In just about a few days, in early August, I will be leading a retreat on loving kindness and its connection to basic goodness.
This event is available in person—in a wonderful beautiful environment in Wales—and also online, both on Zoom and by means of a recording (which can then be used repeatedly for personal practice).
I would be extremely privileged to see you among the retreat participants, and am also quite confident about the power of the material and the format. Please consider joining—and see the information & the registration links here.
Here’s a brief summary of some of the benefits of being in retreat that I’ve recently sent out through the newsletter of the Contemplative Consciousness Network:
Being in retreat can be a wonderful opportunity to train our mind and cultivate new wholesome habits, including those related to attention. It is one of the primary ways to progress in our contemplative practice.
Beyond that, unplugging to be in retreat (group or solitary) has multiple health-related benefits. According to stress researcher Elissa Epel, even a retreat not accompanied by meditation might bring powerful results:
It turned out that just living at the retreat center—regardless of whether the participants trained in meditation—created dramatic changes in gene expression activity in the immune cells…
Cell activity after living at the retreat center was dramatically different than it was on the day the participants arrived!
We saw reductions in inflammatory activity, oxidative stress activity, DNA damage, and mitochondrial degradation.
All great things! Autophagy-related processes—that beneficial process of cell cleanup—went up. People… reported feeling full of vitality at the end of the week and had large decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress.
(The Stress Prescription)
While talking about the importance of profound rest and the different ways of arriving at it, she also points out the transformative power of proper meditation retreats:
Meditation retreats are probably the most extreme example of deep rest, because you’re having a secluded, safe period where you can really remodel your nervous system.
You can have dramatic improvements in how much you’re carrying around vigilance in every moment.
(Elissa Epel for Sounds True)
According to the research Elissa is quoting, those who have combined unplugging (being in retreat) with actual meditation training and then continued with their daily practice were still displaying reduced levels of stress a year later. Such immersive training was especially beneficial for those who have experienced early trauma (allowing for the process of nervous system “remodeling”), but brought benefit to all.
Since our retreat this August is focused on loving kindness, it will offer additional benefits (even when taken online or by means of a recording) related to the nature of kindness meditation.
For example, research done by a team from the University of North Carolina suggests that systematic loving kindness practice can contribute to a reduced shortening of telomeres (the “DNA-protein complexes within our cells that protect them from daily wear and tear”).
In the domain of psychological wellbeing, loving kindness has a powerful way of affecting our habits of cognition, our attention (metta is a śamatha technique, after all!), the domain of our wishes (our conation), and, of course, our emotions.
Research done by Barbara Fredrickson suggests that loving kindness practice can also bring an increase in daily positive emotions, a reduction in depressive symptoms, and a greater level of life satisfaction.