Your Life Is Your Practice: Insight Meditation Retreat

Registration for this retreat is closed

Closed
Registration is closed for this retreat.
August 21 - August 28, 2015 (Friday to Friday)


This retreat is full with a short waitlist. To be added to the list, submit a registration and deposit.

All scholarship funds have been awarded.


Insight meditation (vipassana in Pali, the language of the original Buddhist teachings) is the simple and direct practice of moment-to-moment mindfulness. Through careful and sustained observation, we experience for ourselves the ever-changing flow of the mind/body process. This awareness leads us to accept more fully the pleasure and pain, fear and joy, sadness and happiness that life inevitably brings. As insight deepens, we develop greater equanimity and peace in the face of change, and wisdom and compassion increasingly become the guiding principles of our lives.

The Buddha first taught vipassana over 2,500 years ago. The various methods of this practice have been well preserved in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. This silent retreat, suitable for both beginning and experienced meditators, is rooted in this ancient and well-mapped path to awakening, and draws on the full spectrum of this tradition's lineages.

An optional daily period of yoga will be offered by Éowyn Ahlstrom.

A Message from IMS's Guiding Teachers

Work on expanding and improving IMS's Retreat Center dining room has begun and will continue through late summer.

Inevitably, this will result in construction and machinery noise. However, this will not be sustained and will mostly take place outdoors during regular construction hours, usually Monday - Friday, 7:00am-4:00pm. Toward the end of the project, there will be some indoor work, but this will be planned for between courses.

To help minimize the impact of the noise, windows in our Retreat Center meditation hall will be kept closed. (The air circulation and conditioning system there allows fresh air to move around very well, without opening windows.)

We have decided to continue offering retreats throughout this building period, knowing that conditions for practice are rarely perfect. We trust that this construction endeavor can be met with the equanimity and grace with which we meet a range of conditions in our lives.

All of us at IMS look forward to supporting you on retreat.

Teachers

Assisting