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DECEMBER 27, 2024 – JANUARY 1, 2025 with JOAN STAUBACH

The New Year is considered an auspicious time to practice. We offer an alternative way to spend this time of year; instead of noise, enjoy the quiet. This retreat is appropriate for practitioners from beginners to advanced.

On this retreat, focus will be on relaxing the body and mind and settling into presence. There will be instructions on observing this body mind phenomena, with openness, kindness, and compassion.  And just maybe we will settle into the greater mind.

Location: Oakwood Retreat Center
Cost: $720
Deposit: $200
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Joan Staubach is an active member and president of Tri-State Dharma. She is an experienced practitioner of Insight Meditation. She has been on over 40 week-long or longer residential retreats. She has taught and co-taught the New Years Retreat for many years, led daylong retreats, and taught numerous Insight Meditation classes. She has taken training retreats with Matthew Flickstein on Sharing the Dharma.

FEBRUARY 21-23,2025 – TRANSFIGURATION SPIRITUALITY CENTER with Mary Aubry

This weekend retreat will be held in Noble Silence and is open to beginners and experienced students alike.  The retreat will begin with dinner on Friday night and end with lunch on Sunday.  During the retreat, we will alternate periods of sitting and walking meditations, interspersed with Q&A, instructions, and Dharma talks.  The theme of the retreat will be practicing mindfulness both on and off the cushion, as well as deepening our loving kindness and compassion for all beings, including ourselves.

Mary has been practicing mindfulness meditation for over 30 years and has been a meditation teacher for 15 years.  Her teachers have included Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Leigh Brasington, Tara Brach, and Bhikkhu Analayo.  She teaches meditation retreats nationally and internationally on mindfulness, metta, concentration, and emptiness.  She moved to Columbus from the Asheville, NC area during the pandemic to be closer to family.  

Location: Transfiguration Spirituality Center - Glendale (basically Cincinnati, OH)
Cost: $240

APRIL 25-MAY 2, 2025 - OAKWOOD RETREAT CENTER with JON AARON & GULLU SINGH

Internal, External, Eternal : Being Nature Together

As our meditation practice evolves, we start to see the nature of experience-- internally and externally and our true nature.  Within the Satipatthana Sutta, the refrain continually reminds us to observe phenomena this way.  As wisdom deepens, what is discovered in this investigation?  The sutta implies freedom will be known. 
 
This retreat, held in Noble Silence, will offer an in-depth exploration of this teaching experientially within the Foundations of Mindfulness and beyond to teaching from the later traditions.

Using your inherent wisdom, observe inwardly the mind
and body and outwardly the world. Completely understand both,
as you would look through a pane of glass: from the outside
seeing in and from the inside seeing out. Inwardly, there is no
body and mind, and, outwardly, there is no world. But, although
there is no body nor mind nor world, the body and mind and the
world function in accord with one another.

From the Platform Sutta
The Sixth Zen Patriarch

Location: Oakwood Retreat Center
Total Cost: $1300
Deposit: $400
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Jon Aaron has been a teacher at New York Insight since 2006.  His principal dharma teachers have been Matthew Flickstein of The Forest Way and Kittisaro and Thanissara of The Sacred Mountain Sangha. He is a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher and Teacher Trainer and has taught over 120 cycles of the seminal curriculum.  He leads retreats in the US and in Europe.  He is the co-guiding teacher of the Makom Meditation Havurah program at the Jewish Community Center.  He is a certified Somatic Experience Practitioner® and an Accredited teacher of Mindfulness for Heath from Breathworks in the UK.  Jon is a co-founder of the MBSR Teachers Collaborative of Greater New York, and a founding member of the Global Mindfulness Collaborative.  In 2020, with his partner Upayadhi, he established  Space2Meditate.com, an online community for meditators which started in the context of the pandemic and has been thriving ever since.  JonAaron.net

Gulwinder “Gullu” Singh is a mindfulness and Dharma teacher who also practices corporate real estate law. Although he was exposed to meditation as a child, he found his own practice when, after law school, he found himself working at high-powered law firms where the job was extremely stressful.   Gullu completed the four-year Spirit Rock Meditation Center Teacher Training Program and is qualified to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.  Gullu is core faculty in the Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training and the Spirit Rock Dedicated Practitioner Program.  He is also a core teacher and board member for Sacred Mountain Sangha, a senior teacher at InsightLA, and a member of the guiding teacher’s council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.  Gullu is deeply inspired to share meditation as an antidote to stress, a path to well-being and a way to inject more sanity, compassion, and wisdom into this world.  gullusingh.com

JUNE 13-15, 2025 - TRANSFIGURATION SPIRITUALITY CENTER with Candace Strange

JULY 10-20, 2025 - OAKWOOD RETREAT CENTER with LEIGH BRASINGTON

This retreat combines the two main elements of the Buddha’s model of liberation: cultivating the meditative absorptions (jhanas), which lead to calm and clarity, and using the concentrated mind to gain insight in the nature of reality. We will not only look at the insight practices given in the famous Satipatthana Sutta, we will also delve extensively into the Buddha's teaching of the dependent co-origination (paticca-samuppada) of phenomena. This course is limited to those who have completed at least two one-week or longer silent vipassana retreats.

