Summer Meditation Intensive

After more than two years of exclusively offering online meditation programs and courses, Dharma Ocean is joyfully reopening the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, CO, for a 10-day Somatic Meditation retreat. The program begins on Saturday, June 18.

This retreat provides an opportunity for deep, silent practice, the kind that helps us develop greater depth and discipline in our daily practice and brings fundamental changes in our state of being.  Our setting, the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center, provides an amazingly beautiful, inspiring, and supportive environment for our practice.

This meditative intensive will be held in silence, enabling us to go much further in developing our awareness and experience the awakening of our sense perceptions and experience of the world.  With intensive pure awareness practice, we are thus able to enter into a much fuller state of being and sense of who we are than is usual for us.  And we will perhaps have the opportunity to taste real freedom, perhaps for the first time in our lives.

For those who would like to participate but cannot attend in person, we will offer a virtual option involving remote attendance at daily talks and practice sessions. Details and registration for the simultaneous virtual retreat will be announced in early May.

Pure Awareness and Somatic Meditation

In line with the timeless Tibetan lineage we represent, Somatic Meditation takes our body as the fundamental arena of meditation practice. Rather than trying to develop meditation through our left-brain, thinking mind in a “top-down” process, as is the case with most contemporary approaches, Somatic Meditation allows us to connect with the inherent, self-existing wakefulness that is already present within the body itself.

In contrast to conventional approaches that emphasize entry through the mind’s thinking function and following conceptual instruction templates, Somatic Meditation develops a meditative consciousness that is accessed through the feelings, sensations, somatic intuition, and felt sense of the body itself. In Buddhist terms, the human body is already and always abiding in the meditative state, the domain of awakening — we are just practicing to gain entry into that experience. This is the simplest and most advanced essence of the Tibetan Tantric tradition — realizing the pure awareness that is our fundamental nature.