eamba Retreats offer a unique opportunity to practice with the community of mindfulness teachers from different countries in and near Europe. The 2024 eamba Retreat will be the 11th annual retreat and it has grown to be a place that many teachers return to every year, as they find it supportive to sit with other colleagues and deepen and refresh their practice.

Last call to register December 29 by the Register button below

After that by emailing us at retreat@eamba.net

Warmly welcome,
The Retreat Team

This retreat fulfills the entry requirements for a MBSR teacher training.

The fruits of meditation and mindfulness practice are well studied: We may feel a deeper sense of connectedness, stillness and inner peace, an increased sense of aliveness, clarity, vitality, and happiness – to just name a few.

In this retreat we will use our somatic familiarity with the feel of practice to explore the worldviews, we could say‚ the soil‘, within which these practices take root, grow, and evolve most fully. The fundamental assumption of the Yogic World is that everything changes. Everyone knows this is true! But the depth and consequentiality of this simple fact is usually not experienced. We say, ‘Change changes changing‘, and Buddhist practices can be viewed as the response to the truth of change.

It is from ‘knowing change‘ not ‘knowing about‘, but rather ‘knowing as and with and through‘ change that we can open our bodily minds and ‘minded bodies’ into a radically different sense of world:

• A world based on attentionality, not conceptuality
• A world of relationality, not reality
• A world of interindependence, not separation and connectedness
• A world in which our reference point is aliveness, not self

We will explore each of these aspects as perspectival shifts, turning points or gates to immerse ourselves into the experience of the ‘Yogic World‘.

Zen practice is primarily based on Buddhist Yogachara teachings. Yogachara means ‘yoga practice’, but the ‘yoga’ of Yogachara is not simply what is meant nowadays in the West by the word ‘yoga’. The ‘yoga practice’ of Zen means the whole of one’s life is a practice of embodying ‘things as they are’, locating yourself in things as they are: as sensorium, as mind, as changing, as interdependent, as other, and as indeterminate. This is the yogic view of Zen and it is a part of the yogic culture of East Asia and India.  

The fundamental assumption of yogic culture is that all mental phenomena have a physical component and that all sentient physical phenomena have a mental component. There is no human mind without a body and no alive human body without a mind. It is not that there is a body and a mind, there is a bodymind and a mindbody – otherwise there could be no relationship. Thus, all teachings and practices are both physical and mental.

Zentatsu Baker Roshi in “Yogic Culture“

Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi (*1981) is the Dharma Successor of Zentatsu Baker Roshi in the Dharma Sangha Soto Zen Lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of the book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. The Dharma Sangha is an international non-for-profit organization founded by Zentatsu Baker Roshi.

Nicole is the Vice Abbot and Head Teacher of the two Dharma Sangha Practice Centers, the Zen Buddhistisches Zentrum Schwarzwald in the Black Forest, Germany and the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, in Colorado, USA. She began practicing Zen in 2001 and has been living in monastic contexts since 2009, either at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center or at the Zen Buddhistisches Zentrum Schwarzwald.

She holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Oldenburg. In 2007, she also graduated from the ‘School for Body Mind Centering©’, a method teaching bodily awareness and therapeutic applications. From 2013-2019 she was a member of the Council of the German Buddhist Union.

To find out more about Nicole.

Schedule

The first day Monday January 2 arrival and registration from 11 am and lunch starts at 1 pm. Our program starts at 2:30 pm and continues until 9 pm with dinner between 6:30 to 7:30 pm.

The last day January 7 will end with lunch between 12:30 and 2:30 pm.

Tentative schedule during day 3-6
6:30 am        Wake-up
7:00              Mindful movement
8:00              Breakfast
9:30              Morning session
12:30            Lunch and rest
2:30 pm        Mindful movement
3:00              Afternoon session
4:30              Tea
4:45              Afternoon session cont.
6:00              Dinner
7:30              Evening session
9:00              Rest

Impressions from the past eamba Retreat in January 2023