What does it means to live mindfully? How do we bring more calm and inner clarity into our daily lives? How can we stay confident and purposeful when times get rough?

This gentle introductory residential retreat is open to all, especially those with no prior experience with meditation or Buddhism. We will explore the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness in a down-to-earth, practical way through meditation, discussion, and hands-on exercises. We’ll also investigate how to live with greater awareness and contentment with ourselves, and in turn, how to live in harmony with the world around us.

What are we looking for? What gives our lives a sense of meaning? How can we find a sense of confidence in a world marked by change? In the Noble Quest sutta from the Middle Length Sayings, the Buddha offers a first-person guide to the pursuit of a meaningful life. Drawing on his own life story, he beautifully outlines the creative spiritual restlessness that drove him to reject any goal short of complete awakening.

On this weekend led by Bodhipaksa, through study, discussion, personal exploration, and meditation, we’ll explore the Buddha’s teaching on attaining the sorrowless state and get in touch with the spiritual rebel within.

Bodhipaksa has been a …

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

This Buddha statue reclines gracefully on the ledge of one of the windows in the “yoga room” (it’s called that, although there’s hardly ever any yoga done there) below the shrineroom at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in Newmarket, NH.

Maarten Dankers, Globe and Mail: I never thought I’d look forward to brushing my teeth. It’s not a task I consider particularly exciting. But late last November, it came to that. After eating an apple for dinner, I found myself rushing toward the bathroom for some quality dental hygiene time. That’s what happens when you’re not allowed to partake in many activities of ordinary life.

For 10 days this past fall, I subjected myself to a meditation retreat. Along with about 70 other souls, I was confined to a basic compound in the woods along the shore of Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island. We were …

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Matthew Green: The guru looked troubled. A spry 75-year-old, who could have passed for 60, he usually wore an expression as pure as his ivory robe. Peering into my cell, he watched as I wept harder than I could remember, for a reason my mind could not fathom. Then he beamed. “You are very lucky,” he said. “This is a very big sankara leaving your body – perhaps it was an illness that even a doctor could not cure.”

Perplexing as his words sounded, their meaning would become clear later. All I could grasp then was that the Indian meditation master believed that my …

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Actor David Duchovny recently spent a weekend shovelling horse manure as part of a Buddhist meditation retreat.

The Californication star escaped to upstate New York for a few days to join a monastery programme aimed at helping guests find inner peace through meditation.

But Duchovny admits the stay wasn’t as relaxing as he thought it would be – because he was put to work as soon as he arrived.
He says, “I just went on a retreat to a zen monastery in upstate New York. It’s a type of Buddhism and meditation is a big part of it…

“I’m a beginner, I’ve only …

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Hilary Stout: On a Friday morning in October — Oct. 21, to be exact — Mark Trippetti, an advertising consultant from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, surrendered his laptop and iPhone to storage at a remote mountainside center in southern Colorado and prepared to drop out of human contact for a month.

The previous week he had begun the withdrawal process, leaving word with clients, cutting back his use of technology and giving up caffeine. Before checking out completely, he made one final call to his girlfriend, Jee Chang.

By careful design, Mr. Trippetti would not see or communicate with anyone until Nov. 20. At his spartan cabin …

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If you suffer from tinnitus – persistent ringing in the ears – you may wonder whether meditation is a good idea. And yet it can be a powerful tool in helping you come to terms with the white noise inside your head. Meditator and long-time tinnitus sufferer Mandy Sutter airs some of the issues.

Tinnitus can make meditation very difficult. And because meditation is mostly silent, it may seem that meditation can make tinnitus very difficult, too.

It’s certainly true that as soon as you sit down on the cushion and close your eyes, the tinnitus seems to get louder. It isn’t really getting louder: it only seems that way …

Writer and meditator Mandy Sutter views the reporting-in process at the end of silent retreats with a mixture of dread and excitement.

Many Buddhist retreat centres embrace the custom of the ‘Closing Circle’.

This doesn’t mean sitting in the middle of a razor toothed torture ring that gradually closes in and squeezes the life out of you, like something out of a James Bond movie.

No. It’s worse than that.

It means that after spending, say, a fortnight in silence with thirty strangers, the group sits in a large circle on the last evening to share their experience.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against hearing how everyone else got on. …

Lena Vazifdar: The day I signed up for a silent meditation retreat, I had no idea what I was getting into. The first day, I piled into a red sedan in San Francisco with a 40-year-old hippie in a Hawaiian shirt, a 20-something product developer from India and a straight-faced, vegetarian Indian woman who had been meditating for years. I thought I was about to embark on a great adventure, but little did I know I was beginning the hardest ten days of my life.

I went into the experience with an open heart and mind. My knowledge of Vipassana meditation was…

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Shefalee Vasudev (Indian Express):

A seven-day course in silent meditation is buttered bliss.

Are you a morning person?” she asked. The bristles of hair on her shaven head were golden, her skin alabaster and she wore androgynous clothes.

This was at an “Introduction to Buddhism” course at Tushita, a meditation centre in Mcleodganj, Dharamsala. I was taken aback to see a hundred-odd people trooping into the quiet retreat and felt momentarily lost in the crowd dominated by foreigners. Most looked like spiritual shoppers dressed in psychedelic tops, T-shirts and scarves with Om and other spiritual symbols, harem pants, shawls, silver jewellery, braided hair, ear and nose…

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This is an invitation to download some free MP3s of my teaching.

