IYI 10 Day Silent Retreat in Santa Cruz, CA
Please join the Insight Yoga Institute for this transformative 10 day silent retreat in Santa Cruz Feb 28-Mar 9, 2012 with Sarah and Ty Powers, Jennifer Welwood, and Buddhist teachers Thanissara and Kittisaro.
The Insight Yoga Institute is dedicated to integrating essential teachings and practices from various wisdom traditions. The practices from these traditions amplify our insights and generate the potential for those insights to become evident in how we live our lives and benefit others.
Sarah and Ty Powers founded the Institute on the premise that the combination of retreat, silence, shamatha and vipassana, teachings in Yoga, Buddhism and Spiritual Psychology (as specifically taught by John and Jennifer Welwood) are potent and genuinely successful methods for personal transformation.
Our retreat at Land of Medicine Buddha in Santa Cruz, California, will offer:
social silence
morning and evening meditations with Ty Powers
yoga and meditation sessions with Sarah Powers each day
buddha dharma teachings and meditation with Thanissara and Kittisaro
Psychospiritual Inquiry and teachings with Jennifer Welwood
3 vegetarian meals
walks in an old growth redwood forest
Arrival 4pm Tues Feb 28.
Departure at 11A Friday Mar 9
Retreat FULL - Wait list only - Contact Greg at insightyoga@gmail.com
single $3300
double $2900 ($2700 if paid in full before Dec 15, 2011)
triple $2500 women only ($2400 if paid in full before Dec 15, 2011)
quad $2200 women only ($2100 if paid in full before Dec 15, 2011)
$500 deposit towards this course
Balance towards single
Balance towards double
Balance towards triple
Balance towards quad
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Sarah Powers
Insight Yoga
In this retreat Sarah will encourage us to develop and/or deepen our commitment to a balanced daily practice that nourishes not only our body and breath, but our hearts and minds as well. Each class will give us the opportunity to highlight asana, pranayama, insight meditation, and compassion meditation, so that we might braid them together inside us as a holistic Mandala (or sanctuary of practice) that we can enter daily for renewed inspiration and insight.
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Ty Powers
Shamatha and Vipassana
Ty will be teaching shamatha and insight meditation mornings and most evenings. Shamatha, which means 'calm abiding', requires us to pay close attention to the present moment, the 'issue at hand'. This leaves us in a very open and aware state of being, which can then give rise to insights about how and why we approach our moments as we do.
Knowing what we are doing each moment allows us to respond rather than react to what arises in our experience.
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Thanissara and Kittisaro
Theravadin Buddhism
On this retreat we will contemplate the integration of these teachings into everyday life, and in this develop the role of insight meditation, particularly as it applies to mindfulness of the body and the investigation of the power of emotions in shaping our world. For example, when our letting go is really disguised aversion, we need to meet that tendency with a patient willingness to be in contact with our experience. Form and emptiness are not found in different places. Wisdom and compassion manifest in this one mind. This non dual perspective will inform practices that help us to maintain emotional balance in the midst of life’s ever changing appearances.
The Four Foundations of Mindfulness
“Mindfulness, monks, I say is always useful – it is desirable everywhere, like salt which enhances the flavour of all curries, or a versatile prime minister who accomplishes all the tasks of state.” (S 46.53)
In the Satipatthana Sutta (the foundation text on mindfulness), mindfulness is called ‘ekayana magga’, traditionally translated as ‘the direct path’, but also translated as ‘the path to unification or oneness’. Mindfulness is popular as a secular discipline in the context of health, therapeutic process and even business. While mindfulness enables reduction of stress and increased functionality in daily life, it is also a central practice for the realization of nibbana. (Nibbana is the Pali translation of Sanskrit Nirvana, a term for ‘the deathless’ which has the taste of freedom and peace.) So what is mindfulness? How can it enhance well being and increased skill in negotiating daily life as well as insight into the most subtle aspect of the Buddha’s teaching?
During our retreat we will look at this essential tool of all spiritual work via its four classical dimensions:
1. Exploring the body / both inner experience of body and outer perceptions around body.
2. Exploring feeling / the connection between feeling and emotion & working with emotion
3. Exploring the mind / what is mind and how do we experience it?
4. Exploring the reality of experience / factors of awakening, hindrance, form and emptiness
The Four Noble Truths
“It is because of not understanding and not penetrating the Four Noble Truths that you and I have roamed and wandered for so long through the endless cycles of samsara.” (S 56.21)
As mindfulness increases we become more aware of suffering. The Buddha used the presence of suffering/dis-ease/dukkha as the starting point and central feature of his teaching. He was known as “The Doctor of the World” (Bhesaja-guru) since he focused upon the practicalities of healing this fundamental spiritual/psychological disease. In doing so he cast the explanation of his primary insight into this universal human problem in the form of a classical (ayurvedic) medical diagnosis:
a) The symptom: ”There is the experience of dissatisfaction.”
b) The cause: ”Self-centered and sensory craving; compulsive desires; the primary confusion of self that seeks to become something or wishes not to exist.”
c) The prognosis: ”It is curable; contentment, happiness and peace are possible.”
d) The treatment: “Ethics, collectedness (concentration) and understanding in accordance with reality (wisdom).”
