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 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.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Much appreciation to Sayadaw U Vivekananda that offered a short teaching on the last morning of the Two-week retreat at IMS.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Includes instructions on 6-Part walking meditation at the end.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Sets the condition for wisdom to arise - help us see through the concotions of perception, thought and view.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) An exploration of the First Establishment of Mindfulness
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Dolls, loss, love and the narrative cure. Kafka consoles a girl with a series of letters about a lost doll. An excursion into four different and indispensable tasks for any contemplative practitioner: (i) Calming & stabilzing (ii) Dis-identification and decentering (iii) Deep Inquiry and thorough contemplative Investigation (iv) The bigger Picture – gaining an universal perspective on the personal
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Morning instructions
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Satipaṭṭhāna as map of experience. Somatic - hedonic - affective - discursive 'raw-materials' in these four categories. Relationship between these channels. Citta and the particular challenges with the states of the mind as objects of practice. Establishing a somatic vocabulary for your moods. The ending of something as an easy connection point to citta-states.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Breakdown of types of ignorance in Buddhist teaching. Unpacking some of the terms avijjā and moha. Sketching their different use in the old texts despite their occasional synonymous use. Excursions into conditionality.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Morning instructions
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) 40 Mins of mettā practice with aspects of compassion and forgiveness.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) What happens when I'm *not* mindful? (i) Loss of fluency in our attention — (ii) Loss of the here & now (iii) Loss of the space: collapsing into things. (iv) Loss of embodiment (vI) Loss of the other
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Hindrances – a glance at the list of troubles and how they manifest . The different starting points of Buddhist and Western psychology. The Buddhas vision of freedom Different types of troubles: soteriological hindrances (samyojana), afflictions (kilesa), inflations (āsava). A detailed look at the 5 nivāraṇa, the five psychological obstacles to the cultivation of stillness as the basis for insight and understanding. The phenomenology of their manifestation.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Meditation on friendliness and kindness
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Morning instructions
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Detailed advice on posture, sitting and connecting with the body. Followed by guided body contemplation exercise using the 6 sense channels.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) This talk explores how mettā and the brahmaviharās are both means and ends on the path to liberation — the very ground that allows insight to arise, and the natural expression of the freedom that results.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Guided meditation metta body scan and QA
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Joy is not a break from meeting the world's pain — it's what makes it possible to keep meeting it. An exploration of mudita, appreciative joy, and the many ways the heart can learn to rejoice.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) What does it mean to let suffering touch you without being consumed by it? This talk traces a path from empathy through grief to the inexhaustible compassion of the bodhisattva — and offers practical steps for cultivating it from the inside out.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Receiving care meditation and QA
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Introducing metta practice
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) What matters is what we cultivate, how we care and how we respond
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) a dharmette and guided sit on opening the heart toward those who are difficult to hold.
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) 15 minute intro and guided sit
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) An exploration of the First Establishment of Mindfulness
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) 15 minute intro and guided sit
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)
(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center) Reflection followed by a guided meditation on death (maranasati)
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