Jonathan Foust

How has your meditation practice shifted and changed since you first took it up?   Please join this conversation with Stephen Josephs, who shares how his mediation has evolved over 60 years of daily practice.   As one of the leaders in the Kundalini Yoga tradition at it's peak in the west, Stephen was a devoted practitioner in what he calls the 'fire practices,' willful and powerful practices that can dramatically change one's state.   But after many years of dedicated effort, the fire started to go out. His practice evolved into what he calls the 'water practices' - techniques and attentional strategies that are more about dissolving the sense of a separate self.   In this conversation he shares some of the essential elements of the water practices and we explore that gnarly question: What it is that is actually dissolving?     You'll come away with some key insights from a depth practitioner and a taste of how the dissolving practices might be of benefit to you.       With over 60 years of daily meditation

This talk explores the culminating factor of the Eightfold Path—Right Concentration—and the profound power of a steady, unified mind. In a world of constant distraction and fragmented attention, we investigate how deep focus becomes a gateway to inner stillness, clarity, and freedom. Drawing from classical Buddhist teachings and lived experience, this talk reveals how training attention is not just about meditation, but about reclaiming the depth, presence, and aliveness of your entire life.   You'll learn how to strengthen and stabilize attention through practical, time-tested methods, how to work skillfully with common obstacles like restlessness and doubt, and how concentration naturally matures from effort into ease. You'll also discover how a steady mind supports insight, emotional resilience, and a deep sense of well-being—opening the door to a more fully lived and awakened life.

This talk explores the movement from doing to being—from the disciplined application of effort to the natural ease of presence. After training attention, stabilizing the mind, and refining investigation, there comes a threshold where practice no longer adds anything, but begins to let go of itself. Through stories, humor, and classical teachings, we'll examine how effort serves us and how clinging to it can quietly become another form of tension. We'll explore how investigation matures into direct seeing, how awareness can rest without collapsing into dullness, and how the deepest freedom emerges not from control, but from trusting the field of awareness itself.   You'll learn how to recognize when effort is skillful and when it's simply habitual, how to allow investigation to complete itself without turning it into a project, and how to rest in open awareness with clarity and balance. You'll explore the shift from trying to manage experience to allowing it to unfold, sensing how awareness is already present

This talk explores what remains when we stop circling around the edges of practice and face the deepest truths directly. With humor, candor, and a willingness to take the red pill, we'll look at the three characteristics the Buddha pointed to—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self—and how they shape every human life whether we like it or not. We'll explore how the heart breaks open in the face of change, how our wounds often become the source of our gifts, and how the self we work so hard to protect may be far less solid than we imagine. This is a talk about reality, about freedom, and about what becomes possible when we stop negotiating with what is true.   You'll learn how contemplating impermanence can deepen gratitude rather than despair, how dukkha reveals the hidden strategies we use to secure belonging and safety, and how the teaching of not-self can loosen fear at its root. We'll explore the "winning formulas" that shape identity, the ways suffering can become a doorway to wisdom and compassio

The best meditation hall has no walls.   This talk explores how nature cultivates focus, non-judgment, and belonging, and how mindfulness can help us stay engaged with the world's pain without burning out.   Bio: With 25 years of Vipassana practice and a day job in international marine conservation, Heidi Schuttenberg, PhD brings both deep personal inquiry and real-world urgency to her teaching. She mentors in Jonathan Foust's Year of Living Mindfully and is dedicated to making applied mindfulness available to those on the front lines environmental conservation and social change. Learn more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidi-schuttenberg-1114a658/.

