Finding Courage In A World On Fire:
Resting in the Heart of What Is
A Meditation Retreat for All Practitioners
“We must become more familiar with our inner spaciousness-where the pleasure
of resting in awareness is accessible, sacred & healing.” – Rashid Hughes
In a world that moves too fast and asks too much, we invite you to pause.
Inspired by Rashid Hughes’ contemplative framework: R.E.S.T.-A Practice for the Tired & Weary and Gaylon Ferguson’s Welcoming Beginner’s Mind, this retreat invites a return to the natural ease and wisdom of presence. Through the liberating practices of rest, curiosity, and compassionate awareness, we’ll slow down and remember the wholeness that has always been within us.
Together, we will also explore the liberating power of beginner’s mind — not as a technique to master, but as a radical return to the freshness of this moment. In this spirit, we are not gathering to become better meditators or more productive selves. We are gathering to stop, to rest, and to touch the natural confidence and resilience that arise when we release striving and dwell in effortless presence.
Throughout our time together, we will:
- Cultivate the spaciousness of natural awareness, beyond self-improvement or performance
- Deepen in effortless resting — a trust in being, rather than doing
- Acknowledge and tend to the symptoms of burnout, both personal and collective
- Investigate how slowing down is an act of resistance and an entryway into genuine liberation
- Reclaim confidence not as a rigid stance, but as a tender, alive knowing that we belong
- Build resilience through community, silence, movement, and shared presence
To support our bodies in this deepening, guided movement sessions will be offered by Kate Johnson. These sessions invite us to explore embodiment as meditation, spontaneous, curious, and awake. In the spirit of contemplative movement traditions rooted in awareness practice, Kate will guide us in discovering the wisdom of the body as a gateway to presence. These gentle, improvisational practices will help us feel more at home in ourselves, grounding insight not only in the mind but in the rhythms of breath, heart, and form.
This retreat is open to all practitioners of meditation, those just beginning, and those returning again and again. Whether your practice is fresh or weathered, whether you feel confident or uncertain, you are welcome here.
Rashid, Kate & Gaylon offer this retreat not as an escape from the world, but as a wholehearted encounter with it and with yourself. The invitation is simple: to be here, just as you are.
Come rest. Come be. Come begin again.
TIMING
Check-in will run from 3:00 p.m. ET to 6:00 p.m. ET
The retreat will run from 6:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, October 16, 2025 to 2:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, October 19, 2025
Check-out by 2:00 pm ET
SCHOLARSHIPS
There are a limited number of partial scholarships available for this retreat. Please visit us here for more information and to apply. Please do not sign up for the retreat if you have submitted an application. Please wait to hear from us. For questions, please contact us at: scholarships@garrisoninstitute.org.
RETREAT ASSISTANT
We will offer a partial registration fee subsidy to a potential assistant to the teacher of this retreat, among other tasks. Please contact us at: scholarships@garrisoninstitute.org to indicate your interest.
TEACHERS
Kate (KAYT) Johnson (she/her) is a teacher, facilitator, writer and mother. Buddhist Peace Fellowship has been one of her most beloved spiritual and political homes – the place where she truly learned that the hard work of meaningful societal transformation can also be joyful, relational, and life-affirmingly effervescent. Kate began practicing Theravada Buddhism in the Western Insight tradition in her early 20’s, deeply influenced by the Thai Forest and Burmese Sayadaw lineages. She has participated in many multi-month meditation retreats and multi-year teacher trainings, and graduated from Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s four-year retreat teacher training in 2020, under the leadership of Gina Sharpe, Larry Yang and Lila Kate Wheeler. With a group of friends, Kate helped co-found the Meditation Working Group at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and went on to help organize yoga and meditation communities in service of labor and environmental justice campaigns. She spent several years as a faculty member of MIT’s Presencing Institute, and she has spent much of the last decade working with leaders and organizations committed to equity, impact, sustainability, and the practice of wise relationships. Kate holds a BFA in Modern Dance from the Alvin Ailey School/Fordham University and MA in Performance Studies from NYU. She is the author of the book Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World. In off hours, Kate can be found exploring Philly with her kid, sipping tea with friends, and looking for all manner of good trouble.
Rashid Hughes is an intersectional-contemplative teacher, writer, and restorative justice facilitator who envisions a transformed world where everyone lives with deep connection to nature and one another. He is a certified Mindfulness Teacher, Yoga Instructor, Restorative Justice Facilitator, and Fire Pujari from the Kashi tradition. Rashid is a co-founder of the Heart Refuge Mindfulness Community, which focuses on mindfulness practices within the experiences and cultures of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC). In 2024, Rashid served as the Mindfulness Director of the Inaugural Cohort of the Howard University Contemplative Justice Fellowship program. He draws inspiration from various wisdom traditions, his personal experience as a Black man, and his teachings emphasize that spiritual practices can serve as a radical source of personal and collective liberation. With great joy, Rashid is dedicated to nurturing life at home with his wife and daughter.
Gaylon Ferguson, PhD was core faculty in both Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. He was an acharya, or senior teacher, in the Shambhala International Buddhist community. After studying meditation and Buddhist philosophy with Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa in the 1970s and 1980s, Ferguson became a Fulbright Fellow to Nigeria and completed a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at Stanford University. After several years of teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Washington, he became teacher-in-residence at Karmê Chöling Buddhist Retreat Center, through 2005, when he joined the faculty of Naropa University.
The author of three books (Natural Wakefulness, Natural Bravery, and Welcoming Beginner’s Mind), he contributed the foreword to Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom.
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COVID-19
The health and safety of our guests and staff is a top priority for the Garrison Institute. To attend a retreat or event all guests, teachers, and staff are required to self-test (at home antigen test is acceptable) within the 48-hour window prior to arriving for a retreat on site, and to bring a 2nd self-test kit when coming on site. We encourage everyone to self-monitor for symptoms of COVID-19 and other illnesses before your visit. If you experience symptoms or have a positive diagnosis, please notify us immediately at events@garrisoninstitute.org We will continue to follow any COVID-19 guidelines set forth by our local officials, New York State and the CDC.