Are you feeling overwhelmed by endless demands?
Do you need time and space to remember your true intentions?
Do you want to create a healthy relationship​ with yourself,
experience less anxiety, and find inner peace and clarity?
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Insight Meditation is an ancient medicine with proven health benefits. Recommended for the management of stress, anxiety, addiction, and the chronic diseases that they cause, meditation enables you to become more self-aware, more focused in the present, and better able to manage your emotions.
Insight Meditation
Private Group Retreats
Insight Meditation
Most of us mistake our thoughts for reality and believe that our perception is truth. The only way that we know how to relate to the world around us is through the filter of our thinking mind. This separates us from life and results in a painful sense of isolation and confusion about what is real.
When your mind is congested with chronic thinking, your attention is scattered and out of focus. Everything that you experience is distorted by interpretive thought and you get a blurry picture of reality. By focusing on what your mind thinks about something, you miss seeing that thing as it actually is.
Meditation is about learning to sustain your attention on a sensory experience, instead of a thought. It awakens your senses, concentrates your energy, and focuses your mind. As you practice holding your attention on a simple repetitive sensation such as the body’s natural breathing, your mind becomes steady and you begin to see things in an entirely new way.
Insight Meditation is practical way to focus your attention on the present moment so that you can see clearly. Focusing your mind in this way is like focusing a telescope or microscope so that you can see an object in sharp detail.
This practice enables you to experience things around you as they are, not as you think they are or should be.
It connects you to reality in a profound way that eases chronic anxiety and enables sustained peace and contentment.
How Does It Work?
In the rush of today's world, many of us are trying to find the pause button. You can see how your focused intentions dissolve into endless distractions, undermined by a nagging sense of self-doubt, disillusion, and anxiety about life. And you’re looking for a time-out to ground yourself, and touch-base with your heart’s deepest desires.
Meditation is a powerful tool for people who want to get to the bottom of their chronic discontent, connect with their life's purpose, and experience true serenity. It shines light into your heart, mind, and body, and helps you feel focused, energized, grounded, and alive. It offers direct relief for anxiety, distraction, self-doubt, disillusion, and depression.
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Insight Meditation, also known as Vipassanna or Mindfullness, is a technique for learning to direct and focus your attention. Taught by the Buddha over 2,500 years ago, this practice enables you to observe your thoughts, instead of being absorbed by them. The instructions are simply to notice the sensation of your body breathing, which interrupts the trance of chronic thinking and replaces it with present moment awareness.
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Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of this practice. It can be frustrating, uncomfortable, and humbling, and requires discipline and patience. Miles will ease you into this practice gently by breaking down the process into simple, practical steps. And he will encourage you with talks that enable you to apply this ancient medicine to your life now.
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While meditation is simple enough to learn on your own, most people realize a need for more support to maintain a regular practice. Miles offers silent, intensive retreats from 2-7 days in length, as well as personal coaching for dedicated students. Sitting for days with a group of people and the guidance of an experienced teacher enables you to pass through thresholds of resistance and deepen your mediation. This in turn makes daily practice more enjoyable and productive.
Miles has practiced Insight Meditation since 1976 and taught since 1999. His teaching emphasizes present-moment awareness rather than formal Buddhist doctrine or theory. He will teach you practical tools for developing your own insight and seeing truth directly for yourself.
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The insight meditation retreat Miles leads had a very distinct feeling to me, from my previous Vipassana retreats. I thought it useful to offer this perspective as someone drawn to what was described as a gentler practice. Something incredible that came from the gentleness of this meditation was how I felt it stripping my mind of identifying so strongly with everything I would think I was enduring. I had watched so many people leave halfway through a meditation retreat, or have mental breakdowns or panic attacks from the intensity, myself included. On this particular retreat, I did not sit though physical or emotional pain in the same way, but was given enough understanding to let all those ideas of me fall away and really surrender to the actual feeling of the suffering not being real.
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Everything I believed was brought into question. If I think its a cure, isn’t that just another mental perception? What if you were offered a space that felt so safe, within a community of people that felt so connected, with just enough support to allow you to completely fall apart and surrender to the beauty of your own heart? Because of that, this retreat showed me so much unknown territory. I found a joy I felt I had desperately been searching for in everything outside of me.
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What I loved about this experience is that it came with a teaching that to me was really alive and connected. Many times I would get frustrated going to meditation leaders and getting the same scripted answers to my questions. I didn’t want someone who quotes other teachers, but would not give an authentic heartfelt answer to what I was asking. While there was no question and answer session in this retreat, it felt unnecessary because the nightly lectures spoke directly to me. I received insights from a teacher who sat with us, experienced with us and felt with us. The talks were from present moment awareness and there were real life lessons that resonated on many levels. I was not given a technique to quiet my mind, but what felt like an actual connection to what that means in life.
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Through this retreat and previous teachings from Miles, the concept of meditation has been broadened to something so much more than a technique I practice to arrive at a certain goal. It has been melted into meditation in life itself, what it feels like to be present, fulfilled and in love with life.
A Typical Retreat
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Daily schedule of sitting and walking meditation, meals, and personal time
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Group circle check-in on the first night and check-out on the last morning
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Inspirational evening talks by Miles provides encouragement and insight for the next days meditations
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Retreat is held in silence and structured in traditional Insight Meditation format
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Teachings focus on present moment experience rather than doctrine or theology
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No formal religion or belief system required or promoted
6:30 am
WAKE UP BELL
7:00 am
MEDITATION
Silent Sitting Meditation
7:30 am
YOGA
8:00 am
BREAKFAST
9:00 am
TALK AND INSTRUCTIONS
9:35 am
MEDITATION
Alternating 35 minute Silent Sitting
and 20 minute Walking Meditation
12:00 pm
LUNCH
2:30 pm
TALK AND INSTRUCTIONS
3:05 pm
MEDITATION
6:00 pm
EVENING TEA AND SNACK
7:00 pm
MEDITATION
7:45 pm
EVENING TALK
Working With Miles
Meditation is simple to explain but difficult to do because our body and mind are either too agitated or too lethargic much of the time. It is common for people learning this skill to try to push away thoughts or force their body to sit still. However, the mind is as slippery as the body is restless. And approaching meditation in the way that we usually try to learn a new skill often doesn’t work, leaving you with a sense of failure and defeat.
A coach is someone to keep you motivated and help you practice in the most effective way. Miles will work with you to customize practice methods that fit into your daily schedule and enable you to settle your body and mind without a struggle. Personal coaching will help make meditation work for you instead of being just another chore that you have to do.
In a private session with Miles there will be time for guided meditation instructions and a short period of silent sitting together. This will usually be followed by you sharing what goes on for you during meditation, and Miles offering feedback and inspirational guidance.
All individual sessions are confidential and private, with one exception. If you share thoughts or plans to harm yourself or someone else, Miles is obliged to require you to contact a mental health professional, or to break confidentiality and contact such a person himself on your behalf.