Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center: dharma talks and meditation instruction

(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)

(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.

(Insight Meditation Society - Retreat Center)

(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.