This retreat, streamed live from Omega's Rhinebeck campus, explores what meditation teaches us about being human. It teaches us about resistance and gentleness, about delusion and over-thinking, about healing stuck emotions and expanding stuck worldviews. It teaches us mercy, and forgiveness, and majesty and humility. It teaches us about how we relate to other people and to ourselves. All this and more happens when we sit and do nothing. We go deep, we go home—we go nowhere—and none of it can properly be captured in words.
All this gets revealed organically in our own practice. The teacher here is meditation itself—in particular the quiet, which has a way of organizing the nervous system all on its own. During the livestream, you also learn from other people's reports of their experiences, their insights and challenges. So there is sharing and discussion, between those in the room and those online, in addition to meditation and wandering through the late summer foliage all awestruck and blubbering "the glory! the glory!"
Meditation isn't any one way. Every kind of experience can happen on the cushion–our own internal processes are as distinct as our fingerprints, with a lot more dimensions. The simple skills gathered in meditation—the concentration and the clarity, the equanimity and the care—lie at the headwaters of mental and emotional and spiritual health. Over three days, this becomes ever-more obvious. We learn as a collective.
The goal is for everyone to come away with a clear understanding of why they meditate, and a clear feeling for their own strange and beautiful practice.
This livestream retreat is appropriate for all experience levels.
For registered participants, this workshop will be available on demand through October 6, 2023. The workshop is also offered on Omega's Rhinebeck, New York, campus August 4-6. Learn more.
