Radiate Lovingkindness This Mettā May
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Calendar
Retreat
On-Land
May
Retreat | On-Land
May 5 - May 10, 2024 | Sunday - Friday | 5 nights
With the World on Fire, Embody the Eightfold Path
The Buddha offered the Noble Eightfold Path as a way to direct our lives away from entanglement and towards true freedom. As we find ourselves moving into an increasing ecological crisis and witnessing its impact on the planet and our lives, the Buddha’s teaching becomes ever more relevant and essential. During this retreat, Ayya Ananadabodhi, Ayya Santacitta, and Ayya Santussika will offer teachings on this theme with an emphasis on bringing the path to the whole of our experience.
Retreat | On-Land
May 11 - May 16, 2024 | Saturday - Thursday | 5 nights
Spring Insight Retreat
8 CE Credits. The Buddha suggested that we have underestimated the capacity of our heart. Retreat helps us to remember. In mindfulness meditation, we practice resting, looking deeply, and knowing moment by moment what it's like to be human. The more deeply we look, the more reason we have to love. Together, we'll sit in the refuge provided by a 2,600-year legacy of wisdom and kindness. In silence, we come to know the preciousness of our life and the poignancy of the human condition.
Retreat | On-Land
May 26 - May 30, 2024 | Sunday - Thursday | 4 nights
The Body as Nature, Nature in the Body: Dharma and Our Connection to the Earth
Our body can be a vehicle for liberation in this life, containing all we need to wake up. Yet we may not know how to relate to the body in the ways that can support this kind of freedom. Throughout this retreat, we will practice connecting to our body with loving awareness while recognizing ourselves as an essential part of nature. Together, we will engage in noble silence as we are nurtured and supported by the land at Spirit Rock.
Retreat | On-Land | Hybrid
Sunday, May 26 | 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Inspire, Energize, and Connect: Remedies for the Heart
Come join us as we take a deep dive into the timeless and beautiful teachings of the Bodhisattva, the one who meets suffering with intention, strength, determination, courage, and love. Together, we'll explore ways to skillfully navigate our everyday lives with a steady, receptive mind and a courageous, wise heart. The day includes periods of sitting and walking meditation, as well as Dharma reflections and plenty of time to talk with each other. All are warmly welcome!
Retreat | On-Land
May 31 - June 6, 2024 | Friday - Thursday | 6 nights
Loving Each Moment: The Heartfelt Revelation of Dharma
This retreat will explore the simplicity of being in each moment. Together we will discover the heart's capacity to awaken to loving ourselves, each other, and the world. Together in community we will be nourished by the 2600 year old tradition of abiding in silence, stillness, kindness, and clarity. Our time together will include mindfulness meditation in sitting, movement, and all daily activities. The teachings will weave together ancient wisdom along with the love of truth and being.
June
Retreat | On-Land
June 7 - June 14, 2024 | Friday - Friday | 7 nights
Insight, Awareness, and the Nine Bodies of Consciousness
This retreat offers a new style of Insight Meditation that employs the “Nine Bodies of Consciousness” map. The focus of this practice is on developing mindfulness of the felt sense of embodied experience, and directly experiencing the various capacities of consciousness, including intuitive awareness, which fosters the natural arising of insight. This distinct teaching style will be unfamiliar to first-time “Nine Bodies Insight” practitioners, and potential participants are strongly encouraged to listen to guided meditations beforehand.
Retreat | On-Land
June 15 - June 21, 2024 | Saturday - Friday | 6 nights
The Magic of Awareness
The paradox of awareness is profound and yet very simple. It can’t be described because it has no objective qualities and no limitations. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, good nor bad. We will practice with this quality of awareness through formal and informal meditation. Once we know how to pay attention, it can be experienced in an instant. When we learn to reside in that liberated mind, we find the very thing we have been seeking all along.
Retreat | On-Land
June 22 - June 27, 2024 | Saturday - Thursday | 5 nights
Mindfulness for Everyone
8 CE Credits. Mindfulness offers us tools to develop our capacity to pay attention, regulate emotions, and cultivate states of lovingkindness, compassion, and even-mindedness. Mindfulness can be practiced in a variety of ways—from focused attention to wide open, spacious, natural awareness. Over time, one can access states of profound well-being in both silent meditation and everyday life. Rooted in the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, this retreat focuses on practical applications of mindfulness and is open to people of all experience levels and backgrounds.
