OTHER PROGRAMS

Intensive meditation retreats
These retreats are taught by highly experienced teachers. They will allow you to deepen you personal practice with the guidance of a teacher.

Silent Vipassana Retreat with Visu
From Monday november 6th to Monday November 20 2010
at la salindre in the Cévennes. See www.lasalindre.eu

Vipassana or Insight meditation is the direct and clear seeing into the true nature of mental and physical phenomena. It involves the application of mindfulness to closely observe our mind and body processes during formal sitting and walking meditation and in all other activities.

With practice we gain calm and peace as well as insight into our mental conditioning, behavioural patterns and habits. We learn how to cultivate, sustain and strengthen wholesome and joyful states of mind while diminishing the unwholesome and painful.

We will develop a skillful approach and attitude that is conducive to peace, joy and happiness in all aspects of our daily life.

Our practice is based on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness. These are Body, Feelings, Consciousness or Mind States, and Phenomena. We will learn how to observe and investigate all these in our direct and immediate experience.

In due course we will come to understand "The Three Marks of Existence" - Impermanence, Suffering/Unsatisfactoriness, and Not-Self.

The deep and profound understanding of these fundamental truths will lead to the liberation of the mind from all clinging and delusion that lie at the root of all suffering. Peace, release and happiness are the fruits of the practice.

Vipassana promotes true happiness, fulfillment and freedom in life while leading the practitioner to the ultimate and highest peace and happiness, the end of all craving/greed/attachment, hatred/anger/aversion and ignorance/delusion.

The program

We wake up at 5.30am and spend the day doing walking and sitting meditation. The teacher will give precise instructions and guidance. The emphasis is on maintaining peacefulness and mindfulness during the meditation and in all activities, including meal times, washing, going to the toilet, etc. In addition we will devote an hour a day doing lovingkindness meditation, radiating thoughts of goodwill towards all beings. There will be a Talk every evening for an hour where the teacher will further explain and clarify the practice. Participants will have a personal interview of 15 minutes daily with the teacher to report their experiences and receive further guidance and encouragement. Noble silence is generally maintained throughout the day so as to facilitate the development of deep inner calm and peace. We will retire each day around 9.45pm.

This retreat is in French & English.

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The teacher

Visu (shortened from his full Pali name Visuddhacara) has been practising the Dhamma and meditation since 1982. He was born in Penang , Malaysia , in 1953. He was a journalist for 12 years and a Buddhist monk for 17 years before he returned to the lay life in 2003. He has studied with several meditation masters, notably Sayadaw U Pandita, Sayadaw U Lakkhana, Sayadaw U Jatila and Ven Sujiva. He is married and has leads retreats in Asia and Europe . He is the author of several books including “Curbing Anger Spreading Love,” “Drinking Tea Living Life: Applying Mindfulness in Everyday Life and Critical Times”, “Loving and Dying” and “Hello with love and other meditations.”

Visu’s emphasis in his teaching is on the integration of the practice in everyday life while striving for the ultimate release of enlightenment. He stresses the importance of cultivating lovingkindness, joy and happiness in the present moment while on our journey.

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Below an interesting excerpt from an article by Rick Hanson in the American Insight Journal 2009 Summer Issue:

(Rick Hanson, PhD began meditating in 1974 and has practiced in several traditions. A neuropsychologist, writer, and teacher, he co-founded the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and edits the Wise Brain Bulletin. First author of ‘Mother Nurture’ (Penguin, 2002), his latest book is ‘Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom’ (with Rick Mendius, MD). This article is based on a course he taught at BCBS (Barre Centre of Buddhist Studies, Massacchussetts) in April 2009.

Mind Changing Brain Changing Mind:
The Dharma and Neuroscience

by Rick Hanson

(below is an excerpt – the whole article can be obtained from this website: http://www.dharma.org/ims/ai_news_newsletter.html)

Brain and body benefits of meditation

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a brain region that is ground zero for a lot of very important functions. For one, it's the part of the brain that manages what's called "effortful attention," which is basically paying attention in a deliberate way. That sounds like meditation.

