Insight Dialogue six-night retreat - August 2025

The Two Wings to Awakening: Wisdom and Compassion

A six-night retreat weaving together silent and relational insight meditation practice
This retreat offers a rare opportunity to bring together two complementary practices: silent insight (vipassanā) meditation and Insight Dialogue, a relational meditation practice that involves mindful speaking and listening together in pairs or small groups.

We will combine both these powerful approaches to explore and strengthen the two wings of awakening: wisdom and compassion. Wisdom or insight helps us to understand the causes of unsatisfactoriness, stress, distress, and suffering, and compassion, together with its sister qualities of kindness, appreciative joy, and equanimity, offers the nourishment and support to experience increasingly deep freedom of heart and mind.

The peaceful, natural beauty of Sangsurya Retreat Centre in Byron Bay provides an ideal setting for both quiet reflection and shared contemplation, with warm, inviting spaces perfect for winter retreats.

The retreat schedule will offer a balance of guided and silent meditation in the mornings, relational practice in the afternoons, and dharma talks with evening meditation sessions to close the day.

Teachers: The retreat will be co-taught by Jill Shepherd, guiding teacher of Auckland Insight in New Zealand, and Blue Mountains Insight Dialogue teacher Elizabeth Faria.

For more information about the practice of Insight Dialogue, please see

https://insightdialogue.org/relational-practices/insight-dialogue/

Experience level: This retreat is best suited to people who have done at least one previous residential insight meditation retreat of two days or longer, but prior Insight Dialogue experience is not required.