Retreat | On-Land | Hybrid
Saturday, June 22 | 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
The Awakened Heart: Mindfulness and Compassion Practices for Living a Wise and Free Life
The Awakened Heart practices known as the brahmavihāras are treasures that offer us timeless ways to cultivate and embody lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and peace. Cultivating the heart begins with self-love and self-compassion, and opens toward boundless kindness and care, holding beings throughout the many worlds in our own awakened heart. Join us in the delight of exploring, practicing together, and renewing these disciplines through meditation, stories, teachings, dialogue, and time with our beloved elder teacher.
Jack Kornfield
Retreat | On-Land
June 28 - July 4, 2024 | Friday - Thursday | 6 nights
Finding Refuge in Belonging: Annual BIPOC Retreat
Open to all self-identified BIPOC. Throughout this BIPOC retreat, we will gain insight into the 10 Paramis—the perfections or attainments of heart and mind—which will guide us as a map for the recovery and reclamation of a culture of belonging and wisdom. These are qualities for navigating life, not just guidelines for meditation, and they are said to be what the Buddha was cultivating in earlier lifetimes as he slowly developed into one who could awaken fully and show others the way to freedom.
Noliwe Alexander
Leslie Booker
Gullu Singh
Margarita Loinaz
Jonathan Relucio
Ramona Lisa Ortiz-Smith
July
Retreat | On-Land
July 5 - July 14, 2024 | Friday - Sunday | 9 nights
The Four Noble Truths and Dependent Origination: Are They Still Applicable?
The Buddha’s teachings of the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Origination were formulated more than 2600 years ago in a social environment that was radically different from that of today’s “Information Age.” Are they still functional and useful in the West in the 21st Century? This retreat will be an opportunity to explore these classical teachings and their related practices, and to discover whether they are indeed effective in illuminating our hearts and minds and in leading us to liberation.
Retreat | On-Land
Saturday, July 13 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Home is Here, Refuge is Now: An Asian American Gathering
Open to all with Asian heritage (Central, East, North, South, Southeast, and West Asian heritage). This daylong gathering offers people of Asian heritage an opportunity to deepen their relationship to the Dharma in a supportive community. Inspired by Rev. Liên’s book Home is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path and Chenxing’s book Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, our daylong will weave together meditation, chanting, conversation, and other practices in order to cultivate the possibility that “home is here, refuge is now.”
Retreat | On-Land
July 15 - July 18, 2024 | Monday - Thursday | 3 nights
Tenderness Retreat: Compassion for Self and All Beings
A heart that can stay open and present in the face of dukkha (suffering or dissatisfaction) is one that is well-trained in compassion. Beginning with instruction designed to ease the nervous system and soften the barriers to a tender, open heart, we will learn the ancient radiating method of brahmavihāra practice, which opens the heart of compassion towards all beings, including oneself. It is a gentle but powerful approach to compassion practice suitable for newer and seasoned practitioners alike.
Retreat | On-Land | Hybrid
July 19 - July 28, 2024 | Friday - Sunday | 9 nights
July Insight Meditation Retreat
The emphasis during this retreat will be on the continuity of awareness in all activities, which stabilizes and balances the mind. Relaxed acceptance of our moment-to-moment experience will become the platform for investigation and wisdom. Particular attention will be paid to the attitudes in the mind that condition our understanding. This retreat is suitable for both beginner and experienced meditators, and we welcome people from all life experiences, backgrounds, and communities.
Retreat | On-Land
July 29 - August 4, 2024 | Monday - Sunday | 6 nights
The Spirit of Insight, Dharma & Awakening
The essence of Buddhist practice is embodying the Dharma experientially. In this retreat we will use mindfulness meditation to study our experiential reality within all our activities, including meditation, movement, eating, resting, and listening. When we are present and investigate our experiential reality moment by moment, insight arises, and the Dharma reveals itself within our body, heart, and mind. As the living, embodied truth unfolds, we awaken to the Buddha within and discover the depth and breadth of our own human potential.
