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Retreats, Workshops, Classes, Coaching, Teleseminars, and Podcasts
from Manzanita Village and Five Changes

Retreats at Manzanita Village are an opportunity to learn, or to deepen, your Meditation Practice. The land is beautiful. In every season it offers the gift of continual transformation, mirroring your own process. At night the only lights visible in the surrounding landscape comes from the moon and stars. The facilities are modest but comfortable. The air is clean, and we draw good water from our own well. There are plenty of trails for walking. We serve vegetarian, mostly organic, food. Meditation Retreats are silent, blending traditional aspects of Vipassana practice, and Zen, as well as appropriate interactive processes. Teachers give meditation instruction, Dharma talks, and on longer retreats are available for private interviews. Unless otherwise stated, all Retreats are suitable for both Newcomers and Experienced Meditators. We keep prices to the minimum. Prices include only the cost of food and lodging!
Similar work/workshops are offered elsewhere at many times the cost. Our intention is that everyone can attend.
Every great teacher and tradition has spoken of how generosity, giving freely, is a practice of immense value to the giver.
In addition to the registration fee, you are invited to offer a donation.
People sometimes ask what an appropriate amount might be. There is no single answer. You might match the registration fee. Many people donate several times more than that, while others who cannot afford to, donate less.
The practice is to give what you feel is appropriate to your circumstance.

You receive in proportion to what you give
A closed container cannot be replenished

When you give from your heart
you free yourself from anxiety and loneliness
and remember your connection to the web of living beings No one can take away what is already given
Your giving remains forever pure and
the power of your generosity remains forever intact

 

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Loving Kindness Meditation Weekend Retreat

Lovingkindness and Compassion
Meditation Retreat
Michele Benzamin-Miki and Caitríona Reed
$250 + dana.
Partial scholarships available

The cultivation of Love and Compassion
as guiding perceptions.
Love ~ as Wisdom,
Compassion ~ as the unshakeable recognition
of our connection to the world
and to each other . . .

 

Register for this Retreat by Mail or Credit Card

Just as a mother would give her own life to protect an only child, cultivate the same boundless love towards all of life.
Whatever you happen to be doing, wherever your are; seated, standing, walking, or lying down, so long as you draw breath, find ways to cultivate this quality of loving-kindness, this tender quality of mind, which of all qualities is said to most accurately reflect the truth of who you are. Let go forever of the idea you are in any way separate from the web of living beings. Let everything you do be informed by the understanding that all things are interconnected. Find ways to relinquish the indulgence and excess you have used as a substitute for love. Accept in their place this gift-the infinite pleasure, of love, joy, this boundless heart of kindness. From the Buddha's teaching on Love

As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush . . . Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight and die for, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.
Diane Ackerman: A Natural History of Love

The Eye The Word The Heart

Susan Moon is a great teacher. She coaxes what becomes effortless creativity out of the most stubbornly self-declared non-writers. The delight she takes in inspiring others to use words to express the truth of their life is contagious

Susan Moon with Caitríona Reed $250 + dana

Open to Writers and Beginning Writers

When you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. When you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Gospel of St Thomas

Register for this Retreat by mail or Paypal

 

For more information about Susan Moon go to Visiting Teachers or look at her website http://www.susanmoon.org

Photo by Susan Moon. Old Oakland Train Station. CA
www.susanmoon.org

~ the magic of the thought, the word and the pen ~
A creative writing retreat for writers and non-writers alike to evoke the creative spirit of language, mind, and eye. Open to beginners and to all who wish to be beginners once again. Open to anyone who has forgotten their brilliant creative imagination, as well as those who remember and seek to celebrate and exercise it.
Please join us to delight in words as a practice of imagination and mindfulness.

We will respond together to the miracle of being alive. We'll play with words, write, and sit in the silence words are born from. We'll walk together in the hills by the light of the almost-full moon. [the moon is full the Thursday night before we start. We'll look at what's in front of our faces and what's behind our hearts. We'll find words for the riches in our own experience, and we'll give them away again. The words we use do not belong to us, but have come to us as a gift from our ancestors. We'll practice plagiarism and collaboration; remembering that from a Dharma perspective, everything is in the public domain.In a supportive setting, we'll do lots of writing exercises together, we'll read to each other, we'll get the creative juices flowing, we'll laugh-it's a promise-and we'll each take home a notebook full of the markings of our pens.

