Everything Matters -
The Wabi-sabi Retreat
Venue - Red Ladder Studio, Southern Sweden
The Buddha taught that there are three doorways to freedom. These doorways open when we turn towards our experiences of impermanence, insubstantiality, and suffering. Known as the lakshanas—the marks of conditioned existence—they can seem uninviting. After all, who wants to look closely at the more painful aspects of life?
Back in the 90s, Vajradarshini came across Leonard Koren’s Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, which begins with these lines:
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. A beauty of things modest and humble. A beauty of things unconventional.
Could wabi-sabi mean finding beauty in the lakshanas themselves? If so, perhaps they become easier to embrace. This realisation set Vajradarshini on a path she is still walking today: the path of finding beauty in truth—even in life’s painful truths.
Rooted in Japanese culture, wabi-sabi invites us to cherish the fleeting, the worn, and the understated. It reminds us that life’s most precious moments often lie in simplicity. We are encouraged to notice the magic in everyday rituals— a cup of tea, watching the seasons change, or tending to small creative acts.
Every moment can reveal profound truths. Moments of impermanence, insubstantiality and suffering are like cracks in our everyday world. Through these cracks, we glimpse chinks of light—three doorways into a new reality: signless, wishless, and open.
Silence
After a first day of settling in and getting to know one another, we'll move into silence together for four full days, until the retreat's final day.
Who is this retreat suitable for?
This retreat is suitable for anyone with an established meditation practice and some basic Dharma knowledge. It is not an intensive meditation retreat.
“Wabi sabi art is a distillation of their humble efforts to try and express, in physical form, their love of life balanced against the sense of serene sadness that is life’s inevitable passing.”
See a typical day on retreat for a sense of the programme.
Read more about who our retreats are for.
September 18th - 25th (7 days)
Cost £560
Get yourself freed up!