August
Retreat | On-Land
August 5 - August 10, 2024 | Monday - Saturday | 5 nights
Young Adult Insight Meditation Retreat
Come practice silent mindfulness and Insight Meditation in community with your peers. Give yourself a break from constant overstimulation and external demands as we create a supportive space for cultivating greater calm, spaciousness, and presence. Together we will explore the ancient practices of guided and silent sitting, walking, and heart meditations, along with movement, teacher meetings, and Dharma talks. Over the course of the week, we will extend these practices until the entire day is one of steady, continuous awareness.
Retreat | On-Land
August 11 - August 18, 2024 | Sunday - Sunday | 7 nights
The Elements: Cultivating an Embodied Experience of Emptiness and Fullness
A fundamental aspect of establishing embodied mindfulness involves contemplations of the elements—earth, water, fire, air, and space. These five elements are universal, and when we contemplate them in relation to the body, they may bring a cooling of the grasping mind and profound realizations of emptiness and fullness. In contemplating the elements and their interrelationship, we will allow them to support the non-conceptual knowing from which insights naturally arise. This retreat includes guided and silent meditations, movement, and teacher meetings.
Retreat | On-Land
August 18 - August 27, 2024 | Sunday - Tuesday | 9 nights
Summer Lovingkindness Retreat
The Buddha’s teachings on the four divine sanctuaries include meditations on universal friendliness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity. Focusing on purification and concentration, these divine sanctuaries aid our ability to find inner peace and powerfully engage with the world. This retreat deepens our understanding of selfless love and how it ends suffering. Experienced retreatants are encouraged to combine this retreat with the previous Elements retreat to further develop concentration, purify the heart, and learn to integrate these two forms of meditation.
Retreat | On-Land
August 28 - September 2, 2024 | Wednesday - Monday | 5 nights
Labor Day Insight Meditation Retreat
This retreat emphasizes quieting the mind, opening the heart, and developing clarity and depth of practice. Traditional instructions will be combined with a spirit of lovingkindness, and our time together will include a schedule of silent sitting and walking periods, guided Yoga/movement sessions, as well as practice meetings with teachers and daily Dharma talks. This retreat is for experienced as well as new students.
September
Retreat | On-Land
September 2 - September 5, 2024 | Monday - Thursday | 3 nights
Coming Home to Ourselves
Come home to yourself with the simple and direct practice of being present for your experience. Insight Meditation allows the restless heart to settle through the gentle practice of repeatedly connecting with and returning to the here and now. It is here in the present moment where we discover the peace and well-being we yearn for. This retreat is suitable for beginners as well as experienced practitioners and is silent except for practice instructions, teacher-led Q&A, and practice discussions.
Retreat | On-Land
September 5 - September 8, 2024 | Thursday - Sunday | 3 nights
The Doorway to Freedom and Peace: The Three Characteristics
The radical premise of the Buddha’s teaching is that realizing the truth—what Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki called "things-as-it-is"—is the doorway to freedom and peace. During this retreat, we will engage mindfulness and compassion to turn toward the living truth that arises each moment, with an emphasis on the Three Characteristics of Reality: all things are impermanent (aniccā), ultimately unreliable (dukkha), and ownerless (anattā). Our time will include silent meditation and movement along with instructions, Dharma talks, and meetings with teachers.
Retreat | On-Land
September 9 - September 13, 2024 | Monday - Friday | 4 nights
Founders Retreat: Insight Meditation with the Spirit Rock Founding Teachers
Spirit Rock invites you to a special Insight Meditation Retreat with senior Spirit Rock teachers who have been here since the beginning. This retreat emphasizes quieting the mind, opening the heart, and developing clarity and depth of practice. Traditional instructions based on the Foundations of Mindfulness will be combined with daily mettā (lovingkindness) practice, silent sitting and walking periods, guided movement sessions, practice meetings with teachers, and daily Dharma talks.
Retreat | On-Land
September 14 - September 18, 2024 | Saturday - Wednesday | 4 nights
Aging, Dying, & Awakening
In this retreat, we’ll explore aging and dying from the Buddhist perspective of meditative practice and awakening. Together, we'll examine aging and death in our conventional lives and see what happens as we normalize these processes as part of the great letting go. How might this “letting go” reveal the awakened heart? This retreat will include meditation instructions, Dharma talks, meetings with teachers, and a daily period of contemplative inquiry during which we will investigate our own relationship to death. Otherwise, this retreat is silent outside of the mentioned above periods.
