation, 7:00 am
Silent Breakfast (provided), 8:15 am
Walking Meditation, 9:30 am
Circle & Nature Sitting, 11:00 am
Silent BYO Lunch, 12:30 pm
Rest/Personal Time
Stick Exercise (OPTIONAL), 2:30-2:45 pm; meet @ cabin
Sitting, Reading, Sharing Circle, 3:00 pm
Free & Open Social Hang Out Time, starting around 5:00 pm
Social Dinner (provided), 6:00 pm
Sunday August 16
Wake Up, 6:30 am; Resume Noble Silence
Sitting Meditation, 7:00 am
Breakfast (provided), 8:00 am
Silent Hike to Cedar Grove, 9:00 am; meet @ parking meadow
Talk by Nicole, 10:30 am (at Cedar Grove)
Closing Circle, 11:00 am (at Cedar Grove)
Social Walk or Ride Back to EM, 11:30 am
Social BYO Lunch, 12:30(ish) pm
End of Retreat by or around 1:30 pm
Our earth altar in our outdoor meditation & program space
Three folks attended from other states. Two from Idaho and one from Utah. It was a special treat and gift to our sangha here at EM to have them join us and make the long drive to attend our retreat. Our sangha here is slowly growing.
We are very much still in active experimentation mode here at EM. We made a few minor adjustments to our retreat schedule this year and are continuing to try out different program activities. And this year - wonderfully! - we had the great pleasure of including an optional sauna session on Saturday evening after dinner during our open, social time. We had 8 folks in the sauna with still enough room to maneuver around. It was our largest group in the sauna since we got it up and running earlier this year. Our previous record was 6 people back in June. Saunaing has become one of my favorite ways to spend time with friends.
Above pics: dining area
Mike and I took turns leading the program activities we arranged as part of our schedule, which worked well. Despite how short the retreat was and how small of a group attended, it was still a lot of work to put it all together. We are also a pretty rustic outfit here. Living off-grid and without running water means we also have a few more logistics to tend to in order to help ensure everyone is taken care of to the best of our ability, which is very important to us. We want to be able to provide the best of both worlds here at EM: the gifts and grace of spending time in the woods while also making sure folks have what they need. As we continue to add infrastructure and slow-grow our living systems, we hope to be more and more well set up for an increasing number of people to attend our retreats as time goes on.
We also hope the number of folks wanting to attend will slowly increase, as we’re still on the edge of often not reaching our minimum required amount of people to attend our events and retreats in order to host them. The minimum amount of folks we want to have is 6, which doesn’t include Mike and I. We’ve learned 6 is necessary because even with how small our group sizes are, folks often cancel last minute. 6 gives us wiggle room for 1 or 2 people to cancel. Building a strong energetic container to practice mindfulness & meditation becomes a really big lift with too few people.
The Cedar Grove we hiked to on Sunday (2-miles from EM)
We’ve kept the tradition of hiking to a place we call the Cedar Grove on the Sunday of our retreats, which is a little less than 2-miles from EM further up the canyon. The Cedar Grove trail tags along right next to a small creek and the spot we circle up at is less than a 10-minute walk from the trail head. We have everyone load up their cushions or chairs in our truck and then we drive and park the truck at the trail head. Normally Mike and I tag team it and shuttle a vehicle up there to drop off and then we both drive back to EM to do the hike. But this year my body wasn’t feeling up for the hike. So I drove the truck up and simply waited in the woods for everyone to arrive. I was sad not to join the silent hike with everyone, as I really enjoy quiet walking with folks. But I also had a really nice time in the woods waiting for everyone to arrive. It gave me time to clear the trail of debris and also prepare the space where we circled up. I had such a good time putting a nature alter together before folks got there.
Nature altar at the Cedar Grove
It was a lot of work to put this retreat together and it was also 110% worth every bit of it. It is work we do with love and it’s work worth doing. Bringing people together in the spirit of the practice is truly one of the best things I can think of to do with my time and energy. And to be able to gather folks amid the wilderness of the woods where we live is such an incredible and added lift to the soul. Mike and I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity, the motivation, and the skills to bring folks together on the Path.
Our 4th annual retreat was deeply nourishing. My heart is full and overflowing. What a blessing to spend quality time with like-minded people in the woods.
In the talk I gave on Sunday at the Cedar Grove (which you can listen to by following the link at the start of this post), I shared about what I see as being the Three Pillars of spiritual practice: 1) We practice meditation regularly & ongoingly 2) We stay close to good teachers and 3) We practice with people. We had the fertile opportunity to do all three over the course of our retreat. We sat in meditation and enjoyed walking meditation together. We included readings by Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist teacher Susan Piver, poet Mary Oliver, and Chinese American author and teacher Deng Ming-Dao. We spent our weekend in close kinship and community, threaded together with silence, stillness, heartfelt sharing, and intentional connection.
I want to express my sincere gratitude to everyone who joined us. Those who chose to have attending our retreat be the thing they did last weekend, among 1,000 other things they could’ve done instead. And I want to offer special appreciation to: my friend and amazing gardener Estee who provided us with flowers for our altar and dining tables; the Open Way Mindfulness Center in Missoula for letting us borrow a wealth of supplies from tables to meditation cushions to a large pot to cook the dinner meal for everyone on Saturday night; and the many hearts and hands that have gone into helping support us here in a myriad of ways at Empty Mountain since we moved here and started this practice center in July of 2022. We have and continue to be richly blessed with folks who donate financially, donate building materials, donate their time to lend a hand to Mike to work on projects, and donate material items we need to help welcome & host folks for overnight stays, events & retreats. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Oh! And one last thing before I wrap this up. We had an unusually high number of wild animals around during our retreat weekend. On Sunday, Mike said to me: “I think the animals like having people here.” I think he was right on.
Two people saw a snake up in Morning Sun Meadow. Two folks saw two different kinds of woodpeckers, one of which we’ve not seen around here before. The gray jay family we feed peanuts to not only came by to visit everyone at dinner time on Saturday but actually led the way on the hike to the Cedar Grove on Sunday, I was told. They flew ahead as folks hiked and waited for everyone to get close. Then, when the group approached, they flew further on, perched in the trees ahead, and waited. Mike said they did this for about a mile. While I would’ve loved to have seen it, I was so delighted to know that everyone had had that special experience on the hike. Then on Sunday, while I was setting up breakfast for everyone, Mike saw a moose not far from our cabin! A few of us attempted to go in search of it to see it, but it disappeared without sound into the thick of the trees. It was the first time one of us has seen a moose here at EM. In general they are animals one sees very seldom. Its presence felt like a blessing. We also saw a few deer. And on Friday, while Mike was scouting out a path to take folks walking on Saturday, he found this beautiful turkey feather, which we added to our earth altar as part of our outdoor meeting space:
For this retreat we added 2 new Humanure composting toilet outhouses for folks to use. One up in Morning Sun Meadow (MSM), where we sat in meditation and held our programs, and another one by the guest hut, for the folks vehicle and tent camping nearby. We also rigged up a different tarp structure to help protect us in the event of rain, which did visit us during the retreat. And it was super nice having increased water storage here on site than we had during our retreat last summer. I’m thinking about creating a few tent platforms for our retreat next year. Maybe even a small wooden pavilion up in MSM so we have a hardier sun/rain covered space in which to meet & gather under until we can construct a permanent community use building.
We’ll see where we get and what happens from now until then. Next up here is finishing the sauna building and installing wood cladding and flooring inside the guest hut. In the meantime, I’d like to warmly plant a seed: please think about joining us for our 5th annual summer camping retreat weekend next August in 2027. (Insert friendly smile here.)
