Settling, Seeing, and Spacious Awareness: A Retreat for Experienced Students

In the context of a small and intimate retreat, we will train in three inter-related modes of practice over the course of a week. First, we will settle and stabilize our minds and bodies, becoming more concentrated, through both sitting and moving forms of meditation, including regular Qigong. As we settle, we then become better able to examine closely both the different dimensions of our experience-our bodies, thoughts, and emotions-and the general patterns of experience, both more personal and more universal. We see more clearly where we are reactive, where we suffer, where there is a thick sense of self, and learn to be more with the impermanent flow of experience, transforming our reactivity and habits. We can also tune in more, as we settle and see, to an increasingly unconfined and luminous awareness beyond reactivity, that is a source of freedom, wisdom, and compassion, both in retreat practice and daily life.