This talk explores Wise Awareness as the art of seeing life clearly enough to actually live it. So much of human regret comes not from dramatic mistakes, but from drifting through our days half-awake—disconnected from our bodies, driven by unseen reactions, caught in mental weather, and estranged from what matters most. Drawing on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, we'll explore awareness of body, feeling tone, mind, and the deeper patterns of dharma as direct doorways to freedom. Wise awareness is not passive observation; it is precise, embodied, liberating seeing that brings us back to the vividness of this moment and helps us live with greater authenticity, intimacy, and presence.   You'll learn how to ground attention in the body, recognize feeling tone before it hardens into grasping or aversion, identify mind states without becoming trapped inside them, and see the lawful patterns of impermanence, suffering, and not-self unfolding in real time. We'll explore how mindfulness interrupts automatic living

The third talk in a weeklong meditation retreat, with Heidi Schuttenberg.   Our unwelcome visitors are guides to our freedom. This talk explores the Buddha's five hindrances and offers practical tools for meeting them with compassion, curiosity, and even gratitude.   With 25 years of Vipassana practice and a day job in international marine conservation, Heidi Schuttenberg, PhD brings both deep personal inquiry and real-world urgency to her teaching. She mentors in Jonathan Foust's Year of Living Mindfully and is dedicated to making applied mindfulness available to those on the front lines environmental conservation and social change. Learn more at   / heidi-schuttenberg-1114a658  . Dana: Venmo @Heidi-Schuttenberg

The second talk in a weeklong retreat.  We often assume insight arises from calm, clarity, or deep concentration. But in truth, it is often born in the very moments we want to escape. This talk invites a radical reframe: what if restlessness, doubt, and emotional turbulence are not problems to solve—but the precise conditions for awakening? Together, we'll explore how mindful investigation transforms reactivity into understanding, and how even the most difficult inner states can become gateways to freedom.   Through practical instruction and reflection, you'll explore how to investigate experience without turning practice into a subtle self-improvement project, how to shift from "my problem" to unfolding process, and how insight naturally gives way to a deep, effortless rest. As understanding deepens, something unexpected emerges—a quiet recognition that nothing needs to be fixed for freedom to be here.

This is the first talk of a weeklong retreat in 2026.   Lynn Teo starts by exploring various ways to resource the nervous system to support the capacity to be present to the moment's direct experience.  Then, we investigate what mindfulness is and how mindfulness of the body supports present moment awareness.   Lynn Teo has been teaching embodied movement and meditation for over 25 years. Deeply grateful to her teachers, she now teaches in the Insight (Vipassana) Tradition and is a Dharma teacher with Open Door Meditation Community in Portland, Maine. A deep believer in Sangha and belonging, she helps to empower community members (in particular helpers, healers, artists, activists, and people of color) with embodied practices of radical rest, resilience, and trauma/burnout recovery. As a clinician, Lynn combines acupuncture, shiatsu, and Somatic Experiencing ® and specializes in helping patients suffering anxiety, stress, overwhelm, burnout and trauma as well as chronic pain and chronic conditions. Learn more

This talk explores Right Effort as one of the most misunderstood elements of the Eightfold Path—revealing how much of our suffering comes not from a lack of effort, but from pushing, striving, and forcing ourselves in ways that create inner violence. Drawing on classical Buddhist teachings and everyday experience, the talk reframes effort as a form of care rather than willpower, inviting a wiser relationship to energy, discipline, and motivation in meditation and daily life.   You'll learn how to recognize when effort has tipped into strain, how to stop feeding unhelpful mental patterns, and how to cultivate wholesome qualities without burnout or self-judgment. The talk offers practical guidance for sustaining practice with steadiness and ease, helping you apply energy in ways that support clarity, compassion, and long-term resilience—on and off the cushion.

This talk explores the power of self-observation and what lies beyond the sense of self. You'll learn how the witness can free you from the tyranny of the mind and your reactivity as well as what can happen when you explore being aware of the witness and what lies beyond.

This talk explores the liberating factor of self-observation.   You'll learn about how you can cultivate the optimal environment to develop the witness, the near-enemy of the practice and what it means to be aware of the light behind the observer.

