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.

(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.

Note 7/25/: retreat is now about half-full…., so don’t wait too long to sign up, and send in a deposit to secure your place.

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

April 17, 2010 – April 18, 2010  (Saturday 10 a.m. – Sunday 4 p.m.)

Cost: $100.

You can register with this form: Retreat Registration Form

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

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.

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 using Vipassana meditation, writing exercises and yoga.

Cost: by dana (the Pali word for donation)
Retreat Registration Form

October 17th and 18th (Saturday 10 a.m. – Sunday 4 p.m.)

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

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: $100. Details on the focus of the weekend will be coming soon. Meanwhile, you can register with this form: Retreat Registration Form

Geshe-la will be doing a medicine Buddha initiation with healing ceremonies and instruction in seated meditation.

Geshe Thupten Dorjee was born Sonam Palden in Tibet just before the Chinese Communist invasion of 1959. He and his family escaped occupied Tibet and headed southward when he was three years old. The journey through the mountains to Bhutan was a long, arduous one for the family. On many cold Himalayan nights, they sought refuge in shelters created for animals. Much of Geshe’s early life was spent in a refugee camp in Bhutan with other Tibetan exiles. Unfortunately, most members of his family died while there due to the poor living conditions and lack of medical care.

After 8 years of these difficult living conditions, Geshe and his surviving family journeyed south and settled in Southern India. At the age of 13, Geshe entered Drepung Loseling Monastery in Karnataka, South India.

Over the next 22 years, Geshe made a thorough study of the vast scriptures, principally the five foremost Buddhist philosophical subjects, i.e., Pramana (Valid Cognition), Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom), Madhyamaka (Middle Way Philosophy), Vinaya (Buddhist Ethics), and Abhidharma (Buddhist Metaphysics). Geshe was ordained a Buddhist monk by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1986. In 1994, Geshe received the degree of Geshe Lharampa (meaning “Spiritual Guide”), the highest scholastic honor offered by a Buddhist monastic university. It is roughly equivalent to the Doctor of Philosophy, although its course of study and examination schedules are far more rigorous than the Western degree.

During his years at Drepung Loseling, Geshe taught scriptures and Tibetan grammar to the lower classes while pursuing his advanced course of study. For four years, he was supervisor of agricultural projects at the Monastery.

Cost: $100. Retreat Registration Form