This will be a hybrid retreat with Leigh appearing on Zoom for the morning instructions, the evening dharma talk, and personal interviews, while the students are in residence at Oakwood Retreat Center with an on-site teacher.

Location: Oakwood Retreat Center
Total Cost: $1750
Deposit: $550
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Leigh Brasington is a teacher of insight meditation who was the senior American student of the late Venerable Ayya Khema, who authorized him to teach the jhanas. Leigh has taught them, along with other insight practices, at well over one hundred residential retreats throughout the United States and Europe. He is casual and warm, and is skilled at providing individualized instruction during retreats. Leigh is also the author of the excellent and helpful book “Right Concentration, A Practical Guide to the Jhanas”, which was published in 2015.  He also authored “Dependent Origination and Emptiness” which you can read here at sodapi.leighb.com, and Edited the book “The Path to Peace” by Ayya Khema.

August 19-24, 2025 - OAKWOOD RETREAT CENTER with KEVIN GRIFFIN and GREG PERGAMENT teaching Qigong

Buddhism and Recovery

Join us for a unique meditation retreat combining traditional Buddhist practices with recovery and Twelve Step work.  Primarily conducted in silence, the retreat focuses on insight/mindfulness meditation, with additional interactive exercises, lectures, and meetings exploring ways that Buddhism and the Steps can complement each other. Daily Qigong practice brings added benefit and energy to the retreat.

The emphasis will be on bringing mindfulness to all our activities, whether in formal meditation, movement, speaking, listening, or eating. Participants will practice Noble Silence outside of the interactive exercises and 12-Step-style meetings. All recovery paths are welcome, whether Twelve Step, Refuge Recovery, substance, process, or relationship-oriented.

The intensive nature of the retreat allows for profound personal openings, insight, and transformation. The support of the community carries us through the sometimes challenging, sometimes inspiring elements of this deep inner work.

A minimum of 30 days clean and sober is required for attendance.

Thanks to the generosity of the Hemera Foundation, Tri-State Dharma is able to offer this retreat at a greatly reduced cost.

Total Cost: $400
Deposit: $200
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Kevin Griffin is a Buddhist teacher and author known for his innovative work connecting dharma and recovery, especially through his 2004 book One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps. He is a leader of the mindful recovery movement and one of the founders of the Buddhist Recovery Network. He has been a Buddhist practitioner for over thirty-five years and a teacher for two decades. His latest book is Living Kindness: Metta Practices for the Whole of Our Lives.

Greg Pergament (Chi Kung teacher), is the author of Chi Kung and Recovery. Greg has been in recovery for over two decades and has studied and taught Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan for many years. He has an extensive background in Buddhist Vipassana meditation, is a firetender for Lakota Inipi ceremonies, and has helped facilitate many Vision Quests.

SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 3, 2025 - OAKWOOD RETREAT CENTER with ADAM STONEBRAKER

Location: Oakwood Retreat Center
Total Cost: $1225
Deposit: $350
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Adam Stonebraker has been practicing and studying meditation in various schools since 1999, and began teaching meditation, mindfulness, and yoga in 2010. He is a teacher and leadership council member with Sacred Mountain Sangha (Thanissara & Kittisaro’s teaching organization) and leads teacher trainings, retreats, and workshops internationally, in yin yoga, meditation, and mindfulness.

Adam is a graduate of Sacred Mountain Sangha’s 2-year Dharmapala Training and is a graduate and endorsed teacher with the Insight Yoga Institute. In addition, Adam earned his MA in Mindfulness Studies from Lesley University.

Adam is committed to an all-inclusive dharma, where no aspect of the human experience is left out. He has particular interest in the transformative power of the natural world, inter-faith dialogue, and the bodhisattva way of life.

OCTOBER 24-26, 2025 - TRANSFIGURATION SPIRITUALITY CENTER with JOAN STAUBACH

More information coming later.

DECEMBER 31, 2025 to JANUARY 4, 2026 - OAKWOOD RETREAT CENTER with JOAN STAUBACH

More information coming later.