On-Land Retreat

Young Adult Insight Meditation Retreat

Come practice silent mindfulness and Insight Meditation for a week in community with your peers. Give yourself a break from constant overstimulation and external demands as we create a supportive space for cultivating greater inner calm, spaciousness, and presence. Throughout this retreat, we will honor each person’s experience through radical self-awareness and deeper embodiment, exploring the ancient practices of guided and silent sitting, walking, heart meditations, movement, practice meetings with teachers, and Dharma talks. Over the course of the week, we will extend these practices until the entire day is one of steady, continuous awareness. On the last day of the retreat we will practice coming in and out of silence to explore conscious connection with the community. This is a fully silent retreat, and you will be asked to turn off and put away all electronic devices upon arrival.  This retreat is silent except for teacher-led Q&A, small group discussions, and other practice meetings.

Teaching Team

Matthew Brensilver, PhD

Matthew Brensilver, PhD

Teacher

Matthew Brensilver teaches at the Insight Retreat Center, Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society. Before committing to teach meditation full-time, he spent years doing research on addiction pharmacotherapy at the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine and continues to be interested in the dialogue between Buddhism and science.

Cara Lai

Cara Lai

Teacher

Throughout many mind-body adventures, Cara has explored the concentrated mind, chronic illness, the value of pleasure, the power of maternal energy, and connection to the earth. She tries her best to teach from the most authentic place she can muster, and is still learning about the contentment of simply existing.

Vinny Ferraro

Vinny Ferraro

Teacher

Vinny Ferraro has been a practitioner of insight meditation (Vipassanā) since the mid-90s. He’s been the Guiding Teacher of the Big Heart City Sangha in San Francisco for 20 years. He has been trained and empowered by Spirit Rock/IMS and he doesn’t like talking about himself in the 3rd person.

Hakim Tafari

Hakim Tafari

Teacher

Hakim Tafari is a transplant from the U.K. now living in LA and is active runner meditator and student of the martial arts Hakim is known for his love and passion of the martial arts in particular Tai Chi Quan and has studied and taught for over 20 years.

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