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Retreat Dharma Talks

2017 IMCW New Year Retreat: Awakening the Heart of Compassion

The New Year is a wonderful time to touch sacred presence and deepen our roots in spiritual life. In this silent retreat we will open our hearts and minds through practices of Vipassana (mindfulness meditation–both sitting and walking sessions), traditional heart meditations (metta), yoga (mindful movement) and evening chanting.

2017-12-27 (6 days) Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC

  
2017-12-27 Meditation: The Five Precepts 7:43
Kaira Jewel Lingo
2017-12-28 Meditation: Basic Body Scan 20:00
Tara Brach
From the first morning of the IMCW 2017 New Year’s retreat, Tara offers an introductory meditation with a body scan, bringing focus to the breath, sounds, then resting in awareness.
2017-12-28 Meditation: Loving Kindness for Ourselves 39:00
Kaira Jewel Lingo
In this meditation, we begin by visualizing benefactors offering us kindness, care and acceptance. We practice to truly let this in, and fill our bodies and minds. Then we begin to generate it for ourselves. (Gratitude to John Makransky for inspiration from his "Receiving the Healing, Liberating Power of Love" meditation.)
2017-12-28 Remembering and Choosing Loving Presence (retreat talk) 63:09
Tara Brach
We are conditioned to go into a limbic trance—an emotional reactivity to life within and around us—that keeps us identified with a limited, separate sense of self. This talk helps us to identify the flags of trance, and to bring a healing attention that frees us to live our moments with creativity, wisdom and love. Includes the RAIN of Self-Compassion. (from the 2017 IMCW New Year’s Retreat)
2017-12-29 Meditation and Short Talk: Basic Elements of a Mindfulness Meditation Sitting 34:29
Tara Brach
This short talk and guided meditation offers an overview of what many people find is a natural unfolding within a meditation sitting. It includes the process of arriving in an embodied presence, learning how to come back from thoughts, and then opening the attention mindfully to the changing flow of experience. The meditation provides generous space between prompts for practice.
2017-12-29 Heart meditation: Cultivating self-compassion 45:51
Hugh Byrne
This talk and guided meditation includes reflections on how cultivating compassion towards ourselves is essential for our own well-being and happiness—and a key to opening our hearts to the suffering of others. It concludes with a guided self-compassion meditation.
2017-12-30 Trusting Who We Are (retreat talk) 62:32
Tara Brach
The sign of spiritual freedom is a deep trust in our essential nature, and in the light of awareness that lives through all beings. This talk explores the conditioning that entraps us in a trance of separation and believing in a limited self. We then explore the evolutionary shift in identity that is possible as we deepen our attention and presence to the life that is here, and the loving awareness that is the source of existence.
2017-12-31 The Bodhisattva in Difficult Times 66:21
Hugh Byrne
This talk explores the Buddhist archetype of the bodhisattva and its universal quality across spiritual and other traditions of commitment to the transformation and awakening of one’s own heart for the benefit and freedom of all beings. The civil rights movement in the U.S.—and the role and courage of Rosa Parks and other ordinary people—is presented as a ‘bodhisattva movement’ and a model and encouragement for the challenges we face today.
2018-01-01 Continuing the Practice 9:57
Kaira Jewel Lingo
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