The ACC is the part of the brain we use for mindfulness in all four postures, not just seated, but walking, lying, and standing. It's also the main source of the focused attention we use for talking, and doing other activities that call for deliberate focus. Your cingulate cortex tends to get thicker to the degree you meditate.

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Another major Richard Davidson finding is that people become increasingly happy as they meditate—positive emotions become more prevalent, broadly defined. There's a greater asymmetry of activation, left front to right frontal. To illustrate this with stroke patients, people with a stroke in the right frontal region tend to become kind of mellow. Maybe they can't walk well, but they're often relatively serene about it. But if they have a stroke in the left frontal region, they're a lot more likely to be grouchy and grumpy. Why is that? Because the left frontal region is involved in dampening, inhibiting negative emotional activity, whereas the right frontal region tends to promote negative emotional activity. In the wild, there's a lot of survival value to negative emotional activity; right hemisphere activation—which tracks the spatial environment from whichmost threats originate in the wild—primes you for dealing with threats: in other words, primes you for aversion, for what are called avoidance behaviors, namely fight, flight, freeze, appease. Maybe sometimes those behaviors are useful; in our evolutionary history, they certainly promoted survival and passing on genes. But today, in different settings and with different aims (like spiritual practice), it's great to have relatively strong left frontal activation.

For many people, it's easy to feel when they feel, or think when they think, but to bring mental clarity into being upset, or to warm up cold cognition with heartfelt emotion, is hard. The capacity to do that is centered in the anterior cingulated cortex. So, for example, doing things like compassion meditation, particularly mingling thoughts and feelings of compassion together, stimulates the ACC and therefore strengthens it; you're firing those neurons and therefore you're wiring those neurons.

Another region that gets thicker with meditation is called the insula. If you strengthen a part of the brain through meditation, you get to reap those rewards for other uses. For example, the insula is crucial for one of the three main aspects of empathy: visceral resonance with the feelings of another person (the other two aspects are simulating inside yourself the actions [“mirror systems”] and the thoughts/wishes/psychodynamics

[“theory of mind”] of others). To the extent that we're in touch with own inner being, including our gut feelings—and this degree of in-touchness correlates with the activity of the insula—we become more able to be empathic with others.

True compassion, true loving kindness, requires empathy. I've known people who are sort of generically compassionate, and generically kind, but aren't actually moved by the inner state of the other person. That's not the real deal. So it's foundational to strengthen your empathy. I can tell you from twenty-seven years of marriage, empathy's a good thing! (And there are of course lots of important places for empathy outside of marriage.) Also, if you understand how to be empathic yourself, you understand better how to ask for it from others.

Meditation is probably the most researched mental activity in terms of neural impact. We know, for example, that meditators have less cortical thinning with aging. As I see more gray hairs on my head every year I appreciate the fact that one of the great ways to promote mental faculties well into old age is through contemplative practice. One exploratory study has shown a correlation of about a fifteen per cent reduction in Alzheimer's symptoms if a person has a religious background (there was only one Buddhist in the sample, and any kind of religious activity counted, but the study is still suggestive). That reduction of fifteen percent is about as much as the best current medication can do for Alzheimer's.

In another example, Richard Davidson did a very interesting study with people in a high tech company. He had some of them do daily meditation. After just six weeks, the people who meditated had stronger immune systems. They fought off a flu virus more effectively than people who hadn't meditated.

So meditation benefits us through multiple pathways. Parasympathetic activation ("rest and-digest")—relaxation, in other words—is very supportive of immune system functioning, whereas sympathetic activation ("fight-or-flight") suppresses immune function. Chronic stress exposes us to illness to a marked degree. Sleepy meditating is better than no meditation in terms of parasympathetic activation, or dampening sympathetic arousal (wakeful meditation is usually best of all). We can get attached to and even righteous about one specific method, whereas actualy meditation has a lot of important general effects not specific to any particular method.