Jess Huon, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne (2026)

23/04/2026

We gathered to revive a map of archetypal, elemental, sane energies - to support women stepping forth.

We steeped in foundations within the Insight tradition, then moved off the cushion to revive this ta***ic map - where the feminine is reinstated, where practice meets daily life, where the world is your monastery.

Watching women across all ages step up, speak up, shake off limiting views amplified by our modern culture, is a powerful thing.

Thanks to the wonderful team and to all the women who came, and to the generosity of all the people and teachers who have kept these practices alive and opened them up to me.

Reflections on Red Women’s retreat on the Great Ocean Rd

14/04/2026

Standing up together on Sunday in the fire of these times, sparks of Inspiration flew here in Melbourne/Naarm.

Threading together different traditions - First Nations and the Dharma - to create deeper netting for these times.

I'm appreciative of Ruth Ruth Langford for bringing her wisdom, straight talk and medicine, as we jumped up off the cushion into relational practices.

We explored what it is to stand up and step up within our unique capabilities and capacities.

Thanks everybody for coming down, and Melbourne Insight Meditation for hosting this event so beautifully.

Someone said, 'I hope the infusion from Sunday keeps coursing through my veins for as long as possible'
Photos of Ruth Langford and Jess Huon's day retreat, Inspiration, at the Augustine Hall, by Peter Casamento

08/04/2026

This coming Sunday, I will be joined by Ruth Langford - Indigenous activist, song-woman and wisdom keeper - to offer medicine for the troubling times we’re in.

It’s easy to clamp down when the heat is on. To tighten up.

Together we’ll be creating space for something different.

Coming together from our distinct lineages, with a shared intention here to back your life force - to offer practices to support you to be receptive to more life.

So you can continue to stand up, amidst all of what you grapple with, personally and collectively.

And so you can stand up in your own way. And maybe in a different way - maybe a freer way, or a less known way. Without the idea of how you should be doing it, - but with the awareness that you’re not alone.

60,000+ years of knowledge behind Ruth. And from my side - a deep commitment to the Buddha Dharma, as a female practitioner - to this 2,500 year old lineage.

Join us as we explore wisdom for now.

I’d love to see you there.
Inspiration - Sunday 12th April, Hawthorn, Naarm/ Melbourne. Booking link in bio.

📷 Fire at Nayri Niara Good Spirit Festival, founded by Ruth Langford. Photo by Peter Casamento.

02/04/2026

Let’s come together to cultivate our spiritual strength and resistance

So that we can keep sparking and protecting life in these tender and tumultuous times.

I’m collaborating with my friend Ruth Langford - beautiful woman, powerful Indigenous leader - once again on April 12th for a day gathering.

To light up our inspiration and warm the edges between us… fostering eros and aliveness as we face what’s hard. So that we can resist cycles of inner and outer harm.

Join us to explore crossing divides - growing corridors of aliveness between us to support our broader collective.

Inspiration - Sunday 12th April. More info and bookings at link in bio.

01/04/2026

I was sitting on the couch recently at home with Ruth Langford, and we were having one of our long conversations about the times we’re in that usually leave me with more to chew over.

She’d just come back from the COP climate conference, and had also been protecting forests in the Eastern Tiers of Lutruwita/Tasmania with Uncle Jim Everett and the Bob Brown foundation.

I was talking about how when the heat’s on, it can be easy to fixate on what’s hard, lose heart, in a way that doesn’t help ourselves, anyone or anything.

Ruth started doing this movement with her hands - widening them - we need to have access to both wrath and rapture, she said.

The pleasure, we need the pleasure…you know the belly laughs, Jess, she said.

It’s an art to keep this range, this enjoyment in our lives - for itself, but also as resistance. As resilience.

The Buddha, after he’d been pushing hard and wasn’t well, saw deeply into the power of cultivating pitti - natural pleasure, which he came to see as essential on the path to Waking Up, and for resisting harm.

Ruth and I will be exploring how to keep our eros and inspiration alive in these times in our upcoming day retreat together.

Come with us, we don’t often get together like this and it feels like a beautiful thing.

Inspiration - Sunday 12th April. More info and bookings at link in bio.
Photo: Ruth Langford standing up for forests and First Nations Lore in the Eastern Tiers, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Photo from the Bob Brown Foundation.

30/03/2026

I’m excited for my upcoming day retreat with Indigenous leader, activist and song-woman Ruth Langford.

We’ll be drawing on Dharma and First Nations wisdom to awaken Inspiration - so we can keep sparking and protecting life.

Ruth has been protecting forests in the Easter Tiers of Lutruwita/Tasmania with Uncle Jim Everett, standing up in court for Country and First Nations Lore.

I am coming from an intensive period of teaching on the power of the heart in troubled times here in Naarm/Melbourne.

Join us for a day to embody what you care about, and cultivate joy and pleasure as a pathway to resistance and resilience.

Inspiration - Sunday 12th April. More info and bookings at link in bio.

13/03/2026

It's two weeks until our Red women's retreat begins.

Grounded in foundational practice, we will open to ta***ic buddhist teachings, and to the support of the elements.

In these pressing times of uncertainty, we'll harness the horizon and the ocean currents as we practice unclenching our bodies and diving deeper than set, reactive patterns of mind.

We will not minimise or trivialise embodied feminine knowing, but place it in the centre of our shared enquiry.

Red Women's Retreat, 27-31st March, Seacroft Estate, link in bio.

