Register now for retreat with Michele and Steven in Canada
We hope you will be able to join us for two springtime opportunities to sit with our guiding teachers Steven Smith and Michele McDonald at Hollyhock, Vancouver. The April 21 – 23, 2017, Metta Vipassana Meditation Retreat is nonresidential and the April 26 – May 10, 2017, Metta Vipassana: Awareness as a Path to Liberation is residential.
April 21 – 23, 2017
Metta Vipassana Meditation Retreat
With Steven Smith and Michele McDonald
Sponsored by Hollyhock, Asian Centre at UBC in Vancouver, Canada
Vipassana meditation (insight or mindfulness practice) unites the stillness of concentration with the immediacy of moment to moment silent 6 sense door awareness. By calming body and mind, intuitive wise knowing arises — opening to the truth of each moment’s experience within and around us. In this way, we increase our ability to meet life’s ups and downs with graceful ease and peace.
Metta (Lovingkindness) meditation practice calls forth the beautiful spiritual emotions within our heart: lovingkindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity. Mindfulness of these qualities strengthens and matures them, which leads to a constancy of thinking, acceptance and reverence for our bodies, as well as speaking and acting from the purity of these emotions.
During this silent weekend retreat, new and experienced students are encouraged to deepen their liberation practice in an atmosphere of relaxed affectionate awareness. The program provides meditation instruction, guided meditations and question and answer periods. Sitting and walking sessions are alternated. There will be Dhamma teaching talks and small group discussions with the teachers.
April 26 – May 10, 2017
Metta Vipassana: Awareness As A Path to Liberation
With Steven Smith and Michele McDonald
Experience seven days practicing Metta (unconditional love and kindness) and Vipassana (insight) meditation, followed by seven days of cultivating mindfulness, on beautiful Cortes Island.
Discover the four immeasurables (unconditional love, wise compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) through meditations that fuse these fundamental spiritual emotions with the intuitive wisdom of Vipassana. Develop compassionate awareness and a more loving heart with a unique melding of mindful movement alongside the Metta and Vipassana practices.
Participants may attend the full fourteen day practice, or come during one of the following weeks.
April 26 – May 3 – Metta Vipassana Practice
Cultivate Unconditional Love, Wise Compassion, Empathetic Joy, and Equanimity. The Immeasurables are beautiful capacities of the heart which fuse innate spiritual emotions with intuitive wisdom.
May 3 – May 10 – Mindfulness Practice
Cultivate Mindfulness with a 6 sense-door awareness practice including affectionate awareness and reverence for our bodies, liberating the heart-mind with clarity, ease and authenticity.
Hollyhock on Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada