Holiday Retreat 2026: The Art of Love, Magnolia Grove Monastery

The Holiday Retreat 2026: The Art of Love is a meditation retreat at Magnolia Grove Monastery, held over the winter holiday season in the Plum Village tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. It is for anyone drawn to mindfulness practice who wants to spend the holidays in a monastic community, learning to treat love as something practiced rather than only felt.

The retreat is hosted by Plum Village monasteries, the community founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, whom his students call Thay. Its theme is stated plainly: love is a living practice, an art rooted in presence, listening, understanding and everyday nurture. A mindfulness retreat built around that idea is a good fit if you are looking at your closest relationships, your family, or the way you show up for the people around you.

What to Expect

The retreat takes its direction from a single teaching: that love can be cultivated through ordinary attention. Presence, listening and understanding are the qualities named at its center, along with the daily care that keeps a relationship alive. In the Plum Village tradition, these are trained through mindfulness meditation and shared community life rather than studied only as ideas.

About Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) was a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace activist. He founded the Plum Village Tradition and is widely credited as a major influence on how Buddhism and mindfulness reached the West.

Born Nguyễn Xuân Bảo in Huế, central Vietnam, he entered the monastery at Từ Hiếu Temple at sixteen and was ordained as a monk in 1951. In the 1960s he co-founded the School of Youth for Social Service, which sent volunteers into rural areas to build schools and clinics and to help rebuild war-torn villages. He also created the Order of Interbeing, a community of monastics and laypeople built around the Five and Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. He coined the term "engaged Buddhism", the idea that mindfulness and compassionate action in the world belong together.

The Setting

Magnolia Grove Monastery is one of the Plum Village monasteries, the network of practice centers that carries Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching forward. Retreats at these monasteries are held in community, so you practice alongside the resident monastics and the other guests who have come for the same days.

Before You Go

Plum Village retreats are open to people at different stages of practice, and the theme here, love in daily life, needs no background in Buddhism. Registration is handled through the monastery, and holiday retreats of this kind tend to fill early, so it is worth confirming your place well ahead of time.