Mindfulness allows us to know our experience, which gives us some room. We don’t get swept away by the wanting mind or the aversive mind. Experience can come and go, as it will. T.S. Eliot puts it this way: “There are three conditions which often look alike yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment from self and from things and from persons; and growing between them, indifference, which resembles the others as death resembles life.” What Eliot calls “detachment” emphasizes the knowing, rather than our narratives. This is the inner change: we’re not indifferent to our lives—we care—but caring takes on a larger sense than our ego’s immediate needs.
Phillip Moffitt
Residential Retreat Teacher
Phillip Moffitt is a Buddhist meditation teacher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He served as Co-Guiding Teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center from 2010-2018. Phillip is an honorary co-founder and the creator of the practice method that is the focus of the nonprofit organization Dharma Ground, which offers online Insight retreats and classes integrating Nine Bodies Insight teachings and the dharma. Phillip is also the founder and president of Life Balance Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to training leaders and professionals in how to skillfully make major transitions in their lives. He is the author of three books: Awakening through the Nine Bodies, Emotional Chaos to Clarity, and Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering.
Phillip Moffitt's Upcoming Programs
Retreat | On-Land
May 1 - May 9, 2025 | Thursday - Friday | 8 nights
Naturally Arising Ease, Awareness, and Insight
Registration Open. This retreat offers a potent new approach to Insight Meditation in which we open to enhanced capacities of knowing. After engaging in detailed preliminary practices to help us shift out of reactive tendencies of mind and establish genuine availability and embodiment, we’ll then utilize components of the “Nine Bodies of Consciousness” map to access multiple distinct knowing capacities, including intuitive awareness. This practice method fosters the natural arising of ease, awareness, and insight.
Short Program | Online
Saturday, June 28 | 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Naturally Arising Clarity: A Practice Method for Developing Samadhi and Insight
During this daylong, we will explore two practices that create the conditions for a naturally arising concentrated mind. The first practice—“the three renunciations"—establishes a discerning mind that is free of reactivity and self-judgment. The second practice, the “arriving sequence,” establishes a mind state that is available for practice and aligned with the Dharma. The result of these practices is a naturally arising responsive mind that can free us from the over-efforting that so often plagues our practice.
Phillip Moffitt
Dharma Library
Can't join us live online or on the land? Study and practice at your convenience with Phillip Moffitt through our new library of recordings, articles, and self-paced online courses.