'A Life Well Lived' - A Series of Dialogue Retreat Days

A Life Well Lived - A series of Dialogue Retreat Days

The Buddha’s teachings offer practical guidance on how to actively cultivate a life that leads towards greater freedom, wellbeing and happiness for ourselves and others.

In this series of three daylong retreats, we will take time in silence and relational meditation (Insight Dialogue*) to investigate the role that Sila (ethics), Samadhi (absorption) and Panna (wisdom) play in cultivating a life well lived.

*Insight Dialogue (ID) is a relational meditation practice for developing awareness and wisdom. It is designed to help us awaken together and integrate our understanding of Dharma teachings in a direct and immediate way.

Supported by six Insight Dialogue guidelines, we bring kind awareness right into the heart of speaking and listening, often in pairs. Establishing these guidelines helps us to deepen our meditation while contemplating the Dharma together, allowing for experiential insight into the teachings. ID supports the weaving of a vibrant community of Dharma friendship as we collaborate in the awakening process together.

We meditate together, recognising and unbinding the relational knots that cause suffering in our lives. In ID practice we engage with the buddha's teachings experientially, accessing their relevance to our wider lives.

Rosalie Dores is an Insight Dialogue Retreat Teacher. She has practiced meditation and yoga since 1992. Her dharma roots are within the Vipassana, Theravada, Insight Meditation traditions and Insight Dialogue.

Rosalie is dedicated to offering teachings that engage at the interface between ancient wisdom and the challenges of our modern world. She recognises that Insight Dialogue addresses the urgent need for a meditative practice that incorporates the social and interpersonal domains of human experience as intrinsic to awakening.

She co-teaches courses and workshops dedicated to raising awareness about climate and social justice.

Rosalie's website is https://optimalliving.co.uk/ if you'd like to attend future events with her

Brent Beresford’s (they/them) greatest teachers are their children, showing them how unreasonable their expectations are, and encouraging the practice of relationship and community. Their work has been in engaging the power of relationship, accompanying individuals and groups since 2002. They have endeavoured to transmit teachings of Dhamma in various forms since 2013, through mindfulness-based approaches and the practice of Insight Dialogue. Brent aspires to lean into the darker places, finding “how the dark too blooms and sings.” A person of mixed racial heritage, they also identify as gender nonconforming.

Brent is inspired to explore the living Dhamma with folks. Taking the large perspectives allowed through Dhamma, these must break down the rigidity found in colonized and patriarchal values, as well as integrate the ways we understand trauma to impact the nervous systems, both individual and collective. Their work as a psychologist, integrating Somatic Experiencing, greatly influences these aspirations. Brent is in-training to become an Insight Dialogue teacher under the mentorship of Phyllis Hicks, Beth Faria, and Jan Surrey.