📷 1 Working with Red
📷 2 Seacroft Chapel
📷 3 Seacroft Estate

10/03/2026

I recall one of my ta***ic teachers saying to me quite fiercely, 'It is your job to be a transpersonal teacher and ALSO not to neutralise who you are as a woman.'

In a few weeks, we will gather for a Women’s Retreat to shake off some of the dusty fear in the patriarchal lens on the ‘feminine' - and feel into our own bodily subjectivity as to what feels good and right.

In this retreat in particular, we’ll be reviving an ancient ta***ic buddhist map, focusing on the colour RED.

❤️ Red is deep warmth and curiosity. Discerning desire.

❤️ It’s life force, eros, being seen. Red is shameless ease. It’s love without the need to be loved back.

❤️ Red is animating, magnetising - it’s natural capacity.

Grounded in Buddhist foundations, and opening to these awakened energies - and to the elements - we will fire up together for what’s next in our lives.

If you want to trust yourself more, hone your knowing, bring more of yourself through, stop withdrawing and exiting, and open to more pleasure and delight...we have a last few spaces left!

If you’ve been thinking about joining - now’s the time to jump in.

RED Women’s retreat, 27th-31st March 2026, Seacroft Estate. Booking link in bio.

📷s 1-3 working with the ta***ic map at a previous Collective Well Retreat in Naarm/ Melbourne.

03/03/2026

I spent years in monasteries and in solitary practice, intensely immersed in classical Buddhist teachings.

And at a certain point I also needed to break out of these confines – scale the walls – to explore what it means to include my body, the ‘feminine’ – all aspects of my life on my path.

In just over three weeks, we will gather for a women’s retreat by the Great Ocean road on Gadubanud Country, to:

🔥Re-centre the body.

🔥Re-centre the feminine.

🔥Re-centre the dharma in your actual life, and in the living world around us.

Drawing on an ancient, elemental ta***ic map, we will gather to cultivate life force, desire with discernment, warmth, curiosity, eros - to fire up for what’s next in your life.

To anchor you in depth, as you step up.

So you can move towards what you want - not from lack but from fullness.

Last few places available in private rooms. Shared rooms are waitlist only.

Will you join us?

RED Women’s retreat, 27th-31st March 2026, Seacroft Estate. Booking link in bio.

📷 Jess Huon on a beach on Wadawurrung Country, by Peter Casamento.

19/02/2026

I was sitting in a car one day last year, trawling through the news, when a bird swooped in through the window and flew so close to my face I felt its feathers against my cheek.

It was like it was saying - don’t forget about me. Don’t forget about what’s right here. It pulled me back. Into my body, in my neighbourhood, with the people who were around me.

I’m determined to keep my mind and heart open to the maddening injustices we hear each day, but when I’m overwhelmed, over-thinking, jacked up, or compulsively looking - I’m not efficient anymore. And I’ve usually lost connection to what and who is right around me.

And I’m not as creative or as responsive.

I’ve had a burn to see the way the Dharma can handle these times. How it can be not an isolated pursuit, but a pillar of resource for the collective, and in each of our lives.

In particular, in the last year I’ve been focusing on the power of heart practices.

Heart teachings offer both artful tools to help us be with pain, and an inspirational howl for what we can grow in our one precious life. A way to embed ourselves into a more radical belonging, to stay feeling, as we widen our care.

So we can respond more from a coherent whole, rather than fractured identities or habit energies. So we also can stay connected to what's right here.

In last year’s Collective Well deep dive into the heart, we focused in particular on metta (loving-kindness, friendliness).

And together we explored how this seemingly gentle practice - drop by drop - can have powerful effects - healing, restoring, liberating, animating, a force for change.

There's a reason the Buddha said that no other method was 1/16th as effective.

If you'd like to learn more about metta and the power of heart practices, join me next week in an online class where I'll be sharing on this, both from my own emergent learning and from the wisdom of the collective.

Every-one welcome. Link in bio.

📷 Australian magpie by Chris Gresham.

13/02/2026

The Power of the Heart in Troubled Times 🔥

Are you curious about how heart practices could support and empower you?

Join me to explore how metta (loving-kindness) can resource and mobilise us - and cut through separation.

We've been collating learnings and reflections from last year's deep dive into The Collective Well - Heart, and now we want to make these available more widely.

Save the date - Thursday 26th February 7:30-9pm AEDT, for an online class on the Power of the Heart - bookings open soon :)

📷 by Peter Casamento

02/02/2026

✨️Possibility Day Retreat - this Sunday 8th Feb ✨️

Before the year takes hold, and daily patterns and habits resume in full swing, join us in slipping under the noise - like under a wave. All together here, to settle into a deeper current of trust that a meditation practice affords, amidst it all.

So your creative impulses for the year ahead can arise.

So, together, we can all move a little out of the box; out of known parameters and restrictive thinking.

And a sense of possibilty - that the Dharma keeps inviting us into - might be opened.

So the knowing that comes from settling back into a sense of trust, that can steer you forward, in your own beautiful way, has room to stir. Be heard.

In these times, and maybe all times, I think we need each other to orient back to deep practice - the gravitational pull of people practicing together - to touch into that deeper rest and quiet power.

Join us for Possibility, an urban day retreat on Sunday 8th Feb in Melbourne / Naarm.

What would emerge from you this year, if you felt more backed?

Every-body welcome. Booking link in bio.

Jess Huon

23/04/2026

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