June 13 - 15, 2025

Registration opens May 28 and closes June 11
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Friday PM - June 13 ||  5-7pm Pacific / 8-10pm Eastern
How to Work with Pain

Leader: Shinzen Young
Type of Program: Special Offering
Prerequisites: Some familiarity with the See, Hear, Feel Family of techniques (Just See, Just Hear, Just Feel, SHF)
Fee: $10 per person 

In order to work meditatively with pain, it is absolutely essential to be clear about two things: the ultimate goal of such work and the specific sensory categories involved.

The goal is twofold:

  • Reducing the perception of suffering due to pain.

  • Discovering the “taste of purification” within pain.

This goal can be achieved by bringing a critical mass of clarity and equanimity to pain and pain-related phenomena.

Clarity initially involves keeping track of sensory categories. At a deeper level, clarity becomes a kind of intense and continuous self-knowing, a knowing that seeps into and through the crevices of each sensory strand, dissolving its somethingness…a knowing in the Biblical sense.

Equanimity means maintaining an attitude of gentle matter-of-factness. Equanimity sounds like a “mental thing”, but at the deepest level it becomes a habit within all sensory circuits - visual, auditory or somatic. Equanimity is to the flow of sensation in the body as conductance is to the flow of electricity in a wire.

In this session, using unified mindfulness techniques, these formulas will become more understandable:

  • Suffering = Pain x Resistance

  • Taste of Purification = Pain x Equanimity

In preparation for this program, please:

Saturday AM - June 14  ||  5-9am Pacific / 8am-12pm Eastern
Focus on Rest

Leader: Shinzen Young 
Type of Program: Foundations
Prerequisites: None
Fee: $20 per person

Learn how to find/create pleasant restful states in all three sensory systems: visual, auditory, and somatic.

If you say “meditation” to the average person, they will probably get the mental image of someone sitting cross-legged on the floor trying to mellow out and release stress. Many – perhaps even most – traditional forms of meditation involve focusing on such simple, soothing experiences. There is a good reason for that. It creates a positive feedback loop; the more you concentrate on soothing rest, the more soothing it becomes, thereby motivating you to concentrate even more. This positive learning loop creates snowballing growth in your concentration power.

Restful states are frequently present in daily life, but most people fail to notice and enjoy them because they have neither the concepts nor the vocabulary needed to recognize them. This program will change that.

In preparation for this program, please

Saturday PM - June 14  ||  10am-2pm Pacific / 1-5pm Eastern
Response Challenge

Leader: Shinzen Young 
Type of Program: Accelerator
Prerequisites: Previous participation in a 'Foundations' home practice program that offered at least one mindfulness technique.
Fee: $20 per person 

Response Challenge is a systematic and efficient way to train yourself to remain mindful in daily life.

People often report that they don’t get much emotional body sensation or visual thought during periods of formal practice. On the other hand, emotional body sensation and visual thinking are often activated by life situations. But when that happens, we usually have to take care of the life situation. Handling life situation requires time and energy, so it may be difficult to remain deeply mindful while taking care of business, especially if that business is emotionally charged.

So how can we train ourselves to be in our deepest state through the whole range of emotional flavors and thought patterns that come up in our daily life? One answer is Response Challenge. During Response Challenge, you control the type, intensity, and duration of stimulus you’d like to work with. Also, there’s no real life situation you need to respond to. So you can direct all your energy to reacting mindfully. As a result of this training, when things suddenly come up in daily life, you’ll find that you automatically go into a mindful response. This will reduce your suffering in unpleasant situations, increase your fulfillment in pleasant situations, and foster more effective behavior in all situations.

The basic structure of Response Challenge is simple. You expose yourself to one or a combination of: sight, sound, or physical type body sensation. The stimulus might create a certain type of pleasant reactions (love, joy, interest…) or a certain type of unpleasant reaction (anger, fear, sadness, shame…). You can vary the type, intensity, duration, and frequency of the stimulation. It’s like weight training. You work against an edge but don’t overload yourself.

During and between the stimuli you have chosen, you apply a formal technique. The technique could involve turning toward your thoughts and emotions or it can involve turning away from your thoughts and emotions. You can turn towards the thoughts and emotions by using one of the techniques from the Focus In family. You can turn away from the thoughts and emotions using Focus Out, Focus on Rest, Focus on Flow, or Nurture Positive.

In preparation for this program, please:

  • Think ahead and prepare access to the stimuli you will use during this program. Most people find listening to sound from the TV/Internet with eyes closed to be the easiest way to do Response Challenge, but there are many other possibilities. You can trigger things through sight from the TV/Internet with the sound off, or through physical body sensations from a hot tub, workout, yoga, etc. See what patterns are interesting and productive for you. Consider having a timer nearby to stay on schedule.

  • Review what you’d like from Five Ways to Know Yourself manual 

Sunday AM - June 15 ||  8am-12pm Pacific / 11am-3pm Eastern
Exploring Spaciousness

Leader: Shinzen Young 
Type of Program: Special Theme
Prerequisites: Previous experience with See Rest, Hear Rest and Feel Rest
Fee: $20 per person

In Unified Mindfulness, one way to explore transcendence of form is to work with the theme of spaciousness. This involves learning to find the openness that may surround a sensory experience and a thinness that may pervade it. Those qualities are intrinsically rewarding and can also be helpful for dissipating intense experiences, soothing spasmodic kriyas, and so forth. At the deepest level, they can be an aid to the main transcendent theme in Unified Mindfulness, which is coming in contact with the primordial perfection of expansion and contraction.

Many Unified Mindfulness focus options represent simplifications, reworkings or generalizations of traditional techniques. Focus In is a streamlined generalization of the Five Aggregate paradigm. Focus Out is a reworking of the Zen “Merge With It” strategy. Spaciousness represents a reformulation of certain themes that appear in the Dzogchen practice of Tibet, and the jhana practice of early Buddhism. But in the Unified Mindfulness system, those themes are mounted within the framework of Noting, resulting in what might be referred to as a “Tibeto-Burmese” fusion practice.

In preparation for this program, please:

Sunday PM - June 15  ||  1-5pm Pacific / 4-8pm Eastern
Positivity Training

Leader: Shinzen Young 
Type of Program: Deepening
Prerequisites: Previous experience with the techniques of See Good, Hear Good, Feel Good and Be Good
Fee: $20 per person

In this program, we’ll practice to deepen the “Nurture Positivity” techniques from ULTRA. You’ll work with the four techniques that allow you to create, maintain, and project positivity:

  • See Good – you visualize something positive.

  • Hear Good – you repeat a positive mindful mantra in mental talk space.

  • Feel Good - you generate positive emotion in your body.

  • Be Good – all three elements are involved.

When you deepen your skills with Nurturing Positivity practice, you can selectively attend to positive emotion, rational thought, positive behaviors, or archetypal ideals. This will help you to refine your personhood and be of service to others. It dramatically changes the way you relate to the world…and the way that the world relates to you!

In preparation for this program, please: