Upcoming Retreats
Women’s Full Moon Retreat
August 1-August 8 2020
Men’s Full Moon Retreat
August 29-September 5 2020
Personalized Experience
All attendees are invited to attend all activities. The more you attend, the greater the transformative effects of the retreat you can anticipate. At the same time, we understand that not all activities call all people all of the time. You should follow your intuition, your gentle inner urgings, in selecting your daily activities. You choose what you experience. If the hammock calls you one day instead of the surf, maybe it’s supposed to be a hammock day for you!
Playa Grande is a very quiet tiny town nestled tranquilly in the jungle. In Playa Grande, life is ruled by the sun and the tide. When the sun is up, we are up; when the sun is down, it’s night time. There are a few restaurants in town, but this is not where people come for night life. It’s perfect to escape on a retreat. People come here to relax and to hear their own inner voices, the monkeys, and the other abundant wildlife.
To that end, a lot of the town is up at dawn and down by 8 pm. This sleep structure makes it easy to surf at down when high tide rolls into that hour as it will while you’re here. When you’re used to getting up at 5, you can beat the crowd into the water at 5:30 and enjoy the day’s first waves all by yourself in warm, clear, calm water. By 6 am the breaks are often full!
Even when the high tide doesn’t come around at dawn, sunrise is beautiful no matter where you are in the world. Being present at day break on a warm tropical beach is not a terrible way to start your day! This service is free for the taking to anyone who wants it, every single day of our lives. Join us in appreciating this simple pleasure.
We’ll sound the bell at 5 and have the coffee on for you. Don’t feel this has to be a social hour. Don’t worry about brushing your teeth and you certainly don’t have to talk to anyone. Just come enjoy the dawn and make the day’s first footprints in the sand your own. These simple pleasures are ample opportunity for finding pleasure and appreciation in the everyday life all around us, and finding happiness in those beautiful experiences we give to ourselves.
At the same time, each of our emotional experiences lies within each of us. If we want to feel more of the pleasant emotions, of happiness, joy, love, and like, we’d better be sure we get more of those things in our lives by giving them to ourselves.
And that is what this retreat is all about. Here, we focus on ways of life that bring happiness, joy, love of self and other, and like for self and other. To paraphrase Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, the seeds of happiness live within each of us just as the seeds of all other human sensations and experiences do as well. If we want to feel happy, we need to water the seed of happiness.
