Dharma Library

As a regular Zen meditation 'just sitting' sitter I was drawn to trying a Koan retreat as historically working with a Koan has been a complementary practise. I didn't really know what to expect but imagined it would be some kind of mental 'short circuiting' of the left-brain rational mind.

What actually happened was a much more embodied intuitive process that unfolded across the week. The Koan…

Shawbottom Farm 2024, Leaders Juliet Hackney and Alysun Jones

In order for me to go on retreat there had to be a negotiation with those I would leave behind, my wife and my stepdaughter. It is all too easy to forget the personal cost to others of the absence of those going on retreat. The initial reluctance to let me go, in time moved to acceptance that I could.

This was my first retreat and it…

Shawbottom Farm 2024, Leader Simon Child

This was my tenth Silent Illumination retreat. Looking back over previous retreat reports, there is a constant theme: when will I stop manipulating my meditation and learn to let go? 

My typical retreat would begin with the feeling that finally I have learnt the knack of meditation – how to conjure up the (rather self-indulgent) experience of floating in…

Written During a Snowy Retreat in January 2025 

midwinter 

a hare's tracks 

returning to solitude

“What on earth I was I thinking, booking myself onto a Western Zen retreat? Too late now, I’ll just have to cope.” These were the thoughts in my head as I set off towards Shawbottom Farm.

At least in the Vipassana tradition I was used to I was practicing alone in my room and I only had to deal with the daily interview with my teacher. If I had understood it correctly, I was going to have to talk…

The first week after coming back from retreat I finally rinsed the wash basin in the bathroom. For several months it waited for me to do it. I almost throw up by rinsing away hair and old grease clogging the pipe. However it was ok and not as difficult as I had visualised. 

This was my first koan retreat and I think the koan was supposed to let us see aspects of ourselves we attach to and helping…

heatwave
only the butterflies
still busy

I am a chatterer, verbalising everything in my head all the time, keeping a running commentary going and explaining events to some imaginary listener. It took me a while to realise on retreat that the ‘Silent’ in ‘Silent Illumination’ was not the silence of nature but had to be the silence of me.

I was strict with myself and cut down the flow of the wordy…

Planting a great oak at Shawbottom
and returning each year to say, “I did that”,
that would be something.
The sapling trees were ready in pots,
the spade resting against the shed.

I could only claim a short-lived success
weeding between the paving slabs.
About his many enlightenment experiences
Sawaki Roshi once said,
“they didn’t amount to a whole hill of beans”.

In my secret koan, ‘Tokusan’s Bowls’,
eg…

(Given at a Western Zen Retreat in 1988) 

We have been doing a meditation called searching the heart in which we have been allowing the experiences of our lives as they are remembered to rise within us – to tell us their story and bring us their feelings. In this way we have been reviewing and uncovering and allowing to emerge that which we are. Maybe we have also been seeing that, when that…

Covid 19 restrictions have meant that WCF’s normal retreat programme has had to be abandoned. Instead we have developed a format for online day and week retreats, which are proving to be very valuable. 

WCF’s first online retreat – and I loved it! 

I found the whole process of bringing the retreat out into my ‘market place’, into my living room, was really wonderful. And I enjoyed the experience…