This talk explores how the most simple mindfulness practices point to liberation.   You'll learn about the destination of cultivating present-moment awareness, understanding the nature of impermanence, recognizing inter-dependence and the power of non-attachment.

This talk explores Right Livelihood as a living inquiry rather than a rigid moral rule, asking how we can earn a living without gradually betraying our values, vitality, or sense of dignity. Grounded in the Buddha's teachings and everyday work life, the talk examines the ethical foundation of do no harm, the importance of inner congruence between what we do and what we feel in our bodies, and the often-overlooked relational impact of our work—how it shapes our patience, speech, and capacity for care. Rather than idealizing purity, the talk brings a grounded, compassionate lens to the real tensions people face around money, responsibility, and meaning.   You'll learn how to recognize subtle ways work can create inner fragmentation, how to listen to bodily signals and conscience as guides to integrity, and how to assess whether your livelihood is making you more humane or more armored. The talk also offers a wise, practical approach to compromise—showing how to live in the world as it is without collapsing into

This talk explores listening as a radical act of compassion at moments of loss, when words often rush in to ease our own discomfort rather than meet another's pain. We examine how common responses to grief—reassurance, advice, spiritual framing, or positivity—can unintentionally distance us, and how the impulse to fix subtly reinforces separation. Drawing on mindfulness and embodied awareness, the talk invites a shift from doing something helpful to being with what is most tender and real.   You'll learn how to recognize the fixing reflex as it arises, listen from the body rather than the mind, and rest in not-knowing without withdrawing or collapsing. Through practical guidance and reflection, you'll discover how simple, grounded presence communicates safety, dignity, and care—offering a form of support that does not try to resolve grief, but allows it to unfold and be held with wisdom and compassion.

More on how to keep you keel in the water when navigating uncertainty.   You'll learn some practical strategies for finding 'refuge,' a place of presence, particularly accessing Wisdom - clear seeing, Compassion - a heart that can hold it all, Presence - the space of awareness itself, and Skillful Action - strategies for staying deeply present in the midst of change.

This talk explores how you might cultivate greater steadiness in turbulent times. You'll learn some practical tools for finding refuge in present-moment awareness, in cultivating Witness Consciousness and in watching the flow of phenomena with awake awareness and an open heart.

This talk explores wise intention as a living, moment-to-moment inquiry rather than a fixed decision or self-improvement project. Drawing from the Buddhist understanding of Right Intention, it reframes intention as an embodied process of noticing what genuinely supports clarity and ease, honestly recognizing what leads to contraction, and allowing the heart to recalibrate without judgment. The emphasis is on alignment over striving, and on learning directly from lived experience.   You'll learn how to evaluate your life and practice through clear cause-and-effect, recognize when effort is actually creating more struggle, and make mindful course corrections that are kind, practical, and sustainable. The talk offers simple reflections and practices to help you listen beneath habit and preference, so you can open to what most deeply calls and let wise intention guide your actions with greater trust, coherence, and care.

This talk explores the liberating power of clear seeing — vipassanā, or insight — the capacity to recognize things as they truly are rather than as we wish them to be. Through the practice of mindful attention, we begin to see through the illusions that shape our experience: the illusion that things are solid, that the self is fixed, that craving can bring satisfaction, and that suffering is personal. Each moment of genuine insight loosens the grip of confusion and reveals the luminous awareness that is already free.   You'll learn how insight unfolds through the deep investigation of perception, self, desire, and suffering; how mindfulness and compassion work together to transform pain into wisdom; and how to bring these realizations into the immediacy of daily life. Through stories, reflection, and direct practice, you'll discover how to live from the natural clarity that sees through delusion and rests in the heart of liberation.

This talk explores how to consciously direct the inner process of healing and release. Drawing on the classic teachings of Ho'oponopono, it introduces four phrases that guide your attention to: • Taking responsibility for your inner experience • Attuning to the process of release • Reflecting on gratitude and the opportunity to grow • Resting in loving awareness