108Bowls.org is home to Hermitage Heart, Zen training and the Water Mala
About 108Bowls.org
Welcome to the on-line home of Hermitage Heart. You will find reflected here a commitment to keeping alive a fresh and vital spiritual life. A radical possibility is nurtured here: that each of us can be available to the poignant and complex calls of suffering that characterize this period of history, and at the same moment remain fully at rest in the natural ease that is every being's birth right. This is the practice of Hermitage Heart. Hermitage Heart was founded in 2004 by Zen teacher Bonnie Myotai Treace, Sensei. Its primary retreat house is Gristmill Hermitage in Garrison, New York, where Sensei writes, does spiritual direction, leads Zen retreats, and works with artists and environmentalists involved in with the work of the Bodies of Water School (BOWS). BOWS is dedicated to bringing attention to the water crisis and its current project is the Water Mala: 108 Bowls. Presentations of the Water Mala have now involved participants from all four continents.
Treace is the first successor in the Mountains and Rivers Order, and trained for over two decades as a monastic. She was the Vice-Abbess of Zen Mountain Monastery for over ten years, helped establish and was the first Abbess of the Zen Center of New York City. Her professional life includes teaching poetry at the college level, and working as a hydromechanics analyst; her current work with Hermitage Heart and BOWS combines her dharma, poetry, and water issues background.
