Retreat | Online
Sunday, March 24 | 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
4 CE Credits. Everyone wants to be calm and peaceful. Our restlessness and agitation stem from an untrained, reactive mind and a lack of clear perception of what's happening in our mind and body from moment to moment. During this retreat, we will train our hearts and minds to find a calm abiding in the present moment.
Howard Cohn
Retreat | Online
Saturday, March 30 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
As we look outward into the world and inward to our own hearts, it becomes apparent that we are living in the infancy of our species’ human potential to dream of a world free from suffering. Our world needs fresh eyes, brightened by the goodness that resides within. During this day we will practice silent and guided meditation. Through visual imagery, talks, and journaling, we will nourish our capacity to rewire conditioned perspectives that smother the fire of imagination.
Amana Brembry Johnson
Retreat | Online
Sunday, March 31 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
5 CE Credits. In concentration and serenity meditation (samatha), we return awareness to one meditation object to the exclusion of everything else, unifying the mind stream. This process of purifying the mind reveals with heightened clarity the habitual patterns that cause us to suffer. Throughout this process, a laser-like awareness can develop, leading to peace, stillness, joy, as well as the meditative absorptions known as jhānas. Topics include: the practice path; the relationship between samatha and vipassanā, and working with striving and hindrances.
Tina Rasmussen
Retreat | On-Land | Hybrid
Saturday, April 6 | 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Liberation won't be found in trying to create the perfect personality, because it isn't the personality that realizes liberation. Using the Buddha's teachings on not-self as a contemplative strategy, rather than a doctrine to believe in, is a way to freedom in the heart/mind. This daylong will explore teachings on not-self and how to bring them into present moment experience. The day will include periods of sitting and walking meditation, as well as Dharma reflections and Q&A.
Ajahn Karunadhammo
Retreat | Online | Hybrid
Saturday, April 6 | 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Liberation won't be found in trying to create the perfect personality, because it isn't the personality that realizes liberation. Using the Buddha's teachings on not-self as a contemplative strategy, rather than a doctrine to believe in, is a way to freedom in the heart/mind. This daylong will explore teachings on not-self and how to bring them into present moment experience. The day will include periods of sitting and walking meditation, as well as Dharma reflections and Q&A.
Ajahn Karunadhammo
Retreat | On-Land
April 7 - April 13, 2024 | Sunday - Saturday | 6 nights
This is a silent retreat designed especially for those relatively new to the practices of Insight Meditation (vipassanā). The retreat includes systematic instructions on vipassanā meditation—both stillness and moving—as well as lovingkindness practices, meetings with teachers, and evening talks highlighting the central teachings of the Buddha and their practical application to our lives.
Retreat | Online
Sunday, April 7 | 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
No one is immune to the different seasons of life. Yet we are often ill-prepared to navigate these natural ups and downs without undue pain and suffering. In her twelfth book, Real Life, New York Times bestselling author Sharon Salzberg contemplates the skills needed to traverse the larger cycles of life, drawing from over 40 years of experience in the Buddhist tradition. Join Sharon and conversation partner Scott Barry Kaufman to talk about the themes from the book.
Retreat | On-Land
April 14 - April 20, 2024 | Sunday - Saturday | 6 nights
Open to All Self-identified Women of the Black African Diaspora. There is a deep well of vibrant, intuitive knowing that is alive in the bone memory of Black Women’s bodies. In practicing silent meditation both indoors and in nature, this retreat for self-identified Black Women includes Dharma talks, embodiment practices, teacher meetings, and time for reflective, intentional rest to nourish the mind, heart, and body. Through guided practices of self-love, compassion, and deep connection to nature, we will illuminate the heart of strength and tenderness that resides within us all.
Retreat | On-Land
April 21 - April 27, 2024 | Sunday - Saturday | 6 nights
In the storms of our lives we need refuge, nourishment, and support—a place to replenish our tired bodies and troubled hearts. When the Buddha taught meditation, his first instruction was to sit under a tree. Together, we will practice in the age-old tradition of being outside in the company of the natural world. We will explore tapping into the stillness and dynamism that surrounds us in nature, which teaches us about balance and delight as refuge in our daily lives.
Retreat | Online
Sunday, April 21 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Open to all self-identified BIPOC. During this daylong retreat for the BIPOC community, we’ll explore the many faces of grief and loss, including individual, collective and systemic. How do we learn to be with, even embrace, grief without either bypassing it or being overwhelmed by it? Participants are invited to co-create a safer container in which to practice meditation, engage in small and large group sharing, attend Dharma talks, and give our grief a space to exist and be expressed.
