in Elontuli course center, Karjalohja, Finland
We are happy to offer a deep rest meditation retreat in Finland with Jaya Ashmore teaching!
has led meditation retreats since 1999 to encourage people from around the world to live an awakened life. She draws on her decades of experience in Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as in non-dual Advaita, yoga, deep ecology, and modern somatic disciplines. Other influences on her teaching are her youth in a Christian family, long-time connection with her spiritual teachers in India, and twenty years of practicing Permaculture and Jin Shin Jyutsu, a harmonizing art from Japan. She lived much of her adult life in India, and now lives in Catalonia.
Jaya’s focus on discovering right effort and liberating insight has led her to encourage meditation through deep rest. Just as literal rest allows the body and mind to renew themselves, so deep rest also drops us into direct and non-conceptual awareness. This contact with aliveness feeds a natural opening to deep meditation, where old habit-energies are resolved without the drama that occurs when we are forcing things. Life beyond ideas leaves room for spacious joy and powerful shifts that make a real difference in our lives.
Jaya gives detailed meditation instructions in mindfulness, lovingkindness, and other techniques, but she emphasizes that each person can feel their way along on a uniquely unfolding path.
What happens on the retreat?
The retreat is held in silence. In addition to instructions, Jaya offers a daily Dharma talk and opportunities for one-to-one meetings. All the teaching will be in English. Participants are encouraged to try lying down for meditation, but sitting is also fine. The retreat also includes walking meditation and work meditation, as well as optional embodied movement and meditative singing.
The retreat is appropriate for people at all experience levels or with no meditation experience.
The standard cost for the retreat is 400 € (not including donations for teacher and managers). We are willing and able to support your practice regardless of your financial status at the moment. This means that it is possible to pay less than the standard cost. If you would like to support someone else with some extra payment, that is also possible and greatly appreciated.
Here you can find more information about practicalities and instructions on how to register.
You can ask more from retriitit@syvalepo.fi, or from Ulla Sillanpää (+358 40 536 4181, application and payment) or Noora Pasanen (+358 44 989 6658, other questions).
From participants of previous retreats with Jaya:
”My own practice has been deeply insprired by the deep rest meditation approach. For me this has offered a deep way of opening body, heart and mind; an escape from extensive doing and trying to achieve in meditation; encouragement in finding my own path; and trust in a more intuitive way of guiding my practice and my life, and in letting processes unfold by themselves.”
– Anna Backholm, Finland
”I don’t even know what happened to me during only 5 days – was it the meditation, silence, the deep rest, Jaya’s teachings, chanting, food, nature, the community or everything that happened to me before that lead me to that place? I know, separation is illusion – it was everything, it was life. But something opened inside of me and made me feel like I arrived home, so happy, light, relaxed and sometimes heavy, drowsy, anxious, emotional and processing things, sometimes ecstatic, always full of gratitude. I can say the retreat changed my life and was one of greatest things I’ve experienced. I was relieved of so much pain, some of it something I carried with me since childhood. … It’s like I was a piano that was out of tune and now someone came and tuned me.”
– Lari, Finland
Everyone is warmly welcome!