A Year-End Daylong Retreat: the Power, Beauty and Sacredness of Endings

For those who feel called to contemplate the many endings of 2025 together, this retreat may be for you. An ending is not just a loss, but a beginning. Whether you have experienced loss, gain, pleasure, pain, fame, disrepute, praise or blame, this retreat is not just a call to say good riddance, but to clear space for the renewing and healing of our relationship with the disintegrating world, contemplate our sticky clingings and perchance let them go. At this solstice time, on the darkest day of the year, join us to welcome the light.

The emotional body gets activated when we recall images of disintegrating phenomena. So we enter into a story-telling relationship with what is disintegrating and fight it with our shoulds and should nots. This can be so visceral that it can feel beyond whatever cognitive work we can do. So we need space and silence to filter this wisdom into our bodies. To begin, what stories are you telling yourself about the endings of 2025 and how are we healing or hurting ourselves through these stories? 

In this daylong we will contemplate endings, as we open to our resistance to the fading of reality and include our angry, uprisen stories and images that want to be heard and seen. The forcefulness of the Buddha's last words feels resonant even today, almost calling us out (“vayadhamma sankhara appamadena sampadetha! or “Give yourselves over entirely to the task of contemplating the endings of all phenomena with care and concern [my translation]”). A powerful summary of the Buddha's teaching so dear to our Buddhist cousins called the Heart Sutra ends with the words of "gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakening, so it is!" 

This may seem like a lofty goal for some of us, yet we can enter into a gentle practice in line with this ultimate wisdom. Namely, we will introduce practical and time-proven ways to contemplate endings. For example, if we can sit with just this breath with the perception that it is ending, we can sit with whatever rattles us in times of more intense distress. We can allow the breath to soften and heal our visceral contractions that rise up to say no to our disappearing reality. Drop by drop, breath by breath, one phenomenon after another, we can invite the perception of objects fading, disintegrating, disappearing, falling out of view, with care and concern and in a way that gently wears down suffering and clinging over time. 

Finally the contemplation of loss, lack, suffering, is not for mere contemplation purposes, but to refresh, to build, to enchant and re-engage with more spacious freedom and invite and allow an ongoing relationship with an absolute ending of suffering. I sincerely wish to be with you at the end of 2025, to apply our communal energies to unfold in our collective, inner spaces and to celebrate our community, our achievements, our aspirations. At the end of this 2025, we remember the sacredness of the bond we make with reality that we not hold even a piece of it back, that it belongs to itself, that it is beautiful as it is. We can fully give ourselves to freedom and the power of letting go. Here, we become a refuge for all beings, bodhisattvas for our times.

The facilitators: Greg Hermsmeyer and Marina Colby will be offering this retreat.

How to participate: Sign up and touch base with how you are relating to endings in your life right now. Show up with curiosity to witness more in yourselves. Please bring a water bottle, a mediation shawl or whatever clothing needs, and a vegetarian dish to share. 

Any questions? Feel free to reach out.