We will explore the 4 foundations and the 4 truths and how they weave together throughout the retreat. Our exploration will include explanations, guided meditations, practice sessions, use of chanting to support gathering of body, mind and heart energies and discussion.
The retreat will begin by reflecting on the Triple Jewel, the three sources of inspiration that the Buddha offered as trustworthy refuges for those interested in awakening. Without cultivating confidence or trust in these essential qualities, we have trouble finding the energy to persevere with the difficulties encountered on the Path. Have we explored where we place our trust?
In terms of the Four Noble Truths: we will develop and explore the balance of samadhi (concentration supported by the 5 jhana factors) and vipassana (investigation and insight). In particular we look at how meditation practice enables a letting go of self-centered grasping and the realization of Nibbana, that which is truly peaceful.
In terms of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness: we will develop the role of insight meditation, particularly as it applies to mindfulness of the body and the investigation of the power of emotions in shaping our world. For example, when our letting go is really disguised aversion, we need to meet that tendency with a patient willingness to be in contact with our experience. Form and emptiness are not found in different places. Wisdom and compassion manifest in this one mind. This non dual perspective will inform practices that help us to maintain emotional balance in the midst of life’s ever changing appearances.
On this retreat we will contemplate the integration of these teachings into everyday life, and also reflect how they relate to other spiritual disciplines, hatha yoga in particular. |
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Jennifer Welwood
Psycho-spiritual Inquiry
On this retreat we will integrate deep spiritual and psychological work, which begins with our human predicament and unfolds toward our human possibility. We will explore the ways that we have become caught in habitual patterns that separate us from our nature as innate open wakefulness, and we will work with the mechanisms of identification and avoidance that lock us into those patterns. We will learn how to open to and become present with the underlying feelings and vulnerabilities that our patterns exist to avoid, and we will discover in that meeting the doorway to both our psychological wholeness and our spiritual evolution.
The great 14th century yogi Longchenpa, in his songs of realization, declared:
Awakened mind is self-knowing awareness equal to space.
Naturally lucid and unwavering, the spacious expanse of utter lucidity
Is not created but is spontaneously present.
Spontaneously present–not occurring, not originating, and not finite–
It does not come from anywhere, nor does it go anywhere at all.
This vast expanse, unwavering, indescribable, and equal to space,
Is timelessly and innately present in all beings.
Within primordial basic space, there is simply realization or its lack.
Longchenpa’s words reflect the Buddhist teaching that we all have an enlightened nature that is intrinsic and indestructible, and that the only difference between enlightened beings and ourselves is that in us, this nature has become covered over by obscurations. The essence of the spiritual journey is thus twofold: on the one hand, it involves learning to recognize, access, and abide in our intrinsic nature; and on the other hand, it involves learning to meet, penetrate, and unwind the obscurations that keep us from directly knowing and experiencing that nature. Learning to recognize our intrinsic nature is the process of realization, and learning to unwind what keeps us from experiencing it at each moment of life is the process of transformation.
While it is relatively easy to glimpse our intrinsic nature during practice sessions, retreats, or moments of transcendence, our greatest challenge is to embody it in our daily living–to live from the truth of who we are rather than occasionally experiencing it. This is evolutionary work that requires particular understandings and methods.
On this retreat we will integrate deep spiritual and psychological work in the service of engaging this twofold journey, which begins with our human predicament and unfolds toward our human possibility. We will explore the ways that we have become caught in habitual patterns that separate us from our nature as innate open wakefulness, and we will work with the mechanisms of identification and avoidance that lock us into those patterns. We will learn how to open to and become present with the underlying feelings, vulnerabilities, and ontological emptiness at the core of our patterns, and we will discover in that meeting the doorway to both our psychological wholeness and our spiritual evolution.
What ushers us through this doorway is cultivating our capacity for presence– for meeting our experience just as it is, with open wakefulness, and without judgment, aversion, agenda, manipulation, or conceptual elaboration. When we bring presence to bear on what is most real in us–our own essential nature–then that presence is like sunlight suffusing a closed bud, allowing our experience of our essential nature to begin to open. And when we bring presence to bear on what is most conditioned in us–our habitual patterns and tendencies–then that presence is like sunlight dissolving mist in the sky, allowing our patterns to begin to disperse. By integrating psychological and spiritual work in the service of returning presence to wherever it has been lost, we utilize the potential synergy of this union. Working with our unresolved psychological material becomes a vehicle for unfolding our deeper being, and unfolding our deeper being comes down to earth, and can truly manifest in our lives.
Our format will include teaching and discussion, psychological inquiry and process work, spiritual practice, and the profound and sacred work of cultivating the subtle body, which is the bridge that allows our essential nature to manifest in time and space, in this body and in this life. As the subtle body awakens, we develop the energetic basis for becoming an essential person. Then, rather than living our life as the conditioned person who has temporary experiences of our essential nature, we begin to live our life as a personal embodiment and expression of our essential nature. This is the only basis for true happiness, fulfillment, and meaning in a human life, and the only basis for being of true service to others.
We will work with our psychodynamic patterning from the perspective of nondual wisdom and learn to access our larger awareness in the midst of all feelings and states.
We will also embrace some of the pith teachings and practices of Tibetan Buddhism from both a psychological and spiritual perspective.
And last, we will work with the stages of meditation from the ninth yana perspective of Ati Yoga, in conjunction with psychological processes that parallel and support those stages. |
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