Four-Day New Year’s Retreat with Wayne Coger (in-person and online)

Wayne Coger has led retreats since 2001. He worked with Toni Packer for more than 30 years, and has been a staff member of the Center since 1983, currently serving as administrator. Previously, he studied at the Rochester Zen Center. Wayne writes:

“The essence of meditation is, to this person, being quietly with whatever presents itself—being here. This “being with” is totally inclusive: sensing the breath, the pulse and movements of the body, sounds that are noticed and physical sensations—nothing excluded, nothing judged as trivial or unimportant.

This noticing also includes thoughts and emotions, even the unpleasant thoughts and the unwanted emotions! Is it possible to meet these arisings and fallings with innocence and fresh interest–without judging oneself or ones’ thoughts as either good or bad? This is an opportunity to discover how thought and emotion drive and envelop us—and how, in stillness and quiet, these thoughts can begin to fall away, on their own.

It is an amazing and wonderful thing to be in silent retreat, to be with oneself and each other in the supportive energy of awareness. Might self-concern, in the light and warmth of this awareness, begin to atrophy, to fall away? I honestly don’t know, but in the spaciousness of not-knowing there is an invitation to newness and  possibility.”