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Retreat Dharma Talks at Spirit Rock Meditation Center

Winter Solstice Retreat (2025): Embracing the Dark, Inviting the Light

Throughout this residential retreat, we will focus on centering ourselves at the time of the holidays and the New Year. Together we will quiet our minds, ground our bodies, open our hearts, and use inquiry to help energize our practice. Special emphasis will be placed on opening to the darkness, including to our difficulties and challenges, and opening to the coming light, which includes the beauty, joy, wisdom, and love within and around us. This retreat will include complete meditation instructions, sitting and walking meditation, daily lovingkindness practice, daily Qigong practice, evening talks, practice discussions, and a Winter Solstice ceremony.

2025-12-18 (6 days) Spirit Rock Meditation Center

  
2025-12-19 Receiving Care Practice (Retreat at Spirit Rock) 43:38
Devon Hase
Guided meditation on Caring Figure practice and receiving unconditional love.
2025-12-20 Trust: Finding Faith Beyond Belief (Retreat at Spirit Rock) 43:30
Devon Hase
A Winter Solstice reflection on faith (saddha) as heartfelt confidence rather than blind belief. Drawing on personal stories of religious transitions and crisis, this talk explores how suffering can become the ground for genuine spiritual trust—the kind that arises from direct experience and opens us to the possibility of awakening exactly as we are. Through poetry, Buddhist teachings, and the paradox of being already free while still practicing, we examine how verified faith allows us to meet life with both acceptance and wise action.
2025-12-21 Winter Solstice Morning (Retreat at Spirit Rock) 56:43
Devon Hase
Reflections on Solstice, How to Meditate, Wise Attitude, and guided RAIN practice
2025-12-22 Wise Intention 1:36:52
Matthew Brensilver
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