IMS’s Retreat Center first opened its doors in 1976. It offers a yearly schedule of meditation courses, lasting from a weekend to three months. Most retreats are designed for both new and experienced meditators. Recognized insight meditation teachers from all over the world offer daily instruction and guidance in Buddhist meditations known as vipassana (insight) and metta (lovingkindness). While the context is the Buddha’s teachings, these practices are universal and help us to deepen awareness and compassion.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This guided meditation shifts the subject of attention from objects to the awareness that knows.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Choiceless Attention instructions as a natural process we all know and practice when we are in nature - gazing at the sunset, watching the ocean.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk offers the Niramisa Sutta and explores the 3 sources of joy and the possbiility of living in joy and being sustained by it to support engagement in these challenging times. The talk includes the song This Joy, as inspired by the Resistance Revival Chorus, and closes with the story of Jim Settee.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Forgiveness to ourselves (Body, mind, heart) and between us and others
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk brings in Thanissaro Bikkhu's guidance for offering "Goodwill for the Real World" and self compassion as an inner nourishment and sustainer. A dharmette followed by a 15 minute guided self compassion practice.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Opening up the meditation field to include the physical realm
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Wise Effort as an important issue in practice. This talk explores finding the balance between too much and too little as well as understanding the four classical Wise Efforts described in the teachings.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Including Anatta and recognizing the self-lessness of the knowing dimension.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Tuning in to Vedana. (Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) and on habitual responses.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Teachings and Guided Meditation on Metta for a Friend
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A dharma talk exploring anattā through the five aggregates and the Anattālakkhaṇa Sutta, alongside Anāthapiṇḍika's deathbed teaching from Sāriputta. Weaves impermanence and death contemplation together with not-self - drawing on Thanissaro Bhikkhu's pragmatic (not metaphysical) framing of not-self - and closes with mettā as the natural fruit of a loosened, undefended heart.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflections and guided practice on embodiment
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) How to practice with: -Noticing thoughts at the wake up moment -How to skillfully be with the absence of thought -Noticing what happens to thought once we become aware of it.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) How to view and practice with the Hindrances such that they become and aid to Liberation
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Practicing awareness, wisdom and flexibility in moments of ease and imperfection alike
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Mindfulness of body and use of anchor
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Pt. 2 Hiri and Ottappa with Vedana (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral - neither one) a guided meditation
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) shame. fear of wrongdoing. clear knowing. reality. being protected and guided by the energies of shame and fear of wrongdoing. knowing the first (1st) and second (2nd) arrows.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) practicing to feel what neutral feels like in the body; how metta with / for / from a neutral being feels in the body. a spacious guided meditation.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) "giving. generosity. care. giver, receiver, gift. view, intention, action. beginning again as we enter into the flow and container of retreat. this is the opening talk for the retreat titled: Rooted in Presence: A Natural Path of Insight and Belonging"
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This closing talk distills the sixteen steps of the Ānāpānasati Sutta into what's most portable for daily life — calming the body, calming the mind, opening the heart, and letting go — offered as one continuous gesture rather than four separate teachings. We'll explore simple, concrete tools for carrying retreat-mind into ordinary moments, and extend the practice into patience and sīla as it meets daily relationship and speech. The talk closes with reflections on love, belonging, and letting go: what becomes possible once the hands are finally empty enough to receive what is already here.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) In this guided meditation, the breath becomes a frame - a halo around whatever picture we slot into it - as we move through the third tetrad's four ways of looking at the mind. We'll settle into the stillness already underneath the mind's activity, the way silence sits beneath sound; let a basic gladness surface, an inward brightness already present rather than something we have to chase down; gather the mind into a felt sense of wholeness and integration; and finally practice the small, ordinary liberations already available to us - the fist opening, the self growing quieter, a way of looking that's already free.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Drawing on Bhikkhu Anālayo's scholarship on the Ānāpānasati Sutta, this talk explores the second tetrad of mindfulness of breathing: the four steps in which joy, happiness, and the subtler mental formations become doorways into deep practice. We look at why pleasure, met clearly, has always belonged on the path, and how the Buddha's own early memory of ease under a rose-apple tree pointed him toward awakening long before any formal practice did. Along the way we'll draw on the words of contemporary BIPOC and queer dharma teachers on what it means to actually receive joy in the body, and explore practical instructions for steeping in wholesome pleasure and calming it without losing it.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk explores Samadhi as absorption and as momentary concentration
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Guided Metta for neutral being
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The instructions supports the mind to incline towards ease with breathing and wholehearted attention
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The talk describes the five hindrances and how to meet them in concentration practice by 1. gently ignoring, 2. bring in antidotes, 3. meeting with RAIN approach
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Instructions point to the importance of inviting a attitude of friendliness and patience in mindfulness of a breathing practice
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) We often overlook the absence of pain and suffering. Kaira Jewel also offers movement as an anchor.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Intro to Brahmaviharas and guided metta for self
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Intro talk by Jean Esther. Waking up to our direct experience in the present moment is the doorway to greater ease and peace in the body, mind and heart.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) In a society that prizes overachieving, we are taught to scale it back in meditation practice. But strong determination is also an essential quality on the path to awakening. Here's how to fold your ambition and perfectionism into your practice.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) In this talk, Aishah Shahidah Simmons explores the Buddha's teaching on the Five Hindrances — Sensual Desire, Ill Will, Sloth and Torpor, Restlessness and Worry, and Doubt — drawing on the Saṅgārava Sutta's water similes, the lineage of Sayagyi U Bha Kin through Rev. Dr. Leon E. Wright, and the words of Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde. Offered through a BIPOC lens on Juneteenth, this teaching invites recognizing the hindrances with tenderness, not self-judgment, as a lifetime's practice toward liberation.
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