“Archeology of the Heart”
(A non-residential weekend “Awareness” retreat)
Victoria Insight Meditation Society
Sept 17, 18, 2016
with Steve Armstrong
In this two-day, non-residential retreat, dhamma teacher Steve Armstrong will offer teachings and instructions that cultivate stable awareness of all experience. With awareness, we are able to explore all of life: burrowing beneath appearances through the depths of personality, from entanglement in experience to the ever-creative process of being. The journey unfolds deep into layers of past conditioning to discovery of the shifting, tectonic plates of bedrock awareness and the star-dust like conditional nature of reality. With such intimacy, the evolutionary unfolding of wise understanding is revealed.
The format of our time together will include scheduled sittings with instructions, group debrief or check-in as to how practice is going, lots of opportunity for Q’s and A’s as well as mini-dharmettes and possibly a longer dhamma talk toward the end of each day. Rather than a fixed pre-determined schedule, we will follow the flow of the group energy and if more time is needed with Q’s & A’s then the walking or movement periods between sittings may be shorter. The instruction will develop from single object continuity to awareness of multiple objects and on to awareness of the nature of mind. This is a natural progression of many people in practice so we will be offering something for everyone. Suitable for beginning students as well as for more experienced students.
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Steve Armstrong has studied the dhamma and practiced insight meditation since 1975. He served for many years at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts as Executive Director, Board member and senior teacher of the annual three-month retreat. As a monk in Burma for 5 years, under the guidance of Sayadaw U Pandita, he undertook intensive, silent practice of insight and lovingkindness meditations, as well as studying the abhidhamma with Sayadaw U Zagara of Australia. He continues his practice under the guidance of Sayadaw U Tejaniya in Rangoon. He has been leading meditation retreats internationally since 1990 and is a co-founding director and teacher of the Vipassana Metta Foundation dhamma sanctuary on Maui. He also directs the Burma Schools Project having funded and overseen construction or renovation of over 100 schools, 5 clinics, 2 large nunneries and supporting many other nunneries in Burma. Out of compassion for future generations, he has planted more than 2500 trees on the dhamma sanctuary/hermitage land on Maui. He recently wrapped up the Managing Editor-ship of the Vipassana Metta Foundation’s translation committee that brought to publication by Wisdom Publications, the Manual of Insight, by Mahasi Sayadaw.