This intensive 9-day retreat is designed to provide a good working foundation for your relational offerings and teaching in general, including but not limited to Insight Dialogue (ID). The intention of this offering is to provide whatever practice and Dharma benefit you might gain personally, and to support teachers to offer this relational insight practice within their current retreats and sanghas. The offering is not intended to train teachers to offer multi-day Insight Dialogue retreats.
This retreat will be held mostly in noble silence with speaking only during ID practice. There will be five-and-a-half days of Insight Dialogue retreat, which will include learning the relational practice along with its immersion in the Dharma, engaging in silent meditation, and some quiet times walking in nature. Then begins a three-and-a-half day guidance to offer ID, both as part of our silent retreats—going into silence and emerging from it–and as a practice for any communities in which we teach. This will include a close look at the ID guidelines, how to offer and frame contemplations taking guidance from the six tenets of the whole life path*. This framework provides a basis for drawing on the wisdom of the Buddha's discourses by first experiencing them intimately and intuitively, and then offering the teachings to others as a living actuality. We will also enhance our understanding of the Dharma through a relational lens and experience the practice of Dharma Contemplation, a text-based group meditation. The three-and-a-half day session will include a lot of “hands on” time, offering the practice to each other, receiving feedback from each other and from the teachers, and reflecting on our experiences. Partial attendance is not suitable.
Please contact jean@metta.org with any questions regarding the retreat and suitability, and to request a registration link.
*Tenets of a Whole Life Path
1. The Dhamma is the foundation.
2. All the teachings are practices.
3. Nothing is left out and no teaching is left out.
4. All teachings can be experienced here and now.
5. The teachings are to be let in fully.
6. The teachings are engaged individually, in relationship, and socially.
