In this Life Retreat we’ll turn away from meditative techniques and toward the capacity of “choiceless awareness.” This choiceless aspect of awareness is operating no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re mindful or distracted, focus or confused, awake or asleep. Because of this it is–as Ajahn Sumedho points out–a true refuge.

The capacity to concentrate or focus is one of the bedrock skills of the contemplative life. In this retreat we’ll focus on focus–the ability to relax the mind and unify it with whatever meditative subject we’re exploring. We’ll discuss the benefits, styles, and dimensions of concentration while establishing a practice that allows us to deepen this capacity in everyday life. We’ll also look at how to skillfully apply the concentrated mind to the development of wisdom and to our 21st century information-rich lives.

One of the most powerful forms of contemplation is to work directly with a question or inquiry that has significant meaning to our lives. When we really open up to a question several things happen. One is that we drop the sense of already having the answer and knowing how things really are–this opens us to seeing and experiencing in new ways. Our minds also become bright, open, and curious–qualities which give our contemplative investigation a huge boost. Finally, as we become more comfortable with asking difficult questions, and pursuing our most important lines of inquiry, we start to become fearless in the face of not knowing–of never really having a final answer. We develop what Ajahn Chah called “the wisdom of uncertainty.”

Within the Buddhist contemplative path there are many gateways to experiencing the freedom of unqualifiable emptiness.  In this 6-week intensive Life Retreat we’ll explore several of these wisdom gateways in the context of formal meditation practice and our everyday lives.  We’ll explore some of the classic entry points to emptiness including: ceaseless change, existential struggle, and selflessness.  We’ll also look at the ways in which this (non)experience of emptiness is inseparable from our personal experience and the outer world.