Meditation isn’t only about sitting down and quietening the mind in your favorite home-haven, incense burning, some peaceful music, a reprieve from the endless distractions of the world. It can also be high up on a mountain, cradled by the high blue sky, by silence and solitude, the wide panorama of ancient mountainscapes that provide such a tonic to the spirit.

One of our adventurers from our Auckland meditation group recently visited Germany while on a work sabbatical and spent weeks tied to vertical mountain faces, kayaking rivers, crossing glaciers and hiking some of the European great walks, exploring the lesser known beautiful spaces that are definitely not a feature of most travelogues.

Dave is a physical education instructor at Onehunga’s montessori-type school, Golden Grove, and brings to the classroom and playgrounds a wealth of experience and fun, challenging the children with climbing walls, orienteering skills, tree hut building, multi-day outdoor trips into the Kaimai and Coromandel ranges, teaching them not only about the outdoors but about themselves and their undiscovered capacities, the inner life where great discoveries are also found.

Check out the photos from the summit of Mt Zugspitze (Germany’s highest mountain); climbing 1,700metres up the Che Guevara via ferrata over the Sarca Valley in Italy; belaying on a multipitch climbing route in the mountains near Garmisch, Germany; and in the Karwendle mountain range in Germany/Austria, near Mittenwald. Awesome!!