This retreat explores what meditation teaches us about being human. It teaches us about resistance and gentleness, delusion and overthinking, healing stuck emotions, and expanding stuck worldviews. It teaches us mercy, forgiveness, majesty, and humility. It teaches us about how we relate to other people and ourselves.
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. You also learn a ton from other people’s reports of their experiences, insights, and challenges. So there is sharing and discussion, in addition to meditation and wandering through the late fall foliage.
Meditation isn’t any one way. Every kind of experience can happen on the cushion—our internal processes are as distinct as our fingerprints, with a lot more dimensions.
On this retreat, Jeff guides a variety of adventurous practices as a way both to highlight the underlying skills and principles of meditation and to empower each person to learn what works for them. There is enormous value in this. The simple skills gathered in meditation—concentration, clarity, equanimity, and care—lie at the headwaters of mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Over three days, this becomes ever more obvious. You learn as a collective.
The goal is for everyone to leave the weekend with a clear understanding of why they meditate and a clear feeling for their own strange and beautiful practice.
