Tranquility & Compassion: A Beginner-Friendly Evening Meditation Retreat
Happy New Year! Kick off your new year with an evening meditation retreat focused on cultivating compassion and joy! Give yourself the space to cultivate peace, tranquility, stillness, joy, and compassion in your body & mind. This is beginner-friendly and a great way to deepen your existing meditation practice and gain momentum going into the new year! For more advanced meditators, come enjoy an evening retreat of shamatha :)
Why join?
We envision a few outcomes from practicing on this retreat:
Experience with shamatha & heart-centered meditation
Beginning knowledge of how to structure your practice "beyond the app"
Confidence that you can sit for 30-45+ minutes and do a meditation retreat
A felt sense that meditation can feel great!
Momentum for your daily practice entering 2022
What are shamatha and heart practices like metta?
Shamatha is “concentration” meditation from the Buddhist tradition. The goal of shamatha is to center your attention on a single object (e.g. the sensation of breathing) and maintain that attention exclusively. However, it’s not “rigid” as we typically think of concentration in the west. Another way to translate it is “unified”, and the best way to do that is by relaxing and cultivating pleasure!
A great way to do that is through heart-centered meditation practices. In these, you're cultivating feelings of friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity (the "four immeasurables" in Buddhism). There's a lot of scientific research validating its benefits, and you can simply experience it yourself! We’ll be using metta and tonglen which use phrases and visualizations (respectively) to cultivate these qualities. It’s quite compatible with other contemplative practices like gratitude and prayer.
Sometimes heart-centered practices don’t “hit” right away, and that’s ok! It may take a while for your body to get adjusted to this type of practice. The length of an evening retreat gives you a great chance to really give it a shot.
What’s the schedule?
After introductions, we’ll play recorded guided meditations from Michael Taft, Tasshin Fogleman, and Tara Brach.
All Times in PST
4:00 PM: Opening + Talk about Heart Centered Practice
4:30 PM: Guided 30 Min Relaxation Meditation
5:00 PM: Guided Metta Meditation
5:30 PM: Discussion
5:50 PM: Break
6:00 PM: Guided Tonglen Meditation
6:30 PM: Closing Discussion
Completely Donation Based!
This retreat is entirely donation based! Suggested donation is $15-20, but you can also join at no cost. All donations will go to Dharma Gates. Dharma Gates is a non-profit organization supporting college-aged young people in deepening their meditation practice. If you're not sure, you can also pay at the end of the event.
The art in this post was created by Sílvia Bastos, and is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. You can support her work on Patreon.