Tassajara Wildland Firefighter Retreat
December 28, 2025 - January 2, 2026
Tassajara Zen Mountain Center
Carmel Valley, CA
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Your support of these retreats, in any amount, helps make them possible. Thank You!
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.
This retreat is made possible by Tassajara, San Francisco Zen Center, and Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics & Ecology (FUSEE).
Wildland Firefighters - send in your application!
Space is limited, so please fill out the Application.
If you have questions or need assistance, contact Helena Virga.
"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 annual 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 six-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. The retreat will also include 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 three follow-up monthly Zoom calls in small groups after the retreat.
The facilitators are all experienced practitioners: Chris Fortin is a Zen priest and teacher, practiced for many years as a licensed MFT with a trauma-based orientation, founder and guiding teacher of 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 and 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.
This retreat is made possible by Tassajara, San Francisco Zen Center, and Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics & Ecology (FUSEE).
Retreat Donors—please help support this retreat!
These retreats are a way to support our first responders who have played such a crucial role in protecting our forests—and Tassajara—from fire. We all know that wildfires have become more frequent and more fierce in recent summers, and it is taking a toll on our firefighters. Zen Center is donating meals and lodging; we need to raise funds for the facilitators to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the retreat and to provide support before and after the retreat. Donate using button below. Thank You!
In December of 2024, the San Francisco Zen Center offered a 9-day mindfulness-based retreat for Wildland Firefighters at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. SFZC has sponsored three 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 an article about the most recent retreat that Chris wrote for the SFZC Sangha News Journal
Read more in the SFZC Sangha News Journal article:
“Wildland Firefighters Express their Gratitude”
Photos of Dharma Heart Zen retreat volunteers, December 2024
Photo Slideshow of the 2023 and 2024 Retreats
