Detailed List of Retreats

Dr Jason Ross is a practicing psychologist with a PhD in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis from the Global Centre for Advanced Studies.  He takes a critical stance towards conventional psychology and its ideas of what it means to be supposedly normal.  He proposes a move away from its impoverished language of diagnosing individual experience and a return to a more embodied, socially embedded, poetic, and philosophical engagement with our struggles.  He campaigns for a psychology that is more interested in providing a therapeutic experience than attempting to explain our problems away.  He is particularly sceptical of Psychology’s more recent incorporation of “mindfulness” into its methodology, viewing this as a contradiction of the Buddhist philosophy from which “mindfulness” originally emerged.  His work, therefore, attempts to do justice to the existential philosophical thread that runs through most Buddhist teachings, merging this with an existential psychoanalytic method.  Jason was first introduced to Buddhism through the teachings of Rob Nairn and Louis Van Loon in the 90’s, and his hope is to pay tribute to the legacy of these teachings.  He is currently most influenced by the work of Stephen Batchelor and David Loy.