There is suffering. There is no getting away from it if you are embodied. However, through this practice, and this way of understanding embodiment, there is the opportunity to hold it with dignity and grace. If you keep compassion alive in your listening and understanding, then anger and bitterness cannot arise. Compassion alone can keep you from becoming irritated, angry, or full of despair. Compassion is born from happiness, and also from understanding. When compassion and understanding are alive in your heart, and mind, you are safe whatever the circumstances or situation you are meeting.
DaRa Williams
Residential Retreat Teacher
DaRa Williams has practiced Insight Meditation for more than 25 years. She completed the Spirit Rock/IMS/IRC Teacher Training, serves as a Spirit Rock Stewarding Teacher, and as an Associate Guiding Teacher at IMS. DaRa is a trainer and wellness coach, and has been a clinician and administrator in the mental health field for over 25 years. She is a certified Focusing Oriented Therapist and a practitioner and trainer of Aboriginal Focusing Oriented Complex Trauma Therapy.
"It is my belief that vipassana meditation and the dharma are ideal for transforming suffering, particularly the trauma of oppression and its many vicissitudes-where the chains around our minds and hearts can be broken through and dissolved. Awareness and wisdom become the vehicle for freedom and transforming lives."
DaRa Williams' Upcoming Programs
Retreat | On-Land
December 11 - December 17, 2026 | Friday - Thursday | 6 nights
Opening to Insight and Love
Spaces Still Available! It is easy for us to forget the heart’s capacity for wisdom and love. The term sati—mindfulness—means to remember. To re-member is to make whole. Meditation retreat invites us to remember our fundamental wholeness so we can respond to the cries of the world. Cultivating a clear mind and tender a heart, we can act with skill and kindness. Within the silent container of retreat, we investigate our experience with relaxed, focused attention, let go of habitual patterns of reactivity and fear, and rediscover the preciousness of human life and poignancy of our shared humanity. As our felt sense of separation heals and we remember our essential goodness, we can engage with life from a place of embodied compassion, freedom and peace.
Retreat | On-Land
December 27 - January 4, 2027 | Sunday - Monday | 8 nights
New Year's Insight Meditation Retreat
Spaces Still Available! This is a traditional Insight Meditation (vipassanā) retreat with stillness and movement in silence, and meetings with teachers. Each day there will be meditation instructions, Dharma talks, and movement practice. We will mark the turning of the year with a late evening sitting and simple ceremony on New Year’s Eve. In celebration of the New Year, our focus will be on cultivating loving awareness and embracing each moment as fresh and new. All are welcome.
Dharma Library
Can't join us live online or on the land? Study and practice at your convenience with DaRa Williams through our new library of recordings, articles, and self-paced online courses.