Summer Meditation Retreat: Breathing (Online)
Breathing. You can’t beat it, for life, and as a meditation practice.
Breathing meditation is suitable for all types of people. It develops, concentration, calm, bliss and insight – altogether leading to awakening and healing.
This meditation retreat will be held online and led by Achariya Doug Duncan Sensei and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei from the Clear Sky Meditation Center in Eastern BC.
COVID-19 RESPONSE
Our main priority is to offer a retreat that is accessible and supports your health and safety. Due to current COVID-19 health restrictions, we are offering this retreat online from our home to yours.
See our FAQ section below for more details about our covid policy and requirements for attending online.
Settling the Mind, Cultivating Concentration
A guiding text for this retreat will be the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, or discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, which has been described as the most profound discourse the Buddha ever gave on mental development.
This simple yet powerful framework will extend your meditation experience to everything from subatomic particles to the vastness of space, and all that’s between.
While we believe any undertaking can be a vehicle for awakening, there’s no substitute for the power of one’s own profound experience of truth, gained through meditation. This is why meditation is one of the four foundational practices of our teaching.
Basic requirements to do the retreat online:
- Block out the week and be focused on the retreat for this entire period, using this time and participating in the retreat as if you were at Clear Sky in person. This includes a rigorous, full, daily meditation schedule.
- Participate in all of the daily classes and group practices via online streaming.
- Set up a quiet space or location where you can focus on the Meditation Retreat, and not need to engage in conversation or work with others.
- Put away your phone, digital devices and other distractions.
- If there are enough people in the same time zone as you, you could also make a cohort to meet to do a group practice throughout the retreat.
Meet the Teachers
Achariya Doug Duncan Sensei & Catherine Pawasarat Sensei are Dharma and meditation teachers who founded Clear Sky Meditation Centre, BC, Canada.
Achariya Doug Duncan received lay ordination from Namgyal Rinpoche in 1978, and is a lineage holder in that teaching. Known for his direct, humourous and compassionate engagement with students, Doug embraces various traditions, contemporary psychology, and science, to mentor all beings to a more awakened state.
Catherine Pawasarat Sensei has trained daily with Achariya Doug Duncan since 1998 in an intensive spiritual apprenticeship that is rare in the modern West. She received lay ordination from Namgyal Rinpoche in 2003. In addition to Buddhist philosophy and its applications to daily life, Catherine also draws on generative living and the arts. With Doug she is co-founder of Clear Sky Retreat Center in the BC Rockies.
What can I expect?
Our teachings and Clear Sky operate based on the ancient tradition of Dāna or generosity. As generosity is the basis upon which all spiritual practice flourishes, we recommend that you learn more about this profound practice before you register.
What’s Expected of Me?
- This meditation retreat consists of many hours of consecutive practice each day. Therefore some experience, especially with insight meditation, is highly recommended.
- An open mind and heart, and a spirit of adventure are excellent things to bring!
- It’s human to have some apprehensions about doing something new. We try to make this as supportive as possible.
- This is a silent retreat. To deepen your meditation, we ask that participants refrain from reading, using the internet, phone or listening to music during the course.
Retreat schedule:
(Time Zone: MST, subject to change)
- 6:00 – 7:00am: Group Meditation (optional)
- 9:30am – 11am: Class with Teachers (there will be a Prajnaparamita empowerment at this time on Friday, July 16th)
- 2:00 – 3:00pm: Group Practice and Q & A with Teachers
About Clear Sky
Located in the BC rocky mountains, we offer over 300-acres to deepen your practice and reconnect with nature. Founded by Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat, we are home to students from around the globe who are dedicated to co-creating a supportive and innovative space for awakening in our modern world.
To help you get acquainted with us, some community members made this short video during our 2019 Buddhas in Action retreat. To learn more about us and our incredible community, click here!
FAQs
Dana: This course is offered by Doug and Catherine Sensei through the ancient principle of generosity, or Dāna. Learn more about Dāna here.
Pricing: In order to bring you this retreat at home, there is an additional pay by the heart, sliding scale admin fee* of $200-$700. The admin fee is to cover the costs of running these online courses – for equipment and software to provide you the teachings online.
How Much to Give? A short exercise:
- Take a few quiet breaths and center yourself.
- Spend another few moments contacting as best you can a sense of health, strength and abundance (noticing without judgement if this is hard to contact)
- Offer an aspiration (using the below, or your own words).
May this practice of dāna open up a space inside me to learn and receive.
May this gift support the teachers and teachings for the benefit of many other people.
May this gift directly support my own awakening through a strong dāna practice.
This gift, myself the giver, and the teachers are all impermanent – with this in mind I give lightly and generously, for the benefit of all beings! - Now check with your heart and mind what amount feels both consistent with your situation, and expressive of your aspiration. Remember, you are free to offer whatever amount of dāna feels good for you right now.
- Now simply, with a joyful abundant heart aspiring for awakening, and awareness of the preciousness and impermanence of life, enter the amount you choose to offer.
About the administrative fee
In a traditional model of in-person teachings, a retreat center or urban meditation center invites teachers to visit. In these cases the centers have infrastructure and organization costs to cover, which might be covered by an admin fee. For the teaching itself, dāna to the teachers is offered in a bowl. This honors both the sustainability of the teachers, and of the supporting center.
We’ve tried to recreate this approach online.
The teachers’ time and the teaching themselves are offered on the basis of dāna, separate to the admin fee. With our dāna offering we are making a direct gift of generosity to the teachers to support their teachings and livelihood. Learn more about the practice of dāna here.
The admin fee goes to support the infrastructure and organization necessary to support them to teach. As anyone with an online business will know, it can be surprising the costs of setting up a good infrastructure to support effective teaching and connection online.
Below are a few of the work and benefits that your admin fee payment is supporting:
- high speed internet (to allow interviews and classes on-line)
- online class systems (Zoom)
- registration / admin systems (Eventbrite, Basecamp)
- communication systems to keep everyone informed, share connection details, teachings and other resources (Mailchimp)
- online storage (for example, Dropbox, to allow us to let students watch recordings, and to store and share selected teachings in other forms such as podcasts and video later, and Amazon cloud)
- quality sound, video and editing equipment (both for live teachings and to provide good enough quality for later sharing as podcasts and video). We are regularly updating our equipment to improve your user experience.
- online calendar booking system to allow students to book interviews
- website hosting and maintenance for sharing upcoming courses, teachings, blogs and other resources.
May all our efforts be sustainable, abundant and for the benefit of all beings!
We welcome any questions. Please feel free to contact michelle@clearskycenter.org
If you are taking this retreat online, we require that you devote your full attention to the retreat for the entire week.
Online Retreat Requirements:
- Block out the one week and be focused on the retreat for this entire period, using this time and participating in the retreat as if you were at Clear Sky in person. This includes a rigorous, full, daily meditation schedule.
- Participate in all of the daily classes and group practices via online streaming.
- Set up a quiet space or location where you can focus on the Meditation Retreat, and not need to engage in conversation or work with others.
- Put away your phone, digital devices and other distractions.
- If there are enough people in the same time zone as you, you could also make a cohort to meet to do a group practice throughout the retreat.
The retreat starts at 9:30am MT on Friday, July 9th and ends at 3pm MT on Friday, July 16th.