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Steadying the Heart: Refuge through the Four Sublime States


  • Spirit Rock Meditation Center (map)

A Residential Meditation Retreat with Oren Jay Sofer, Cara Lai, Jessica Morey & Yong Oh

The Buddhist path includes practices to cultivate four powerful and transformative qualities—kindness, compassion, joy, and balance. These qualities are innate human capacities, and can also be developed into more reliable dwelling places for the heart. Known as the Brahma Viharas, or “sublime homes,” these states can serve as powerful supports for wellbeing, wholeness, concentration and the maturing of insight practice.

In this residential silent meditation retreat, we will explore techniques for developing each of the four sublime states, as well as ways to release the obstacles that often get in the way of living with more ease, happiness and peace. Our time together will include silent and guided sitting meditation, walking meditation, Dharma talks, instructions, Q&A and small group meetings with the teachers.

This retreat is appropriate for both beginning and more experienced meditators. Proof of full vaccination is required to attend this retreat.

Space is limited; we encourage you to register early.

Questions?

This event is being run by the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. For any questions related to registration or scholarships, please email Spirit Rock at srmc@spiritrock.org. For questions related to the content of this program or event, feel free to get in touch with us here instead. Please be sure to include the date and title of the event in your email!

Additional Information from Spirit Rock

Scholarship offerings: In returning to the land, we will also be returning to our pre-pandemic scholarship options and policies. All scholarship rates require a minimum fee ($50/night). Scholarships are limited to TWO per calendar year for on-land retreats. And, while we are not able to offer “no one turned away”-type of scholarships for in-person retreats, they are still available for online offerings.

Room Occupancy Update – Starting in March 2022:** As of March 27th, we will return to double occupancy rooms. Most of our rooms are single occupancy (only 16 of 80 rooms are double occupancy). We will also return to offering a “guaranteed single room” rate and they will be limited. This rate guarantees you a single room while helping to support scholarships and all we do here at Spirit Rock. Single rooms are not exclusive to the top end of the sliding scale; everyone has a chance of being assigned a single room.

**Subject to change depending upon COVID-19 situation.
IMPORTANT – Details on our current COVID Safety Protocols for In-person Retreats.

Cancellation Policy
To offer participants greater flexibility as we make our way out of the pandemic, we’ve changed our cancellation policy for residential retreats:

  • $100 fee* when you cancel two or more weeks before the retreat (*fees reduced to half for scholarship participants)

  • No refunds when you cancel less than two weeks prior to the retreat (applies to all participants)

Photo by Sidharth Bhatia on Unsplash