Bring pen, notebook, and playful mind.

Photo by Susan Moon. Harbor, Camden ME

www.susanmoon.org

 

 

 

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In this course with a special focus on social permaculture, participants will learn ways to collaborate and build just and enduring alliances across social divides, as well as skills to build personal, interpersonal and community resilience to sustain themselves through hard times. This two-week residential intensive is a permaculture design certificate course and also offers a broad-brush overview of the regenerative design principles of permaculture. From inoculating mushrooms and digging swales to building with natural materials and sheet mulching the land, students have ample opportunity to experience these principles firsthand.

Throughout the course, students work in small groups to incorporate what they are learning into real-world permaculture design projects. The course culminates in the presentation of each group’s design project — which earns each student a Permaculture Design Certificate (required for any advanced course of study).

Starhawk. Photo: Bert Meijer

The Details: Tuition for this EAT Course includes all standard meals, accommodations, classes, workshops, rituals, and course materials for the entire course. Sliding Scale Pricing: $1700 if you have an abundance of money $1500 if you are working and solvent $1200 if you are scraping by

for more information

Michele Benzamin-Miki
and Caitríona Reed
Four Days $250

Being still for the first time, without distractions or diversion, may be the hardest thing you ever try to do. After that, with the appropriate guidance, it may become one of the most deeply pleasurable thing you ever do! More than that, it will be a tool by which you continual challenge yourself towards your true values, your deepest intention, and your capacity to live with integrity and focus.

This retreat is open to anyone. There will be special instruction for beginners, and for those with prior experience. This retreat will include instruction in sitting and walking meditation. Bringing mindfulness and meditation into daily life.
Meals and accommodation are included in the cost.

 

Michele Benzamin-Miki
and Caitríona Reed
Week $800 - includes accommodation and food

An activist is someone who takes action - in order to raise awareness, as well as to change situations of injustice.

An effective activist is someone who takes action while at the same time challenging their own limiting habits, expectations, judgments, and fears.

The ongoing commitment to transform the world and the ongoing commitment to transform ourselves is, in reality, part of a single process. We can’t do either one effectively without the other.

Michele Benzamin-Miki and Caitríona Reed
$250 + dana
includes food and accommodation

"There is nothing to fear. Ever."

A three day training in focus and awareness, to begin mastery of your own emotions.

Centuries of biological and social conditioning have given us the capacity for unlimited richness and emotional fluidity. When we stop being afraid, stop judging, we begin to enjoy inner textures hitherto unimaginable. They reflect the outer circumstances of our life.

Then, as we waken to them, we learn that there is no fixed separation between inner and outer.

Becoming master of our emotions is the start of becoming master of our life.

You will have skills and perspectives to take home with you that will transform your existing meditation practice, or allow you to begin a powerful new practice.

Register by Mail or Credit Card

" Warrior Lessons "
Michele Benzamin-Miki

Let's look at how you place yourself in the world.

Anyone who takes deliberate action is an activist of some sort.

People who have attended Sanctuary programs in the past have been social activists in the traditional sense, with a progressive outlook, organizers for social change. There are many form of activism. Teachers can be activists. People in the healing professions can be activist. Artists can be activists. Entrepreneurs can be activist. Activism is a mind-set rather than an identity.

Above all: Activism means knowing that the consequences of your actions move out in wider circles than you can ever truly know.

Sanctuary is for anyone who wants to deepen their sense of belonging to movements for positive change in the world, and who are willing to make change within themselves to be more effective at doing so.

Sanctuary also requires that you have some ongoing project, or are about to begin one, than links together the elements of personal transformation with social, environmental, and global change work.

* E-mail us for application form manzanita@fivechanges.org

* Participant who are also asked to prepare information about a new, or ongoing, project or action which they will use as a point of focus during the week, and as an ongoing collaborative process with other participants.

