A silent meditation retreat in California over the New Year holiday. We will use the healing process of vipassana, or insight meditation. It will integrate techniques that help you truly bring meditation practice into your everyday life. Beginners are welcome.
Meditation is not something to isolate you from the world. It is something to give you the insight and power to determine your own course amidst the challenges of your every life. It does not ask you to conform to any set way of thinking, it actually gives you more choices, so that you can free yourself from limiting beliefs, decisions, and habits.
Although the intention is to integrate mediation and mindfulness into your everyday life, going away on a retreat to learn transformational techniques and perspectives will provide you with skills you need to bring meditation home. If you are a beginner it will give you a jump start to continue meditating through the new year, and if you are already meditating regularly, the retreat will strengthen and deepen your meditation.
“The Way is easy
for those who are not rigid.
“When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”
from the Hsin Hsin Ming
The purpose of meditation is not to be devoid of feeling – ‘When love and hate are both absent‘ - rather it is to help you become so fluid that all the natural feelings that go along with being human simply pass, like clouds in the sky, allowing you to choose how you respond, and to let go of old fears, resentments, disappointments – to begin anew.
Feelings are inevitable, they are part of living. Meditation is to transform the stickiness of certain feelings through clarity and awareness, and develop the habit of simply letting go. Meditation is a reliable teacher. The process of meditating leads you to towards the simple capacity of letting go of you ‘stuff’.
Loving Kindness and Compassion are key elements in this process also. Loving kindness and compassion begin with how you treat ourselves, how you respond to the inevitable mistakes that occur in daily life. Learning to forgive and let go are essential; allowing you to become expansive, so that you are able to engage in the world with awareness and congruity – so that you become happy, and so that your happiness becomes contagious..
“Angels fly because they take themselves so lightly”