Tassajara Wildland Firefighter Retreat
December 28, 2024 - January 3, 2025
The annual Tassajara Wildland Firefighter Retreat offers refuge, rest, and renewal for the wildland fire community that includes mindfulness, meditation and sensory awareness practice.
Chris is a core member of the facilitation team.
"The Tassajara Firefighter Retreat is the most meaningful thing that fire has led me to. It has helped me recover from the toll that life experiences and working fire has had on me. This experience has helped me to feel balanced and whole. I would highly recommend this retreat."
~ Retreat participant, 2022-2023
The San Francisco Zen Center is offering this mindfulness and practice-based retreat for Wildland Firefighters as a way to give back to the firefighting communities and to support our first responders. This 7-day retreat at Tassajara Zen Monastery, Hot Springs and Retreat Center is intended to provide refuge, rest and renewal through mindfulness, meditation and sensory awareness practices, and is grounded in trauma based-awareness. There will be a day of work to help to care for Tassajara and to integrate mindfulness practice into fire prevention and working on the land. There will be ample time to bathe in the hot springs, walk the wilderness trails (as weather permits), be nourished with nutritious vegetarian meals, and to relax and find ease in the quiet of this ancient valley. We will have the unique opportunity of seeing in the New Year together around a huge bonfire on this sacred land. There will also be 3 follow-up monthly Zoom calls in small groups after the retreat.
The facilitators are all experienced practitioners: Chris Fortin, Zen priest, and teacher, practiced as a licensed MFT with a practice and trauma-based orientation, founded and leads Dharma Heart Zen and is a senior dharma teacher in the Everyday Zen Foundation. Lee Klinger Lesser has been practicing Zen and leading workshops in Sensory Awareness for over 40 years. Together Lee & Chris co-founded Veteran's PATH a program that offered mindfulness and meditation retreats for returning veterans. Marc Lesser is a CEO, executive coach, speaker, author and Zen teacher, with more than 25 years’ experience supporting leaders to access their full potential. Wildland Firefighter Leaders will also help to guide and support this retreat. Space is limited, so please apply as soon as you can. Once we receive your application we will follow-up with you to schedule a conversation to confirm your participation.
In December of 2023, the San Francisco Zen Center offered a 9-day mindfulness-based retreat for Wildland Firefighters at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. SFZC has sponsored two previous retreats that have been life-changing for the participants. These retreats are a way to support our first responders, who have played a crucial role in protecting our forests from numerous fires that have become more frequent and fierce in recent summers.
The intensity and longevity of these wildfires has been taking a toll on firefighters and their families, who carry the trauma of the destruction they witness and of the loss of colleagues who have died fighting the fires.
Comments from firefighters after the retreat:
"Going to [Tassajara] was a life-changing experience for me. I really appreciated being surrounded by like-minded firefighters who truly understand the struggles we each face, both on and off of the line. I found people I could empathize with, I found healing, and I found practices I can use in everyday life to benefit my mental health."
"I hope this [yearly] retreat continues and I will be actively sharing the tools, resources, and my takeaways with the wildland firefighter community whenever I have the opportunity."
Read more in the SFZC Sangha News Journal article:
“Wildland Firefighters Express their Gratitude”
Photo Slideshow of the Dec 2023/January 2024 Retreat
