The Mycelial Path: Rediscovering the Living Field of Awareness (Hybrid)

This Hybrid retreat is offered in person at Wonderwell (Residential option) and Live via Zoom (Online option). To Register, please choose one of the options in the YELLOW panel.

Beneath the forest floor, an ancient conversation is taking place. Delicate threads of mycelium weave through the earth, carrying nourishment, exchanging information, and quietly sustaining the life of the forest. Though largely unseen, this living network reminds us that what appears separate is, in truth, profoundly intertwined.

For centuries, Buddhist teachings have pointed toward this same discovery. We usually experience ourselves as isolated individuals moving through an external world, yet with careful attention another reality begins to reveal itself. Our lives arise within an immeasurable web of relationships. Breath depends on forests. Bodies are shaped by sunlight, rain, soil, stars, and countless generations who came before us. Even our thoughts and emotions arise through conditions beyond our own making.

But Buddhism invites us one step further. It asks us not simply to understand interdependence, but to recognize the boundless field in which interdependence appears. Before there is “self” and “other,” before there is “inside” and “outside,” there is awake presence—vast, luminous, and naturally compassionate. This is not something we create through meditation. It is the ground of our experience, present before every thought, every perception, every story about who we are.

From this perspective, the forest is not merely something we observe. It is an expression of the same living awareness that knows this very moment. The wind moving through the pines. The song of a thrush. The fragrance of cedar after rain. The beating of your own heart. Each arises within one indivisible field of knowing.

Please join us to:

• Explore the mycelial network as a living metaphor for interconnection, reciprocity, and belonging
• Practice meditation as a form of rooting into breath, body, and earth
• Be inspired by the intelligence and resilience of the forest
• Reconnect with your place within the larger web of life

Throughout this long weekend, we will allow the living world and the forest to become our teachers. Through periods of silent sitting, walking meditation, contemplative practices in nature, Dharma teachings, and shared inquiry, we will gradually soften the habit of perceiving ourselves as separate observers. Again and again, we return to immediate experience—not searching for extraordinary states but learning to trust the extraordinary completeness of what is already here. Meditation becomes less an effort of concentration and more an act of remembering. Like roots settling into fertile soil, we allow attention to sink beneath the restless surface of conceptual thought into the quiet immediacy of embodied presence. There we can discover an intelligence that is not manufactured by the thinking mind—an effortless awareness that is intimate with every sound, sensation, emotion, and perception without clinging to any of them.

The mycelial network offers us a profound image for this journey. It does not strive to hold the forest together. It simply participates in the life that is already unfolding. In much the same way, awareness does not need to create connection. It is connection. It is the open, living field within which all relationships continuously arise.

As our practice deepens, we may notice that the boundaries we habitually defend begin to soften. The distinction between “my breath” and the breathing forest becomes less fixed. Listening happens without a listener. Seeing occurs without a separate seer. Compassion arises naturally because there is no longer such a solid division between ourselves and the world around us.

The great Dzogchen masters often speak of awakening as recognition rather than attainment. Nothing new is added. Nothing essential is acquired. Instead, we simply cease overlooking what has always been present. This retreat is an invitation into that recognition. To discover that awareness is not confined within us, but that we live within awareness. To experience the earth not as scenery but as kin. To rediscover ourselves as participants in an immeasurably ancient conversation that began long before we arrived and will continue long after we are gone. Like the hidden mycelium beneath the forest floor, this living field quietly sustains every moment of our lives. To remember it is to rediscover our original belonging.

Whether you are participating from Wonderwell Mountain Refuge or from the living landscape beyond the Zoom screen, all are invited to discover the profoundly intertwined web of relationships within which our lives arise. Wherever you find yourself—a front porch, backyard, community garden, nearby park, or simply with the sky framed through a window—the living world can become our teacher, inviting us to rediscover our original belonging.  

Typical Retreat Schedule

(All times are Eastern time zone)

First Day — Hybrid evening session begins around 7:00 pm.

Full-Day Schedule — Morning meditation 7:00 am; Breakfast break 8:00-9:30 am; Lunch break 12:00-2:00 pm; Dinner break 5:30-7:00 pm.

Last Day — The closing session typically ends by 12:00 pm.

These times are just for reference. An expanded schedule will be provided in pre-retreat information emailed during the week prior to the event.

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