Retreat | Online
April 27 - April 28, 2024 | Saturday - Sunday | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Unleash your stories, stir your imagination, and honor the wild heart of your life through an immersive weekend of creative writing and meditation. Together, we’ll practice writing in a way that helps us wake up. We’ll settle our minds and open our hearts through meditation in movement and stillness, so we can write from a deeper place. Through sharing our stories with each other, we’ll connect with our common humanity.
Anne Cushman
Retreat | On-Land
April 28 - May 4, 2024 | Sunday - Saturday | 6 nights
At this time of increasing global crisis, the relationship between letting go and trusting a heart that knows can resource us in profound and unexpected ways. On this retreat, we will enter into Noble Silence, invoking our intention to increase our intimacy with this primordial relationship between embodied knowing and embodied care. Our intention is to support you as you tenderly meet each moment with care. Together, we will weave Dharma teachings with stillness, movement, ritual, sound, and song.
Retreat | Online
May 3 - May 4, 2024 | Friday - Saturday | Times variable - see details
Oftentimes we find ourselves running to our altars when we need saving or when we are at a loss. In this weekend time together, we will explore ways to move from a crisis-oriented meditation practice to one that is a sacred way of life. How can we attune our habitual meditation activity to ancestral wisdom? Discover how to transform your sitting practice into one that consistently honors the ancestors, the land, and all sentient beings.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Retreat | On-Land
May 5 - May 10, 2024 | Sunday - Friday | 5 nights
The Buddha offered the Noble Eightfold Path as a way to direct our lives away from entanglement and towards true freedom. As we find ourselves moving into an increasing ecological crisis and witnessing its impact on the planet and our lives, the Buddha’s teaching becomes ever more relevant and essential. During this retreat, Ayya Ananadabodhi, Ayya Santacitta, and Ayya Santussika will offer teachings on this theme with an emphasis on bringing the path to the whole of our experience.
Retreat | On-Land
May 11 - May 16, 2024 | Saturday - Thursday | 5 nights
The Buddha suggested that we have underestimated the capacity of our heart. Retreat helps us to remember. In mindfulness meditation, we practice resting, looking deeply, and knowing moment by moment what it's like to be human. The more deeply we look, the more reason we have to love. Together, we'll sit in the refuge provided by a 2,600-year legacy of wisdom and kindness. In silence, we come to know the preciousness of our life and the poignancy of the human condition.
Retreat | Online
Saturday, May 11 | 9:30 AM - 3:30 PM
We all want love. Throughout this retreat, we will explore together how love can be when it is expressed in conjunction with the qualities of the Four Divine States of Equanimity, Kindness, Compassion, and Inclusive Joy. This daylong retreat includes short readings from bell hooks, who puts forward fierce feminist social criticism that invites us to transform our challenges into strength in order to manifest the love and caring we want in our lives.
Rev. Liên Shutt
Retreat | Online
Sunday, May 12 | 10:00 AM - 2:30 PM
Open to all self-identified Women. Join us on Mother’s Day to celebrate the archetypal Buddhist feminine, with a focus on Prajna Paramita, Green Tara, and others. By aligning ourselves with aspects of different sacred archetypes, we'll explore how they can live in our body and offer a sense of equanimity and inspiration. This day is not only for mothers, but for all who identify as women and want to sit in the sacred space of embodying our heart’s deepest expression of the divine feminine.
Grace Fisher
Retreat | Online
Sunday, May 19 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Vesak is the Buddhist holiday honoring the birth, awakening, and death of the Buddha. To honor Vesak 2024 (year 2568 in the Buddhist calendar), we will share simple chants from the Forest Saṅgha and Mahāyāna traditions, learn a meditation on the qualities of the Buddha called Buddhānussati, and and celebrate the presence of the Dharma in our lives and in the world. All are welcome.
Sean Oakes
Retreat | On-Land
May 26 - May 30, 2024 | Sunday - Thursday | 4 nights
Our body can be a vehicle for liberation in this life, containing all we need to wake up. Yet we may not know how to relate to the body in the ways that can support this kind of freedom. Throughout this retreat, we will practice connecting to our body with loving awareness while recognizing ourselves as an essential part of nature. Together, we will engage in noble silence as we are nurtured and supported by the land at Spirit Rock.
Retreat | On-Land
June 7 - June 14, 2024 | Friday - Friday | 7 nights
This retreat offers a new style of Insight Meditation that employs the “Nine Bodies of Consciousness” map. The focus of this practice is on developing mindfulness of the felt sense of embodied experience, and directly experiencing the various capacities of consciousness, including intuitive awareness, which fosters the natural arising of insight. This distinct teaching style will be unfamiliar to first-time “Nine Bodies Insight” practitioners, and potential participants are strongly encouraged to listen to guided meditations beforehand.
