Peaceful Lake, Powerful Mountain, 2025:

The Third Annual Retreat for Peace

What the world needs most is the expansion of our consciousness. In a world of intense alienation and isolation, let us refuse to give up on each other. No more violence, no more condemning. Let’s work on listening and sitting together in silence, and peace.

“This place is a bullshit incinerator.”
- DBZ Abbot Dukuro Jaeckel Roshi 

Peaceful Lake, Powerful Mountain 2025 is all about:

Zen, creative writing workshops, yoga and Qi gong, recovery, swimming and fun time, music, joy and peace.

With special guest teachers: Luisa Giugliano, Lo Nathamundi, and Sander Hicks

The Third Annual Weekend Retreat for Peace.

At DBZ Zen Monastery in the Catskills.
July 11-15, 2025.

Kid-friendly. Childcare provided.

Vegetarian meals provided. 

Our Special Guest Teachers This Year:

Luisa Giugliano, MFA, MDiv, IAYT

Luisa is a poet, theologian and facilitator who has worked in contemplative and creative communities to co-create transformative learning and healing experiences with groups and individuals. She works in private practice in NYC as a chaplain and spiritual care provider specializing in grief. She serves as assistant clerk for her beloved Quaker community. For two decades Luisa has run retreats, trainings and workshops focusing on relational, imaginative and embodied ways of facing the ecological and social troubles of our times. This fall, she will be joining CIIS as a doctoral student in transformative studies. 

Lo Nathamundi is a licensed massage therapist, author, and yoga instructor born in Richland, Washington. He has led classes, workshops and trainings in English and Spanish in North and South America. He has taught both young and old in gyms and athletic clubs, retreat centers, festivals, yoga studios, and prisons.

He is the founder of the Kaleidoscope Community Yoga project. He has a degree in Philosophy from Linfield College, and has also worked as an interpreter and translator.

Facilitator Sander Hicks, is an active member of the 15th Street Monthly Meeting, Society of Friends. He is a peace activist, Zen student, and a writer. With www.Nonviolence.works, he co-produces a nonviolence retreat every year upstate at DBZ monastery, with his wife, Dr. Sophie Gonick.Hicks has written on nonviolence for the New York Daily News, and has reported for Huffington Post, Catholic Worker, New York Press, and Alternet. He regularly broadcasts the podcast, “Monks and Punks” which has featured episodes on Fr. John Dear, Dorothy Day, and Combatants for Peace.

More TBD!

Childcare Available. Children under 14: 1/2 price.

Tickets: $585.00

Includes the retreat, rich content, four nights lodging and all vegetarian meals. Space is limited to 19 overnight guests.

Low-income discount, and work-study programs available.

To register:

RSVP by contacting retreat organizer Sander Hicks.

We can discuss details. (Text me if you like to, my cell phone is on the flyer.) Also, you may send $585 to @Sander-Hicks-1 on Venmo. Or to me on Zelle.

Bus Info: From Port Authority to Monticello, NY. We can pick you up in Monticello, NY, that day, at 2:30 PM-ish if you get on the 12:30 PM bus at Port Authority. More Info.

Physical Address: 223 Beecher Lake Road, Livingston Manor, NY 12758

FOR DRIVING: Please print or screenshot these directions before-hand, phones do not work in the mountains.

Physical Address to the Zen Gatehouse:
223 Beecher Lake Road, Livingston Manor, NY 12758

Come through the gate at the Gate House, then go up the mountain road, two more miles. And then you are really there!