Retreat | On-Land
September 19 - September 25, 2024 | Thursday - Wednesday | 6 nights
Spiritual Sanctuary: A Women's Liberation Retreat
Open to all self-identified Women. We live in times of increasing pressure, which can be experienced as intensity, stress, limitation, or dissatisfaction. The Four Noble Truths remind us that pressure is an unavoidable part of life, and that freedom is possible within it. This retreat offers a space in which practitioners can choose rest, renewal, and liberation. Together we will practice in silence, integrating movement and stillness, outdoor practice, and Dharma talks that lift up women’s journeys of awakening from a diversity of lineages and traditions.
Retreat | On-Land
September 26 - September 30, 2024 | Thursday - Monday | 4 nights
What the Buddha Taught
Held in noble silence and open to all levels of experience, this retreat explores ancient Buddhist practices, stories, and insights while considering the relevance of these 2500-year-old teachings to our contemporary lives. Together we will weave mindfulness into our practices of sitting, walking, eating, and basic daily activities. The renunciation of technology, books, entertainment, and other aspects of regular life will facilitate the development of insight that will benefit our everyday practice as we return to our modern lives.
October
Retreat | On-Land
October 1 - October 10, 2024 | Tuesday - Thursday | 9 nights
Naturally Arising Samādhi [Concentration]
This retreat develops concentration through specific meditative practices that utilize the mind’s natural capacity to become collected and unified. Our focus will be on developing concentration; exploring the experience of a concentrated and contented mind as a natural, mysterious, and beneficial phenomena; and utilizing concentration during Insight practice. The primary teaching method will be two daily guided 45-60 minute meditations, and participants are strongly encouraged to listen to guided meditations ahead of time to experience this style of practice.
Retreat | On-Land
October 10 - October 19, 2024 | Thursday - Saturday | 9 nights
Fall Insight Meditation Retreat
This is a Vipassanā retreat in the Thai Forest Tradition, which will emphasize quieting the mind, opening the heart, and developing clarity and depth of practice. Traditional meditation instruction will be combined with a spirit of lovingkindness, and the retreat will include silent stillness and moving meditation, Dharma talks, and practice meetings with the teachers.
Retreat | On-Land
October 20 - October 26, 2024 | Sunday - Saturday | 6 nights
Uncovering the Luminous Gold Within: BIPOC Mettā Retreat
Open to all self-identified BIPOC. There is a rich repository of deep peace and ease that resides within the heart. Mettā, the practice of lovingkindness, brings to awareness the messages of conditioning that cloak the inner sacredness of our being. Mettā transforms the heart into a sanctuary by which we are strengthened to stay lovingly engaged with the tumultuous tides of life. This retreat offers silent and guided meditation, Dharma talks, movement meditation, and restful time to nourish the body and heal the heart.
Retreat | On-Land
October 27 - November 2, 2024 | Sunday - Saturday | 6 nights
Befriending Mortality: Living An Awakened Life Through Mindfulness of Death
18 CE Credits. We all “know” we will die, yet we tend to ignore it and put our collective heads in the sand. Rather than running away from our inevitable mortality, we can harness its power to stay aligned with our deepest values and to live and love more fully. Fully embracing life’s impermanence can engender a deep freedom and letting go. Through mindfulness of death (maraṇasati), we become more present for this miraculous, passing show called life with gladness and gratitude.
November
Retreat | On-Land
November 3 - November 8, 2024 | Sunday - Friday | 5 nights
Nourishing the Beautiful: A Retreat for the LGBTQIA+ Community
Open to all self-identified LGBTQIA+. Awakening to the beauty that is within and around us is an essential part of the Buddhist path, and it is particularly important to those of us who have been taught to view ourselves and the world in a different light. Practicing together, we will closely consider—and deeply nurture—what beauty means for us, both individually and collectively. This retreat supports all levels of practice and inclusivity for LGBTQIA+, GNC, and non-binary communities, and is open to all levels of experience.