Registration Register by mail or credit card

 

Safe Space for trans women and men and allies
Flier (PDF format)

Facilitated by Elise Turen, Michele Benzamin-Miki,
and Caitríona Reed. 
For information about Elise go to Visiting Teachers.
For information about Michele and Caitríona go to Resident Teachers

$250 + dana includes food and accommodation
Partial scholarships available. . . for all women, men, g/q ,and others questioning gender binaries and stereotypical identity-ies

Conference highlights include:
* Workshops and discussion groups co-created by participants,
* Accommodation and fine vegetarian, mostly organic meals
* An atmosphere of safety, confidentiality, and ease 
* Time for relaxation, sauna, naps, walks in the surrounding hills

* Exploration of issues such as:

• Internalized oppression, internalized transphobia
• Identity beyond binary paradigms (female/male straight/gay etc etc)
• The Wisdom of Insecurity, trusting our Power 
• Class, Race, and Gender
• Strategies for facilitating change: personal, communal, and societal
• Trans issues and the law
• Coming Out to Our Family and Children
• The place for genderqueer, trans, and 'two-spirit' people in traditional societies
• Buddhism, Christianity, Spiritual Practice and Trans Issues
• Transition issues
• Relationships
• Transgender Liberation Movement '
• Descansos' reflections on and the landmarks of our life's journey
• Dance and body-image
  
  Guidelines for facilitating a workshop
  or discussion-group

Please note: this is not just for trans people 'in transition.' We are all always, all of us, in transition of one sort or another - whether we are gay, straight, trans or otherwise. And if you think you have got you life together, please come along anyway to support those who do not! We look forward to sharing some time with you.

 

I have come back to life!
The ease and the freedom
I feel at Manzanita
lets me let go and feel free….
free of all fears and the sense of abandonment
I sometimes feel in my everyday life.
What is more beautiful than a human being
who has just realized that she is actually alive….?
–Sara Carmichael, participant at Circles

Register for this Retreat by Mail or Paypal

Transgender 101 by Micah Bazant, 2006 PDF file

Michele Benzamin-Miki, Mushim Ikeda-Nash
for information about Mushim go to Visiting Teachers
$250 + dana includes food and accommodation

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out
that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity . . . John Muir

Manzanita Village is only two-and-half hours from Los Angeles but it borders some of the wildest mountain country in Southern California. What I am learning is that, even in these times - especially in these times! - I am nourished and regenerated by living on this land, and by the beings I share it with. My roots are growing deep here. We established Manzanita Village 14 years ago because we understood that the land itself could be a teacher, and that if we cared for it, and trusted it, it would help heal everyone who came here. I invite you to come and listen to the coyotes’ song, and the ravens’ song, and the wind’s song, and the silence, and join us for this retreat.
Michele Benzamin-Miki

Mushim Ikeda-Nash

December 26, 2007- January 3, 2009
4:00 PM December 26th - 10:00 AM January 3

Retreats and Seminars with Caitríona and Michele
Ongoing teachings and Retreats with Rodney Sanchez
Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
at Tender Shoots of Joy Zendo
Rodney and Bethany Sanchez
Contact them for their teaching schedule as well as
retreats with Caitríona Reed and Michele Benzamin-Miki
414-372-9785 bethanyrodney@hotmail.com

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Guiding teachers at these dojos are students of Michele Sensei
and invite her to teach from time to time (once or twice a year)
Please contact them for details.

Long Island, New York
Iaido Seminar with Sensei Michele Benzamin-Miki at Suigetsu Dojo
Contact Sensei Dara Masi (631) 261-4229 for dates
Suigetsu New York

Minneapolis, Minnesota
FEMA Dojo,
Iaido and Aikido and Meditation with Sensei Michele Benzamin-Miki
Contact: Sifu Koré Grate (612) 729-7223 for dates
Feminist Eclectic Martial Arts (F.E.M.A.)

Ukiah, California
Ukiah Aikido Dojo
Iaido and Aikido and Meditation with Sensei Michele Benzamin-Miki
Contact: Sensei Gail Fillman (707) 462-5141
fillman@pacific.ne

 

Accommodations: we provide shared rooms, with a few single and double rooms.
On Retreats rooms are usually shared between up to five other people.
You may also camp in your own tent.
Note that winter can be very cold, summer can be hot.
Note that even in the summer the nights can be cool.
We have hot showers and indoor bathrooms.
The buildings are heated in winter with wood burning stoves.

Single rooms are available on a first come basis.
For a single occupancy room add 20%
So on a retreat costing $250 a single occupancy room will cost $300.

For a Shared Double room add 15% to registration.
On a retreat costing $250 a double occupancy room will cost $285 per person.

The hermitage is also available on scheduled retreats for single or double occupancy.

On Personal Retreats it is usually possible for you to have your own private room.We also have a hermitage, of straw-bale construction, which is available for personal retreats.
Click here for information on Personal Retreats