The Pop-UP School 2024 Retreat Series

Modern meditation practices are based on either (western style) conceptual or (eastern style) phenomenological analytic exercises. Analysis means deconstructing ordinary experience in order to isolate the variables. Analysis inevitably leads to fragmentation of experience into either abstract, psychological or phenomenological parts. We are then left to piece the parts together by constructing an over-arching metaphysics. In this retreat we practice the art of attending to experience as a whole. This is a delicate empirical approach that was directly explored and philosophically developed by the American pragmatists.

Attending enables you to obtain the natural state even in situations that are precarious or riveting and deepens your understanding of the wisdom that is inherent in the natural state.

In the true state of natural abiding, the body is not merely a basis. It is also the wisdom, virtue, and fruition of life itself. Fruition is abiding in the body, postures and gestures as a whole. This experience leaves us open to reality as it is, and the freedom of spacious choice. The feeling of abiding in the natural state is not a transcendent idea, or an arrival. It is a return to the direct experience of the limitless aliveness of the body as undifferentiated awareness.