Home and On-Site Retreats with Shinzen Young

People have been writing in questions to this channel.

About what happens at my retreats, so I'd like to talk a little bit about what you can expect if you do a retreat with me.

I do 2 kinds of retreats actually.

One is on site type situation, which is more like the traditional way of teaching for householders where you come to a value off and it will be a residential situation where you stay overnight. Although not inevitably it might be a computer type situation where you come in for one day or weekend. But you go home. But I call those onsite retreats because I'm physically present there.

So I do on-site retreats around the world, mostly in North America and you can find the schedule for those at the website shinzen.org. Then I do. Another kind of retreat that I call the home practice program and that comes to you by conference call.

Uh you do that, from wherever you are in the world and you register for those retreats by going to basicmindfulness.org and the whole program is explained there and that's a really cool program because it takes away all of the show stoppers. The speed bumps that People have to do. The other with regards to doing the other kinds of retreats because for an on-site type retreat.

You need to.

Leave your home leave your family incur losses of job time incur perhaps travel expenses and loss of income. And so forth in a troubled economy that can be problematic and also People don't want to be away from their families.

Their schedules don't allow for travel there might, not be a center in their area. You might be living in a part of the world where you don't have a?

Up even a place you could go to to do something like that.

Or you might be disabled Cath leave your house so we wanted to create.

A delivery system for what I call?

Industrial strength, but user friendly meditation that anybody can have regardless of their familial work financial or health situation or geographic situation so that's the whole practice program. You register for that and we give you an access code in a telephone number to call at the appointed time. Most of those are done in 4 hour blocks just about anybody can get 4 hours.

During a month to do the practice and that's a second delivery system. If you come to a residential retreat with me or computer retreat with me In other words, If you do an onsite type program. You have the advantage of a buildup of momentum and so forth.

If you do a whole practice program, you have the advantage of enormous convenience.

Sometimes People ask well if I go to one of his.

On-site retreats.

Will I have to practice his techniques?

And the answer is absolutely no not required at my retreats. You are free to practice whatever form of meditation in which?

Lot of People come to my programs because they want to learn my approach is an my techniques that so-called five way system of basic mindfulness that I teach and you will have a chance. Of course to learn that, but it is by no means required that you practice that either at the retreat or for your own self practice. It's been my experience over the years of teaching that different things work for different People at different times and there.

Spiritual itinerary.

So my basic model about what to do, if you were to ask me well. How should I meditate what how should I practice. I would say do what works I'm not alone in this regard another senior teacher Joseph Goldstein wrote a book called One Dharma and basically that's if you had to sum it up in a sound bite. That's what the book is about and that's been my conclusion also do what works so now you don't have to do any other.

Five ways that my retreats, the way I think of the organization of the practice is I have this system of 5 approaches.

And then there's everything else that anybody ever did that worked.

So I divide all ways of practicing into.

The five ways, which in some ways, is just a modernization of a whole bunch of old stuff, so stuff that sort of fits within that framework and then anything else that doesn't fit within that framework. I refer to them as special exercises. You can mix. The five ways with special exercises. You can mix it with whatever you want to do just totally free to practice as you wish.

So I I like People that study with me.

As the result of having studied with me.

Not too.

Become a Devil T of my way of teaching but rather to see the commonality with in all the ways of teaching so that they can be comfortable with anybody's program. They can make use of everybody's program from my perspective. There's only one teacher.

Even the universe through all times.

There's just one teacher.

And she is the 1000 armed.

1000 headed goddess of compassion.

And each one of us individual teachers sort of represents one head that a couple of.

Arms on that single archetype.

And if you look at the This is of a low key tation for our common in Japanese, one yen in Chinese.

A quantum in Korean.

Well and one in Vietnamese and generaci into bed and known by many names sometimes actually Mail, but often in East Asia females. So I call her the thousand armed goddess of compassion.

If you look at this particular archetype. You'll see each one of her hands has a different attribute a different object a different symbol and to me. That represents all the different approaches that different teachers have developed over the ages, but we're all limbs on one.

Formless activity.

That pervades time in space each one of us contributes as best we can to this overall activity, so my job as a teacher is too.

Set you up to.

See things that way so that we all of us teachers can share this huge job that needs to be done.

For the world.