Éowyn Ahlstrom grew up a stone’s throw from the then-emerging Insight Meditation Society. She left the area for college and spent about a decade traveling the world, searching for a way to live. Along the way, she first discovered meditation through the yoga tradition. To her happy surprise, the way of life she had been seeking turned out to be very close to home—at IMS, with the liberating practices of vipassana and metta meditation, and the profound wisdom of the early Buddhist teachings. Over the past two decades, she has attended many IMS retreats, both at the Retreat Center and the Forest Refuge, and has often led mindful movement sessions during retreats as well.
Éowyn has served as both a staff member and volunteer at IMS, and was honored to be authorized as a retreat teacher by the IMS guiding teachers after a mentoring process with Kamala Masters, Greg Scharf, and Bhikkhu Analayo. Her broader work has included developing programs and training MBSR teachers at Brown University; teaching community mindfulness, meditation, and yoga programs at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance; and teaching for many other organizations in the region, including IMS’ next door neighbor, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. She loves both teaching and consulting with organizations to offer pragmatic guidance and support for integrating contemplative awareness into the complexities of 21st-century life.
Éowyn is also a poet and the author of Mindscapes: Practice Poems. In addition to her master’s degree in health and wellness, she has qualifications as a massage therapist, yoga teacher (E-RYT 500), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, and Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) teacher. For more about her work and practice, please visit her website, Middle Path Healing Arts.
Dedicating time to mindfulness practice supports deepening and widening awareness in every moment of our lives. This nourishing and reflective evening will welcome you to fully embody awareness. In the guided meditation a strong emphasis will be placed on noticing the simple experiences of embodiment, like adjusting the posture and seeing the environment around you. The dharma talk will provide context and offer inspiration for bringing fuller attention to the body both in daily life and when sitting.
In our fast-paced, confusing, unjust world, it's easy - perhaps even natural - to feel overwhelmed, disconnected, or caught in cycles of reactivity. Fortunately, the Buddha's Middle Path offers us another way (namely Wise View, Wise Intention, Wise Speech, Wise Action, Wise Livelihood, Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness & Wise Concentration). This Dharma talk will explore and illuminate how the eight trainings of the Middle Path can help us establish a more balanced and embodied approach to life's many challenges. We could sum it up as resilience. Drawing from our traditional practices and of sitting and walking meditation, we'll delve into a re-embodying approach that fosters buoyancy, clarity, and compassion, even in the most difficult situations. The teachings will be suitable for both beginners and seasoned practitioners seeking to enrich their practice with embodied mindfulness. The evening's session will help practitioners ground their meditation in the felt sense of the body, making the profound teachings of the Dharma more accessible and alive in everyday life, with all its joys, sorrows and surprises.
