This is a virtual retreat hosted on zoom.

The emphasis will be deepening the experience of emptiness.  Self-inquiry meditation instruction and practice and a talk on emptiness and awareness.

• Teacher:  Cedric Reeves
• Cost:  Sliding-scale
• Date:  Saturday Dec 18th 2021
• Time: 9:00 am to 7:30 pm EST (Europeans can come for the first part of the retreat and leave early in as much as it is very late for you)
• The retreat will be recorded and sent out to those who sign up.

Practice Technique

Self-Inquiry instruction for beginners will be taught in the morning.  We’ll start most seated meditation sessions with concentration practice and then do self-inquiry punctuated by bouts of resting in objectless awareness.  There will be pointing out style guidance offered at times during meditation sessions.

Philosophical lecture

The lecture will be more in the Pointing Out Style in such a way to point to a direct experience of emptiness, to seeing and knowing experience as experience.

Walking Meditation

Brief walking meditation instruction will be offered.  Most hours will consist of a 20 minute walking meditation session and a 40 minute seated meditation session.  The type of walking meditation taught will be Shinzen style “Auto-Walk” or do continue with self inquiry while walking.

Yoga

I’ll guide a 40 minute session of Yoga.  The Yoga routine will be made up of two sequences.  The first is based on the “how to grow a lotus” sequence which is specifically designed to help with long meditation sitting.  The second sequence is Tibetan Sun Moon Yoga which supports deep meditative experience.  This is a Yoga sequence from from the Karma Kagyu Mahamudra lineage.

This retreat is an intermediate level retreat

The best result will be for meditators with at least 300 hours of meditation practice and with an established, on-going meditation practice.  Preferably you have a heart practice like loving kindness, Tong Len, etc.  The reason for this is that insights into no-self and emptiness can be disturbing.  Having an established heart practice helps assure a productive and balanced integration of these insights. However, as long as there is sincere interest, no one will be turned away.  No experience with self-inquiry is required. 

Partial attendance, coming and going, etc.

You can come and go whenever you like based on your availability and interest.  Full participation will yield the most powerful result, however.  You’ll get there recordings about a week later after we get done editing the files.

The schedule and chanting will inspired by the Zen tradition.  

We’ll chant the Hakuin’s Song of Zazen at the beginning and end of the day.  At the beginning of each sit we’ll chant the Mantra “gate gate parasamgate bodhi svaha”.  Chanting is very powerful and strongly recommended.

We have a sliding scale to accommodate people of different means.

Tier 4

$80I have enough resources and would like to support others.

Tier 3

$40I have sufficient resources.

Tier 2

$20I have some resources.

Tier 1

$1I don’t have the resources – pay whatever you can.

These are the suggested payment tiers for this retreat. You can pay on the next page

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang