In-town retreat with Julie Putgen

Embodying the Buddha Way
with Julie Püttgen

June 2-4. 2017
Red Clay Sangha, Atlanta GA

During this weekend retreat, we will explore the Buddhist concept of the three kayas, or bodies, of the Buddha, as a mirror for our own layered identities in form and emptiness. Throughout the weekend, we will alternate periods of meditation with periods of creative exploration (drawing, moving, writing). Working individually and as a group, we will move towards compassionate understanding of our embodied predicaments and profound freedom. All are welcome. No previous experience with meditation or art-making is required.

Bring a journal, and wear comfortable clothes that fear nothing.

In 1995, Julie Püttgen began her studies of Vipassana meditation with Steve & Rosemary Weissman, then resident teachers at Wat Khao Tham, a small nunnery on an island in the south of Thailand. Having decided on the basis of that experience to explore monastic life for herself, she lived and trained at Plum Village, Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn's monastery in the south of France, before joining the Thai-tradition English Forest Sangha as a resident laywoman and novice nun for three years, from 1996-1999.

Over the past 20 years, her training has extended into the Soto and Rinzai Zen schools, and most recently, into the embodied Tibetan-tradition Mahamudra practices taught by Lama Willa Miller, Lama John Makransky, Reggie Ray, and others.

Pursuing an interest in embodied compassion practice, Julie trained for nine months in the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, with Rev. Frank Mächt as her Supervisor and Linda Piotrowski as her mentor in Palliative Care and Oncology Chaplaincy. She is currently training as a Clinical Mental Health Counselor with a concentration in Expressive Arts Therapy at Goddard College in Vermont.

Julie Püttgen is the Founder & Facilitator of Just So Space, a non-sectarian Buddhist meditation community. Her independent practice as a contemplative studio artist includes the Inner Beauty Project, an ongoing exploration of embodied well-being; and Home / Away From Home, which invites New England communities to understand the global displaced persons crisis from the perspective of the local & the personal. A former full-time Professor of Art at Sewanee: The University of the South, she now teaches occasionally as a Lecturer in the Studio Art Department at Dartmouth College, and is a member of the faculty at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH.