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Please support Dharma Seed with a 2025 year-end gift.
Your donations allow us to offer these teachings online to all.
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The greatest gift is the
gift of the teachings
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Retreat Dharma Talks
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Settling, Seeing, and Spacious Awareness (276R25)
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| During this retreat, we will train in three interrelated modes of practice. First, we will practice settling and stabilizing our minds and bodies. As we become more concentrated through sitting and movement-based meditation, including regular Qigong, we are better able to examine the experiences of our bodies, thoughts, and emotions, as well as the general patterns of experience—both personal and universal. From here, we can see more clearly when there is reactivity, when we suffer, and when there is a thick sense of self, and we can learn to be more in line with the impermanent flow of experience. We can also tune in to an increasingly unconfined and luminous awareness beyond reactivity, which is a source of freedom, wisdom, and compassion both in retreat practice and daily life.
This retreat is silent except for teacher-led Q&A, small groups, or other practice meetings. |
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2025-10-25 (8 days)
Spirit Rock Meditation Center
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2025-10-27
Awareness of Awareness (Retreat at Spirit Rock)
64:15
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Tere Abdala-Romano
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Further more on this practice that requires concentration and relaxation, how to recognize the space where all experiences arise and dissolve. Mention of other (Tibetan) traditions on this topic. The nature of awareness, three simple stages of progression, more on some obstacles and remedies. How to recognize awarenes that has been and is already here
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2025-10-28
Morning Instructions (Retreat at Spirit Rock)
56:51
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Tere Abdala-Romano
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A guided meditation from Settling the Body, the breath and the mind in its natural state Shamatha to Vipassana , in this case observe the three ways that liberate us, emphasizing this morning on the inmeditae direct experience of impermanence through breath , body sensations, sounds, mental objects realizing how all are transient as our lives and selves.
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2025-10-28
The Three Ways of Seeing That Bring Liberating Insight (Retreat at Spirit Rock)
67:37
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Donald Rothberg
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After a brief general account of the three ways of liberating insight, we look at each of the three--insights into impermanence, dukkha, and not-self--with a longer treatment of insight into not-self. There is an emphasis especially on how we practice in order to come to these insights. We close with a passage from Ajahn Chah pointing to the unity of developing samadhi and cultivating insight. The talk is followed by discussion.
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2025-10-30
Transition From Settling to Seeing (Retreat at Spirit Rock)
1:49:25
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Tere Abdala-Romano
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This talk explores the gentle transition from shamatha (calm abiding through concentration) to vipassanā (insight), inviting us to cultivate stillness not through effort but through nourishment, (as The Budha did) curiosity, and kindness. It reminds us that the mind’s obstacles—dullness and agitation—are gateways to balance and presence. From this grounded calm, clarity naturally arises, revealing the truth of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self. In resting with things as they are, stillness ripens into seeing, and seeing reveals freedom.
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