In-town retreat with Julie Putgen

Embodying Compassionate Wisdom
with Julie Püttgen

June 10-12, 2016
Red Clay Sangha, Atlanta GA

During this weekend retreat, we will explore embodied, intuitive connections between contemplative practice (sitting & walking meditation) and creative practice (drawing, sculpting, moving, writing). Throughout the weekend, we will alternate periods of meditation with periods of creative exploration. Working individually and as a group, we will move towards 'finding the deeper grain' – opening to the place of compassionate stillness and wild possibility at the heart of being. 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 entering training as a Clinical Mental Health Counselor 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 the upcoming Home / Away From Home, which will invite 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.