Retreat | On-Land
June 15 - June 21, 2024 | Saturday - Friday | 6 nights
The paradox of awareness is profound and yet very simple. It can’t be described because it has no objective qualities and no limitations. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, good nor bad. We will practice with this quality of awareness through formal and informal meditation. Once we know how to pay attention, it can be experienced in an instant. When we learn to reside in that liberated mind, we find the very thing we have been seeking all along.
Retreat | On-Land
June 22 - June 27, 2024 | Saturday - Thursday | 5 nights
8 CE Credits. Mindfulness offers us tools to develop our capacity to pay attention, regulate emotions, and cultivate states of lovingkindness, compassion, and even-mindedness. Mindfulness can be practiced in a variety of ways—from focused attention to wide open, spacious, natural awareness. Over time, one can access states of profound well-being in both silent meditation and everyday life. Rooted in the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, this retreat focuses on practical applications of mindfulness and is open to people of all experience levels and backgrounds.
Retreat | On-Land
June 28 - July 4, 2024 | Friday - Thursday | 6 nights
Open to all self-identified BIPOC. Throughout this BIPOC retreat, we will gain insight into the 10 Paramis—the perfections or attainments of heart and mind—which will guide us as a map for the recovery and reclamation of a culture of belonging and wisdom. These are qualities for navigating life, not just guidelines for meditation, and they are said to be what the Buddha was cultivating in earlier lifetimes as he slowly developed into one who could awaken fully and show others the way to freedom.
Retreat | On-Land
July 5 - July 14, 2024 | Friday - Sunday | 9 nights
The Buddha’s teachings of the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Origination were formulated more than 2600 years ago in a social environment that was radically different from that of today’s “Information Age.” Are they still functional and useful in the West in the 21st Century? This retreat will be an opportunity to explore these classical teachings and their related practices, and to discover whether they are indeed effective in illuminating our hearts and minds and in leading us to liberation.
Retreat | On-Land
Saturday, July 13 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Open to all with Asian heritage (Central, East, North, South, Southeast, and West Asian heritage). This daylong gathering offers people of Asian heritage an opportunity to deepen their relationship to the Dharma in a supportive community. Inspired by Rev. Liên’s book Home is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path and Chenxing’s book Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, our daylong will weave together meditation, chanting, conversation, and other practices in order to cultivate the possibility that “home is here, refuge is now.”
Retreat | On-Land
July 15 - July 18, 2024 | Monday - Thursday | 3 nights
A heart that can stay open and present in the face of dukkha (suffering or dissatisfaction) is one that is well-trained in compassion. Beginning with instruction designed to ease the nervous system and soften the barriers to a tender, open heart, we will learn the ancient radiating method of brahmavihāra practice, which opens the heart of compassion towards all beings, including oneself. It is a gentle but powerful approach to compassion practice suitable for newer and seasoned practitioners alike.
Retreat | Online | Hybrid
July 19 - July 28, 2024 | Friday - Sunday | Audit (broadcast only)
The emphasis during this retreat will be on the continuity of awareness in all activities, which stabilizes and balances the mind. Relaxed acceptance of our moment-to-moment experience will become the platform for investigation and wisdom. Particular attention will be paid to the attitudes in the mind that condition our understanding. This retreat is suitable for both beginner and experienced meditators, and we welcome people from all life experiences, backgrounds, and communities.
Retreat | On-Land | Hybrid
July 19 - July 28, 2024 | Friday - Sunday | 9 nights
The emphasis during this retreat will be on the continuity of awareness in all activities, which stabilizes and balances the mind. Relaxed acceptance of our moment-to-moment experience will become the platform for investigation and wisdom. Particular attention will be paid to the attitudes in the mind that condition our understanding. This retreat is suitable for both beginner and experienced meditators, and we welcome people from all life experiences, backgrounds, and communities.
Retreat | On-Land
July 29 - August 4, 2024 | Monday - Sunday | 6 nights
The essence of Buddhist practice is embodying the Dharma experientially. In this retreat we will use mindfulness meditation to study our experiential reality within all our activities, including meditation, movement, eating, resting, and listening. When we are present and investigate our experiential reality moment by moment, insight arises, and the Dharma reveals itself within our body, heart, and mind. As the living, embodied truth unfolds, we awaken to the Buddha within and discover the depth and breadth of our own human potential.
Retreat | On-Land
August 5 - August 10, 2024 | Monday - Saturday | 5 nights
Come practice silent mindfulness and Insight Meditation in community with your peers. Give yourself a break from constant overstimulation and external demands as we create a supportive space for cultivating greater calm, spaciousness, and presence. Together we will explore the ancient practices of guided and silent sitting, walking, and heart meditations, along with movement, teacher meetings, and Dharma talks. Over the course of the week, we will extend these practices until the entire day is one of steady, continuous awareness.