Taste the Pure Sky of Your True Heart

The St Joseph’s Center
64 MacKillop Drive
Baulkham Hills
New South Wales 2153
Australia
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You can’t taste the word “apple”, you have to bite into it.

The pure sky of your true heart that is your essential nature can never be truly tasted until you’re willing to bite into, fully welcome, and be with your moment-to-moment experience.

Come on retreat and taste the Pure Sky of your True Heart where we meet in the field that lies beyond right, wrong, judgment, comparison, and separation. During retreat, you are invited to experience your innate wholeness that is awake, grounded, authentic, wise, and alive. As you open yourself to your True Heart Essence, you open to healing all the wounds that otherwise bind and contract your heart, which otherwise prevent you from truly feeling and being love.

Time and again, past retreatants report they have experienced this as a true heartfelt coming home to themselves that has opened the door to the unexpected—to delight, wonder, awe, and self-compassion and loving presence.

This silent retreat includes daily periods of meditation, BodySensing hatha yoga, BreathSensing prāṇāyāma, iRest yoga nidra, community gathering, periods of self-inquiry and silent contemplation, and the freedom to awaken and embody who you truly are.

As Buddha said, we need three things for awakening: Teacher, Teachings and Community. Retreat is your opportunity to gather with like-minded practitioners in a safe container that supports deep contemplation and self-inquiry and takes you into the deep stillness of the sky of your True Heart.

Whether you are new to meditation, or are an advanced practitioner, this retreat will enhance your practice of meditation into being a way of enlightened living in daily life.

Only when you are willing to live the pure sky of your true heart essence will you and the world be at peace.

I look forward to our time together, sharing the deep stillness and ease of being and what lies beyond, the mystery that interconnects us all.

Richard Miller

On silent retreat you’ll engage in BodySensing and BreathSensing to strengthen your sensitivity and ability to somatically embody stillness, ease and calm. You’ll have the opportunity to steep in guided meditations and self-inquiry that point the way to the recognition of your Essential Nature, and help you to navigate challenging emotions, thoughts, and perceptions that otherwise may impede the recognition of your natural, awakened state of nondual presence.

Living your nondual presence invites effortless living—where you live in harmony with and as Essential Nature, the underlying intelligence that is your true heart. Here you live the paradox of being a personal and unique expression that is not separate from the universal Mystery that has given birth to you and to everything, everywhere. Here you live your true destiny as love itself, where meditation is no longer something you do, but the way of living life.

Learn the Core Principles of Meditation
During silent retreat you engage practices and principles that enable you to proactively respond to every circumstance in your life with actions that feel harmonious, appropriate, and right to whatever life presents. Embodying these principles and practices helps you to build a strong foundation on and off the mat. This supports you in building a strong relationship with yourself, others, and the world around you, at home, at work, and at play.

Learn To Navigate Emotions and Reactivity To Foster Peace
Your sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts are ever-changing. During retreat, you can recognize these ever-changing movements as messengers that help you respond to every situation in your life, which enables you to feel deeply connected and in harmony with yourself and the world around you.

Learning to respond, rather than react opens you to new insights and possibilities to overcome past conditioning, while building a solid foundation for the advanced practices of meditation that will be showcased during the silent retreat.

Unchanging joy, peace, compassion, loving kindness, resiliency, and wellbeing exist alongside, and independent of any achievement or changing states of your body, mind, or senses. Meditation doesn’t create these qualities. Rather, it unearths them as anchors that enable you to feel solidly grounded in unchanging wellbeing, no matter the ever-changing circumstances of your life. Please join iRest Founder, Richard Miller and Senior iRest Trainer, Stephanie Lopez, and a community of like-minded practitioners in returning to source through these precious depth nondual teachings of meditation.

Topics covered on retreat include:

• The 38-stage map of nondual meditation
• The four great turns of awakening
• Core practices of meditation
• The role of intention and inner resource
• The role of the six senses and mind that support feeling separate
• The role of the 7th sense that knows no separation
• Your innate ground of unchanging Wholeness and Wellbeing
• Practices of attention, concentration, being, and awareness that deepen meditative absorption
• Working through compulsive thinking and emotional reactivity
• How to open to insight and infinite possibility
• Practices that nourish openness and heart-centered Presence
• How to work with emerging psychic material on and off your mat
• The four internal needs that enable you to meet, welcome, and respond to each moment
• Six practices for proactively responding to sensations, emotions, and cognitions
• Opposites of sensation, emotion, and cognition that lead to transformative insight
• Essential qualities of compassion, joy, equanimity, and loving kindness
• The yoga of restful, wakeful sleep and lucid dreaming

During this silent retreat you’ll engage in extended periods of meditation, BodySensing, BreathSensing, iRest Yoga Nidra, self-inquiry, co-meditation, and engaged dialogue; practices that nourish inner stillness, support psychological integration, and spiritual awakening at all levels of body, mind, and spirit.