Consider, that you can take the practice wherever you go.
Standing Mediatation is one of the four mediative postures.
The others being sitting, lying & walking.
Presently in various locations in the Bega valley on the far south coast of New South Wales, Australia.
The teachings are gifted within the Buddhist tradition of dana.
In the early nineties, I travelled from Sydney up to The Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre, near Medlow Bath to attend my first Vipassana Retreat with Patrick Kearney.
It was there & on subsequent retreats with Patrick, that I learnt the Buddhist practice of both sitting & walking meditation.
When these retreats became too painful physically for me due to long hours on the cushion, around 2009, I happen to find out about yatras (read silent week-long Buddhist wilderness walks) & walked these until recently, when my knees & hips began to give way.
It was in January 2024 whilst returning to The Blue Mountains Insight Mediation Centre to “sit” a 28-day mediation retreat, again with Patrick, that the idea of starting a School specifically to encourage the practice of standing mediation came to mind.
I was standing in a paddock & had been for several hours with my eyes closed, listening to various sounds of nature, such as the songs of local birds camped out in nearby trees, being carried by the wind or the hum of hungry bees pollinating the dandelions underfoot or the clickity-clack of the Lithgow-Sydney train every 45-minutes off in the distance. It was there that I woke up to the versality, immediacy & strength of standing meditation.
All too often the self-imposed expectations of getting down onto the “cushion” & sitting in lotus position prohibits individuals from ever experiencing the benefit of a starting & maintaining a regular mediation practice.
If in some small way the School is able to introduce to others a sustainable mediation practice, it will have been a success.
The expressed intention of the Come Barefoot Meditation School is to support the practice of standing meditation in the great outdoors.
The School would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand on and the sky under which we gratefully meditate beneath.
It is upon the ancestral lands of the Djiringanj people of the Yuin Nation that we practice.
We pay respect to knowledge embedded forever within Aboriginal custodianship of Country.
We pay respect to their Elders past and present and we pay respect to other Aboriginal people present.