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) Evening chanting of the Suffusion of the Brahmaviharas followed by toning with Sabra on the shruti box
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Drawing on the story of Pukkusāti meeting the Buddha, this talk explores four core resolves: not neglecting wisdom, protecting the truth, cultivating generosity, and training in peace. With reflections from retreat practice and daily life, the talk invites us to orient the heart again and again toward these qualities as a path of gradual cultivation and inner freedom.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Grief introductory reflections on mudita are offered followed by a guided meditation using phrases to cultivate mudita.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This guided meditation explores the third foundation of mindfulness—awareness of mind states. We bring kind, steady attention to thoughts, emotions, and moods, while gently investigating our relationship to them. Seeing how mindfulness can know these experiences without being defined by them, the practice opens space, clarity, and a more compassionate way of relating to the mind.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) An introduction to Vedana, guiding awareness of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral experience as a foundation for insight and less reactivity. Includes Guided Meditation.
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The power of moment to moment mindful attention to awakeness to the inherent freedom and peace of our nature
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Amma Thanasanti began meditating in 1979 under the guidance of Jack Engler, Ajahn Chah, and Dipa Ma. She spent 28 years as a Buddhist nun, including 20 years in Ajahn Chah monasteries, and has taught internationally since 1996. She is the founder of Awakening Truth (awakeningtruth.org) and developed the Integrated Meditation Program (IMP), an attachment-repair pathway for meditators. Her work integrates classical Buddhist training with contemporary psychology and trauma-informed practice, helping practitioners discern where meditation supports awakening—and where relational wounds and trauma require direct healing. This integration allows the stillness, clarity, and goodness from meditation to become more natural and sustainable. SHINE is a practice Amma developed as a counterpart to the RAIN method by Michelle McDonald and Tara Brach. While RAIN helps us meet difficulty, SHINE supports cultivating positive states—training the nervous system to recognize, sustain, and deepen what's good.The acronym stands for Sense, Hold, Inquire, Nourish, and Enhance. Integrated into the broader Integrated Meditation Program (IMP), SHINE addresses a gap many practitioners experience: we become skilled at observing suffering but less adept at stabilizing ease, joy, and goodness when they arise. In this session, we'll practice SHINE together and explore how cultivating these states helps stillness, clarity, and goodness become more natural and sustainable in daily life.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Mindfulness directed equally to every experience in the style of Dipa Ma opens us to shift from happiness dependent on conditions to unconditional happiness.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Working with impermanence
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Mindfulness isn't about pretending to be peaceful, it's about being real. Don't be afraid to be completely yourself. You are good and the world is waiting for you to stop believing otherwise.
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A meditation on finding comfort in the simple goodness of this moment, followed by a talk about feeling alone with the task of being ok in the world, followed by a meditation to locate the comfort and care that reassures us that it's safe to let go.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Day 1 sitting instructions. Very short practice suitable for beginners emphasizing relaxed relationship to the objects of attention, balanced attitude, and how to set appropriate expectatioins about unintentional thinking during meditation.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Instructions and Guided Meditation in Open Awareness as a practice we do naturally, when we spend time connecting with nature externally.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The image of a bird flying is offered as a way of bringing together the big picture of the Satipatthana Sutta teachings, with the three characteristics as the environment the bird is flying in. The three characteristics are then situated in the refrain of the Satipatthana Sutta, which is seen as a practice from nature, to reveal our inner nature. This teaching is applied to our lives through exploring how to work with self judgement. The talk ends exploring this practice in the world, for the benefit of all beings.
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The story of turning into the skid to grow in wisdom and the journey of the Buddha's awakening
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Vedana is explored as a significant freedom moment which can help us see clinging.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The four wise efforts are explored as a path to freedom with the hindrances. Several practices are offered for each effort, with particular emphasis given to abandoning unwholesome states that have arisen, through a relationship of non-clinging. The talk concludes with reference to Indigenous Elder Stan Rushworth and the thought that working with the hindrances shows us a way of showing up in a sacred way in the world.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) The First Foundation of Mindfulness of the Body
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Mindfulness in the mainstream world and what brings us to practice
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) With all sensory and mental experience-body sensations, hearing , seeing, tasting, smelling, thinking emotions and moods.
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A discussion of Equanimity and confidence and Mindfulness
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Metta as renunciation and chanting to end the evening.
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk explores how spiritual friendship encompasses the entirety of Buddhist practice, examining how we become intimate with ourselves, others, and the world through connection and accompaniment. Drawing on suttas, poetry, and personal stories, it reveals how talking about the dharma, offering presence to one another, and cultivating tenderness through difficulty are essential paths to awakening.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflecting on the rewards of this retreat, using the framework of some of the ten pāramī, specifically generosity, ethics, and equanimity
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Concluding remarks on the Satipatthana--for the growth of our practice (bhavana) and the aspiration to be carried by the stream of wholesomeness.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Silent sit followed by teachings on clear understanding: Sampajañña.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Equanimity is the final quality in many Buddhist lists: awakening factors, paramis, brahma viharas, and jhana factors. And, it's the starting point for skillful action in the world.
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Cultivating muditā for oneself and an easy being
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(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) A discussion of the fourth foundation as a progression within the discourse on "The Four Foundations of Establishing Awareness".
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