Windhorse Zen Community

Windhorse Zen Community, Inc. is a residential training center offering essential Buddhist teachings and practices within a lay, community-based context. By working with evolving forms of dharma practice—ones uniquely responsive to the relational, psychodynamic, and ecological forces that shape our present reality—we seek to help people live fuller, freer, and more compassionate lives.

The training at Windhorse is open to all who seek a more authentic and fulfilling way of being in the world. Working with breath, koan, and awareness practices, we offer regular weekly sessions, residential training, sesshin retreats, and Zentensives. Windhorse is maintained as a 16 acre wildlife refuge, and is located just outside of Asheville, NC, and overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sunya Kjolhede and Lawson Sachter, the founders and spiritual directors of Windhorse, were ordained and sanctioned to teach by Roshi Philip Kapleau.

Sunya-roshi, along with her other teaching activities, has traveled regularly for over two decades to Poland, where she serves as spiritual director of the Bodhidharma Zen Center, a Polish Zen community founded by Roshi Kapleau in 1975. She has trained in Clinical Pastoral Education, working for a period of time as a hospital chaplain, and has also worked as a storyteller in schools.

Lawson-roshi is also the spiritual director of the Clear Water Zen Center, and a licensed psychotherapist with extensive training in Habib Davanloo’s ISTDP. Many of his clients have been engaged in dharma practice, and he also leads specialized trainings called Zentensives. These retreats are APA accredited trainings designed specifically for mental health professionals, and others interested in working with the unconscious dynamics that arise during intensive meditation.

While the practice at Windhorse is rooted in the depth and power of East Asian wisdom teachings, we also value the contributions of the psychotherapeutic community to the greater well-being of so many. We emphasize a dynamic practice both on the mat and in the world—a living practice that helps us to respond in wise, flexible, and heartfelt ways, to the realities and urgent challenges of contemporary life.