Living Your Nondual Presence: The Pathless Path of Meditation Advanced Silent Retreat

"Meditation reveals the innate intelligence that lies within you,
that provides the answers to your questions
and the recognition of yourself as the underlying
Mystery that has given birth to you and everything, everywhere."

—Richard Miller

The path of enlightenment is fraught with paradox. The word ‘path’ entails a meditator with time, space, and distance to be traversed. But ‘enlightenment’ entails neither path, meditator, time, space, or distance, as what is being sought is already the case. Awakening—enlightenment—is truly a matter of recognition, not achievement. Seeking, striving, achieving have brought you to this moment. Now they need to drop for true meditation to unfold. Otherwise, they will now take you away from who and what you truly are!

Silent retreat is your opportunity to effortlessly glimpse, recognize, embody, and revel in your natural state of nondual presence – your enlightened state in which all sense of separation dissolves, even as you continue living your life as a unique expression of the underlying Mystery—your Essential Nature—that has given birth to you and the entire cosmos.

During retreat take time to embody the four “great turns,” or major recognitions of yourself first as nondual witnessing presence, to abiding as your natural state of nondual being, to recognizing yourself as the boundaryless field of pure awareness, to realizing yourself as the Mystery that lies beyond all sense of mind, separation, and suffering. When you recognize yourself as the Mystery that is your “original face,” searching ends, and you rest in the never-ending runaway realization of finding and discovering.

On silent retreat you’ll engage in BodySensing and BreathSensing to strengthen your sensitivity and ability to somatically embody stillness, ease and calm. You’ll have the opportunity to steep in guided meditations and self-inquiry that point the way to the recognition of your Essential Nature, and help you to navigate challenging emotions, thoughts, and perceptions that otherwise may impede the recognition of your natural, awakened state of nondual presence.

Living your nondual presence invites effortless living—where you live in harmony with and as Essential Nature, the underlying intelligence that is your essential heart. Here you live the paradox of being a personal and unique expression that is not separate from the universal Mystery that has given birth to you and to everything, everywhere. Here you live your true destiny as love itself, where meditation is no longer something you do, but the way of living life as and from the underlying Mystery.

Learn the Core Principles of Meditation
During silent retreat you engage practices and principles that enable you to proactively respond to every circumstance in your life with actions that feel harmonious, appropriate, and right to whatever life presents. Embodying these principles and practices helps you to build a strong foundation on and off the mat. This supports you in building a strong relationship with yourself, others, and the world around you, at home, at work, and at play.

Learn To Navigate Emotions and Reactivity To Foster Peace
Your sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts are ever-changing. During retreat, you can recognize these ever-changing movements as messengers that help you respond to every situation in your life, which enables you to feel deeply connected and in harmony with yourself and the world around you.

Learning to respond, rather than react opens you to new insights and possibilities to overcome past conditioning, while building a solid foundation for the advanced practices of meditation that will be showcased during the silent retreat.

Unchanging joy, peace, compassion, loving kindness, resiliency, and wellbeing exist alongside, and independent of any achievement or changing states of your body, mind, or senses. Meditation doesn’t create these qualities. Rather, it unearths them as anchors that enable you to feel solidly grounded in unchanging wellbeing, no matter the ever-changing circumstances of your life. Please join iRest Founder, Richard Miller and Senior iRest Trainer, Stephanie Lopez, and a community of like-minded practitioners in returning to source through these precious depth nondual teachings of meditation.

Topics covered on retreat include:

• The 38-stage map of nondual meditation
• The four great turns of awakening
• Core practices of meditation
• The role of intention and inner resource
• The role of the six senses and mind that support feeling separate
• The role of the 7th sense that knows no separation
• Your innate ground of unchanging Wholeness and Wellbeing
• Practices of attention, concentration, being, and awareness that deepen meditative absorption
• Working through compulsive thinking and emotional reactivity
• How to open to insight and infinite possibility
• Practices that nourish openness and heart-centered Presence
• How to work with emerging psychic material on and off your mat
• The four internal needs that enable you to meet, welcome, and respond to each moment
• Six practices for proactively responding to sensations, emotions, and cognitions
• Opposites of sensation, emotion, and cognition that lead to transformative insight
• Essential qualities of compassion, joy, equanimity, and loving kindness
• The yoga of restful, wakeful sleep and lucid dreaming

During this silent retreat you’ll engage in extended periods of meditation, BodySensing, BreathSensing, iRest Yoga Nidra, self-inquiry, co-meditation, and engaged dialogue; practices that nourish inner stillness, support psychological integration, and spiritual awakening at all levels of body, mind, and spirit.

Is This Silent Retreat Right For Me? 10 Questions To Help You Inquire Within.

Take a few minutes to sit with the statements below and inquire to see if they’re true for you.

• I’m willing to stop, befriend, and listen to my emotions, sensations, and thoughts, and understand what they’re asking of me.
• I’m willing to unhook from comparison, expectation, anticipation, concepts, and my thinking mind, and simply be.
• I’m willing to be truthful and authentic, and to examine and go beyond my limiting beliefs about myself, others, and the world.
• I’m willing to stop—stop thinking, and simply be, for extended periods of time.
• I’m willing to engage in self-inquiry practices without using my conceptual thinking mind.
• I’m willing to trust my deepest instincts and say yes to this moment and respond to what it’s asking of me.
• I’m willing to deeply inquire as to who or what it is that is aware. I have a childlike curiosity to inquire into myself without expectation of what I may discover.
• I’m interested in living in, and as, pure perceiving, where subject-object duality collapses, all sense of separation dissolves, and there is simply resting in and as “This”, which is beyond the conceptual thinking mind.
• I’m deeply interested in “being” and “being awareness”, and what lies beyond these concepts and the concepts of awakening and enlightenment.
• I have an earnest and deep yearning to realize my heart’s desire for being fully awake and enlightened.

If you experience a heartfelt “yes” to the above, this advanced retreat may be of great benefit to you.

Have any questions about attending an advanced silent meditation retreat? Contact events@irest.org.