Spirit Rock Meditation Center

Spirit Rock is an insight meditation centre founded by Jack Kornfield and others in the 1980s, on 411 acres of oak woodland in the San Geronimo Valley of West Marin County, California, about 45 minutes north-west of San Francisco and an hour west of Oakland. It grew from a few portable trailers in a meadow into a campus with two main meditation halls and a dining hall. The upper campus, where most silent retreats take place, has a meditation hall, two walking meditation halls and four two-storey residence halls with single and double rooms for 96 retreatants. The lower campus holds the Community Meditation Center, used for classes and gatherings, and a bookstore. Its practice is rooted in the Pāli discourses and draws on the Burmese vipassanā lineage and on the Thai Forest tradition of Ajahn Chah, Kornfield's root teacher. It offers residential silent retreats of one day to two months as well as daylongs, drop-in groups, classes and longer study and training programmes, on site and online. Meals are vegetarian. Retreats carry fees, and Spirit Rock offers financial assistance or scholarships to people for whom cost is an obstacle. It does not offer self-retreats. From the San Rafael Transit Center, 8.4 miles away, the daily West Marin Stage route 68 bus will stop at the entrance gate on request.

How to apply

Choose a retreat on the centre's own website and register there. IMS takes a deposit on registration and offers sliding-scale rates and scholarships.

What is taught here

Insight meditation is the English name for vipassanā, clear attention to the present: how IMS, Spirit Rock and Gaia House teach it, its roots and fees. Read about Insight Meditation (West).