Meditation is about calming the mind, understanding ourselves and freeing the heart. Gaia House offers silent Insight Meditation retreats in the Buddhist tradition.
Insight Meditation (Or Vipassana: literally translated as ‘seeing deeply or clearly‘) is the practice of developing a calm and mindful investigation into the nature of experience, leading to wisdom, compassion and the end of suffering.
Download or listen on-line to an Introductory Guided Meditation by Insight Meditation teacher: Catherine McGee. You will need a quiet space and a cushion or comfortable chair.
Guided Meditation (15 mins) (mp3 format 7MB)
- To Play: Click on the link
- To Pause the talk, click again
- To Download: Click the link, then click the download link that appears (or right click and “Save Link/Target As…”)
Gaia House guiding teacher, Martine Batchelor recorded a series of talks which are very useful as an introduction to meditation. They are:
Instructions and explanation for Meditation on Sound
A Guided Meditation on Equanimity
Alternatively, watch Martine on YouTube, focusing On the Breath, On the Body, or looking at two aspects of meditation: Concentration and Enquiry.
The recordings are an introduction to meditation, but are not the same as learning to meditate. To do that, you really need to be taught by someone in person.
Different people prefer to learn in different ways. Some may decide to take the plunge and experience one of our longer Group Retreats, for 4, 5 or even 7 days. Others may wish to begin with a Group Retreat weekend at Gaia House or Meditation Days.
Alternatively, work or family commitments mean that many people learn meditation by attending weekly classes. All of these different routes to learning work well in their own way.
If you’d like to learn to meditate by attending weekly classes and live locally, a new 6 week Evening Meditation Course begins in April 2012 in Newton Abbot. Sharpham Trust, near Totnes, also run a regular programme of meditation and mindfulness evenings, weekend mornings and courses. Elsewhere in the country, try getting in touch with a Meditation Group. London Insight Meditation and Oxford Gaia House are associated organisations, offering a programme of retreats and meditation groups, based in the Insight (Vipassana) Meditation tradition.
If you have learned to meditate in the context of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) or Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), read about how Gaia House’s offering differs from this.
More about Silent Meditation.