This week I’m doing a lot of meditation teaching at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in New Hampshire, and I’ve been recording the meditation sessions and uploading them to a Dropbox account.

Most of the recordings are from 30 to 50 minutes long. I’ve been introducing the Mindfulness of Breathing, Development of Lovingkindness, and Walking Meditation practices. The overall theme is a phrase from the Pali canon, “Abiding in Ease, Here and Now,” and the meditations encourage a sense of spacious relaxation into the moment, with the emphasis on acceptance and equanimity.

If you’d like to download these, just post a comment below, …

Foreigners are being invited to teach English to Buddhist monks at two temples in Thailand — at a cost of hundreds of dollars.

And staff at one temple claim that many visiting instructors “experienced nirvana temporarily” during meditation sessions.

The temples, Wat Luang Phor Sodh in Ratchaburi and Wat Doi Saket in Chiang Mai, run slightly different programs, but essentially offer the chance to learn about Thai culture while teaching English.

Foreign teachers have to pay for their own lodging, food and other expenses, as well as their airfare to and from Thailand. And though all of the saffron-robed monk students are male, the temples welcome both men and women teachers.

“All English speakers are …

Was it possible to survive 10 days of meditating in an Indian retreat without speaking, reading or making eye-contact with fellow guests?

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in a large hall, surrounded by strangers. Sweat is running down my face, and my thighs are bleating in agony. I’m trying to meditate but my mind keeps calculating how long I’ve been here (about five hours) and how long there is to go (about another 100).

It is the first day of my silent retreat in Gujarat, India. I am not allowed to talk throughout the 10 days. In fact, I am not allowed to do much at all: I can’t …

Kaki Hunter is no stranger to success. Her background includes a career as a successful film actress, a published author and a recognized guru in sustainable building.

Two years ago, however, despite all of her success, Hunter says she found herself miserable and at what she describes as, “an extremely low point in life emotionally, spiritually and physically.”

After hearing about friends’ experiences with Vipassana, a 2,500-year-old silent meditation technique designed to eradicate human suffering, Hunter decided to enroll in a 10-day retreat.

The program required all participants to abstain from all communication, including talking, eye contact, writing, music, and reading. As Hunter entered into “noble silence” and …

Last weekend the British Guardian newspaper published a guide to meditation. Here are extracts, as well as links to the full articles…

1. How to meditate: An introduction

Rates of depression and anxiety are rising in the modern world. Andrew Oswald, a professor at Warwick University who studies wellbeing, recently told me that mental health indicators nearly always point down. “Things are not going completely well in western society,” he said. Proposed remedies are numerous. And one that is garnering growing attention is meditation, and mindfulness meditation in particular.

The aim is simple: to pay attention – be “mindful”. Typically, a teacher will ask you to sit upright, in an alert position. …

Some of us go to the beach or camping by a river or lake for our holidays.

Some of us stay home and read books.

The really exhausted ones, the spiritually exhausted ones, go on retreat.

That’s what I did between Christmas and new year.

It was billed as a yoga and meditation retreat.

On December 27, I loaded up with two unknown fellow retreaters and hitched a lift to Healesville, deep in a valley where prayer flags fluttered in the breeze, to a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of old wooden rooms that I suppose once constituted a mountain guesthouse. Buddha, in various statue forms, and a few of his followers have since moved in.

Each day …

I arrive early that first overcast day, so I can pitch my tent before dark. Then it’s off to a quick orientation session the night before the start of a weeklong meditation retreat.

I have come to Karmê Chöling, a 700-acre Buddhist meditation center in northern Vermont, about 10 miles south of St. Johnsbury. Many of the 50 or so retreat participants (two are from Amsterdam, one is from Italy) are here for a month, but time and money have held me to seven days, just enough for some serious letting go, I hope.

There are few diversions here at Karmê Chöling. The library has DVDs, but we are discouraged from checking them out. This is a time for contemplation and study. …

The image of the ancient but youthful-looking sage meditating on a mountaintop might be closer to reality than you think, according to a new study that found that after a three-month stay at a meditation retreat, people showed higher levels of an enzyme associated with longevity.

The study is preliminary and didn’t show that meditation actually extends life, but the findings suggest a possible means by which it could.

Researchers led by Tonya Jacobs of the University of California-Davis compared 30 participants at a meditation retreat held at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado with matched controls on a waiting list for the retreat. Participants meditated six hours per day …

The Whitwell House Day Hospital in Saxon Road, Saxmundham [Suffolk, England], used to look after mental health patients but closed last year.

Planning chiefs at Suffolk Coastal District Council have now given the thumbs up for the building to be used as a silent meditation retreat centre subject to a number of conditions.

It will be run by the Vipassana Trust, a charity which was formed in 1988 and has its headquarters in Hereford.

Most of the the residential courses on offer will be no more than three days long, although some could eventually last for up to 10 days.

Last night Patrick Elder, from Walpole, near Halesworth, who acted as an agent for the application and practices the meditation technique, said: “Vipassana is …