Living Stillness: Just Say Yes—Advanced 10-Day Hybrid Retreat with Richard Miller

Without trying to be still, sense the dynamic Stillness that is the ever-present background of your everyday experience. Here, life blossoms. Here, change takes place spontaneously. As you live from choiceless awareness, in choiceless living, each situation is free to unfold as it does, minus the separating ego which lives in conflict, always grasping for solutions.

An Inquiry Into Self

What we refer to as our “self” is simply a thought appearance. In truth, “self” is not an ultimate reality. It appears only as an illusion of stability. 

Contemplate “Who am I?”, “What am I?”. 

Observe how the thinker, doer, and sufferer all appear and disappear in an ever-present background, the Essence-Presence-Being-Awareness of dynamic Stillness. When observation deepens, the separate objective self is realized to be only a mirage; an image held together by memory. 

What we truly are can never be objectified because what we are is beyond time, space, and duality. Time, space, and duality arise within and from what we are. This long retreat is an invitation to be living Stillness and recognize how life wishes to live you, before your dividing mind and ego take control.

Meditation purifies us and places us beyond the dividing mind and its obsession with images and projections. Searching for enlightenment only takes you away from the dynamic Stillness that you already are. Relinquish the belief that you are limited to a separate body and mind. Instead, use them as pointers to what they arise in. 

Listen and observe, free from thinking, free from the past, future, and all time. Live with the teachings and you’ll attune to Living Stillness. They are the perfume of what they refer to—our Essential Nature. Free yourself from the idea that “I am only this body and mind” and you will awaken to dynamic Stillness as your natural state of Being.

What Long Retreat Encompasses

The emphasis of this annual ten-day retreat is on practices of meditative self-inquiry and awakening to our nondual Essential Nature. Practices include periods of meditation, BreathSensing, BodySensing Yoga, iRest Yoga Nidra, and engaging talks and dialogue. Each practice is designed to nourish self realization at all levels of body, mind, and spirit. 

When the center of your regard is no longer centered in yourself as a separate “I” ego, love truly blossoms. You become a liberating presence in the world. This retreat offers you the opportunity and the ability to welcome the deep energies calling you to be fully alive, authentic, and awake. May we enjoy sharing Living Stillness and being together in community.

Is This 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.