2025 Deerhaven Retreat Recordings
2025 Deerhaven Retreat Review
It has been the policy of the Orlando Insight Meditation Group to dedicate a meeting following a significant retreat experience to allow those who attended a retreat to “think out loud” about their experience in front of a supportive audience. This provides an opportunity for those talking to “connect the dots” about the experience, as well as informing and inspiring others to consider attending a retreat. This talk is exceptional, as several participants reviewed the Deerhaven retreat, while another person, Ashley, who attended a retreat organized through the Goenka tradition of body scanning practices, shared her experience.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:46 — 53.8MB)
2025 Deerhaven Retreat 55 Minute Body Scan Contemplation
This recording was made during the retreat to enhance vipassana meditation practice.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:20 — 50.7MB)
2025 Deerhaven Retreat 7th Night Nurturing Awakening at Home
This final Dharma talk of the retreat provides suggestions for developing the themes and practices presented during the retreat at home, including cultivating a lifestyle that counters any cultural conditioning that reinforces unnecessary distress and confusion.
Here are the notes prepared for this talk: NURTURING AWAKENING AT HOME
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:13:22 — 67.2MB)
2025 Deerhaven Retreat 6th Night–Integration and Liberation
During this talk, Peter describes how applying the principles and practices associated with being “diligent, mindful, clearly knowing” presented earlier in the retreat supports a beneficial progression from self-state conflict through self-state integration towards self-state liberation. Self-state conflict represents the inescapable difference between how the selfing process idealizes oneself, others and the world and what actually happens, creating ongoing distress and confusion. Self-state integration represents the way that the diligent cultivation of vipassana supports a more realistic and adaptable way of living. This creates the basis for the cultivation of elf-state liberation, which develops the capacity for full Awakening.
Here are the notes prepared for this talk: INTEGRATING AND LIBERATING THE SELF
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:41 — 69.3MB)
2025 Deerhaven Retreat 5th Night–Dependent Origination
This Buddhist concept describes how our subjective experience of self hood is created multiple times per second. Contemplating this provides a way to “deconstruct” the belief that there is an enduring/autonomous self, and this understanding supports the process of Awakening. Peter uses a different term than Dependent Origination–he calls it “Contingent Provisional Emergence” which provides a more contemporary psychological understanding regarding how the process operates.
Here are the notes prepared for this talk: Deerhaven 2025 Seven Awakening Factors
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:20:40 — 73.9MB)
2025 Deerhaven Retreat 4th Night-The Awakening Factors
The 7 Awakening Factors represent those wholesome qualities of mind developed for cultivating the process of Awakening. During this talk, Peter explains how they operate and various ways to nurture their maturation.
Here are the notes prepared for this talk: Deerhaven 2025 Seven Awakening Factors
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38:51 — 90.5MB)
2025 Deerhaven 3rd Night–Cultivating a Concentrated and Tranquil Mind
During this talk, Peter describes the development of Access Concentration, the quality of consciousness that is not affected by the Hindrances. This is cultivated through developing the procedure of aiming/sustaining attention intentionally to develop stability and tranquility in the mind, preparing for the practicing vipassana, insight into the conditioned nature of the mind.
Here are the notes prepared for this talk: Unifying A Dull And Distracted Mind
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:49 — 56.6MB)
2025 Deerhaven 2nd Night Dharma Talk–Overcoming the Hindrances
During this talk, Peter reviews the 5 Hindrances, which he describes as “energy dumps”–setting them aside frees up energy for further development of the 7 Awakening Factors, creating more opportunities to liberate the mind from dukkha, the distress and confusion resulting from the action of the Hindrances.
Here are the notes prepared for this talk: The Five Hindrances
The next evening’s discussion recording focuses on how the cultivation of concentration and tranquility overcomes distractedness, agitation and dullness in the mind, preparing for the cultivation of the Awakening Factors
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:13:08 — 67.0MB)
2025 Deerhaven Retreat 1st Night Dharma Talk
During this talk, Peter refers to the main themes of the retreat a a refuge from the stress of these times and the importance of developing “diligence, mindfulness and the intention to clearly know how to awaken the mind from greed, hatred and delusion. He emphasizes that Awakening rather than Enlightenment is a better term to use for the ultimate goal of this way of living, in that we “wake up” from craving and clinging every time attention is brought back to breath awareness from the distress and confusion that is experienced as the result of the dominance created by one or more of the 5 Hindrances.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:24 — 36.1MB)
