A day of silent introspection (Vipassana style) meditation, combined with yoga stretching.

A chance to go inside, as the dark days of winter set in, and re-kindle our intention
to take refuge in, and cradle the higher wisdom that already lives inside us.

This one-day silent guided meditation, led by Joy, is open to all levels of experience.
Cost: dana ( the Pali word for donation). Lunch is included.

Retreat Registration Form

(Friday evening – Sunday after lunch)

It’s our annual weekend with Geshe-la. If you want to “prepare” for the Dalai Lama’s visit to our town next May, come to this retreat.
Cost: $100, plus dana for Geshe-la.

Retreat Registration Form

This is an annual celebration of our lives. Come early and stroll around the grounds, the creek, or the Peace Path.

We’ll gather at 3 p.m. and share a giant (vegetarian) potluck meal, followed by a circle of thanks.

Thanks can be a poem, prayer, song, dance, dramatic presentation (I dare you to STRETCH your imagination) or even the spoken word.

Together we will explore the patterns we created a long time ago, in forming the personae/personality, and how the mind continues to reach for this template. Silent meditative witnessing, automatic writing, and yoga will be the tools that we use to expand our awareness.

Led by Joy Fox, Wattle Hollow owner, therapist, and retreat leader.

Cost: $100. And no one is ever refused attendance at a Buddhist event for lack of finances.

Retreat Registration Form

Oct 8 – 10, 2010 – Music Workshop Weekend

Spend three days in the Heart of the Ozarks
and experience an eclectic, organic approach to creating music
in a provocatively creative atmosphere.
A weekend of musical exploration and growth.

Registration fee of $250 per person
includes rustic lodging, healthy gourmet meals, and…

* An intimate concert by Jack Williams and Still On The Hill
* Nature walks
* Open mics, song swaps, quiet time to write and create
* Inspiration and camaraderie
* Catering by Chef Tuesday
* Work

Space for the weekend is limited to 20-24 people – if you are interested please don’t wait to sign up. For more information or to make your reservation, contact Judy by phone at (205)572-0056, (479)761-0001, or email at judy@jackwilliamsmusic.com

Plan to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening and stay through lunch on Sunday.

October 22 – 24, 2010

Friday evening – Sunday after lunch.

Anna Cox, founder and director of 'Compassion Works for All'

We are blessed again, to have this wonderful teacher, Anna Cox, come up from Little Rock, where she counsels maximum security and Death Row prisoners, among her many functions.

Anna Cox is a practicing psychotherapist in Little Rock, Arkansas. She is also a trainer, lecturer and consultant on psychotherapy, meditation, the expansion of consciousness, subtle healing, death and dying, living spiritual lives and lives of compassionate service. She offers talks and workshops that encourage individuals to conceptualize their life as a spiritual journey rather than as an ordinary life of accomplishing goals that promise worldly happiness.

A practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism since 1980, Anna has lectured and taught classes extensively on Buddhism. Anna helped to found the Ecumenical Buddhist Society in Little Rock, which supports a variety of Buddhist traditions by bringing lineage masters from around the world to offer teachings and retreats.

Since 1993, Anna Cox has offered volunteer psychotherapy and spiritual counseling, group psychotherapy, and meditation classes with incarcerated individuals on and off death row in a maximum-security prison. She has written and published the free monthly newsletter, Dharma Friends, since 1997. Anna Cox also presents lectures frequently on the abolishment of the death penalty in Arkansas and in other states.

For over twenty years, Anna has traveled the world extensively in pilgrimage to holy sites of all religions, places of human suffering, and to places of great transformation. Anna feels deeply that ours is one human family and that no one should be excluded.

Cost: $125, includes meals and lodging. You may also offer dana (Pali word for “donation”) to Anna for the teachings.

NOTE: this retreat is now full.

Retreat Registration Form

July  17 & 18 (10 AM Saturday and ending at Noon Sunday)

In this dance weekend we will explore art, song, poetry, and dance for Yemaya, the Yoruban Orisha of the living Ocean, considered the Mother of All. She is strongly protective and cares deeply for all Her children, comforting them and cleansing them of sorrow.

Altar of Yemaya

As an embryo we all spend the first moments of our lives swimming in a warm sea of amniotic fluid inside our mother’s womb. We must transform and evolve through the form much as a fish before becoming a human baby. Yemaya dresses herself in seven skirts of blue and white. Like the seas and profound lakes she is deep.

Yemaya was brought to the New World with the African Diaspora. In Brazilian Candomblé and Haitian Vodou she is worshipped as an Ocean/Moon-goddess.

Symbols and Sacred Objects of Yemaya: Ocean, mermaids, the virgin Mary, New Year’s Eve, February 2, the North Star, half moon, dreams, indigo, pound cake, boats and ships, sacred dance, and the Number 7, all sea creatures, seaweed and other plants that grow in the ocean, silver, pearls, mother of pearl, coral, moonstone, crystal quartz, turquoise, and any blue gem or bead.

Heather will be joined by Jeff Porter, who has recently studied Yemaya in Africa, will lead the drum class and accompany the dancing.

Heather Burns

About Heather Burns

Heather Burns teaches popular and folkloric Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian  dance. Along with rhythm and correct placement, she draws her students attentions to the contrasting elements of controlled/free, feminine/masculine, and joyful/aggressive expressions in dances.

In Cuba, she apprenticed under Cuban cultural historians, playwrights, actors, musicians and professional dancers at Cutumba Ballet Forlkorico. After studying dance at Duke University, the Lakota Indian Reservation, the University of Washington and Los Angeles, she found her true match in the eclectic Cuban mix of French, Spanish, Haitian and West African heritages. (And she adds, there is a bit of Scottish and Tahitian flavor that she cannot do without.) A Master of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology helped her to make sense of all of this.

Herself a product of an Arkansas cotton farmer and a theater director, Heather has combined the earthy and the dramatic in perhaps unlikely places. She took oral histories of wacipi dancers and studied with yuwipi prayer-song musicians. She has taught dance in Compton, CA’s middle schools and worked with South Asian immigrant teens to create dance works in Seattle, WA.

Heather presently lives and teaches in Oklahoma, working as a great artist with schools and dance companies throughout the region, and with the dance department at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Cost: $100 includes food and lodging.

Retreat Registration Form

(Friday evening – Sunday, 3 p.m)

The theme for this weekend silent meditation retreat will be:
“Time Out”

Joy Fox, Wattle Hollow owner, therapist, and retreat leader,
will guide us in exploring our concept of time:

“The iron grid of time that society imposes on our psyches keeps us locked into a certain mindset, and locked out of present tense reality. During this weekend, we will use writing, Vipassana meditation, eating exercises, stretching and sharing to peek into living here, now.”

Cost: $90, includes lodging, food and retreat. Please know that no one will be turned away for lack of finances.

Retreat Registration Form