Insight Meditation

Insight meditation is a simple practice of bringing direct awareness to the experience of each moment.  Doing this brings clarity and calms the mind, enabling one to see through interpretations and concepts to a direct experience of reality.  

This method comes from the 2,500 year old Buddhist Monastic tradition practiced in Southeast Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. It is one of the simplest meditation practices as the primary aim is paying attention to the sensations of the body breathing. It does not involve learning concepts or taking on beliefs, but rather relies on our innate capacity to know through unfiltered awareness.

Intensive retreats are a time to train the mind in this direction and provide a foundation to carry  meditation practice into daily life.  These retreats are held mostly in silence and consist primarily of sitting and slow walking meditation periods.  Participants are expected to follow the daily schedule and maintain silence while on retreat.   There will be simple instructions, short individual interviews, and inspirational talks based on Buddhist teachings.

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Excerpt from Mile's forthcoming book, Beyond Perception

This Empty Feeling

This empty feeling is simply our innate longing for freedom from our mental programming. Until we decide to recognize this longing for what it is and stop trying to make it go away by feeding it candy or giving it trinkets to play with, our lives contain a certain amount of despair and impotence. We become caught in an endless loop where all of our attempts to free ourselves fall short and we unconsciously affirm the hopelessness of our situation again and again. This naturally leads to chronic depression or anxiety from which we can get only temporary relief through our addictive behaviors or medications.