Bozeman Insight Community
2025-06-12 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-06-26 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-07-17 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-07-24 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-08-07 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-08-14 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-08-21 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-08-28 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Denver) and 3 more dates | Hybrid Meeting
Thursdays, 6:30 – 8:00 pm
In person and via Zoom
Bozeman Insight Community (BIC) is a welcoming community that offers the Buddha’s priceless teachings on wisdom and compassion to all those who seek them. Centered on a commitment to personal practice we support the development and expression of our inherent wisdom and compassion for the benefit of all beings.
The program usually begins with a short teaching to introduce the practice and provide some instruction. Then there is a lightly-guided 30-minute meditation, followed by tea, Q&A, and discussion. We open and close the evening with short chants, which are provided and completely optional.
All are warmly welcome to drop in and join us. No prior experience necessary. If you’d like to talk to one of the leaders prior to attending for the first time, please email us and we’ll connect. We look forward to meeting you and welcoming you to our sangha.
When in person, service dogs, lap babies and school-age children are welcome. There are places in the room and nearby where kids can hang out or do homework. Parents can relax about any disturbance this may cause – our community is not fussy about meditation rooms being super silent (ambient noise is a chance to practice with the conditions and cultivate equanimity). We’d rather have you with us than strive for “perfect” conditions (which don’t exist).
BIC Leadership
Council Member – Sandy Kindt
Council Member – Megan Higgs
Council Member – Marilyn Raffensperger
For leader and council member bios, more information about this group, and to see program updates, please click this link to go to the BIC’s website.

Kindhearted Awareness Meditation
2025-06-17 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-06-24 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-07-01 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-07-08 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-07-15 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-07-22 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-07-29 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-08-05 10:30 - 11:30 and 7 more dates | Online Offering
BIC Drop-In Meditation
Meeting Our Lives with Kindhearted Awareness
Tuesdays
10:30 – 11:30 AM
Led by Suzanne Colón

via Zoom

This program shares the meditation practices that expand our capacity to meet life with an open, stable heart-mind. Guided meditations will vary week to week, providing an opportunity to try new practices and ways of working with life’s challenges. The four heart qualities known as the Brahma Viharas (Noble Abodes) will be cultivated with variations on ways to evoke and develop them: Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity.
Program Schedule:
10:25 – Zoom Room Opens
10:30 – 10:55 – Guided Meditation
Collective Sharing of Delights or Difficulties
Short Reading: Guidance in the Buddhist Practices of the Heart
Discussion until 11:30
Following the guided meditation, we’ll give each other the opportunity to connect, to be supported in times of difficulty, and be witnessed in times of joy. The collective “Sharing of Delights or Difficulties” is formal practice of briefly naming a sorrow or difficulty, a joy or delight, and having the group witness and resonate with each other’s experience.
No prior meditation experience is needed to attend this program. Please make every effort to arrive by 10:30.
This program is offered freely, which means this is a gift to the community, and you are encouraged to pay the gift forward to help cover costs to the degree that you can. This is a program of the Bozeman Insight Community (BIC), offered to the entire Dharma Center community and general public.

BIC Special Event: The Path of Most Resilience
2025-06-19 18:30 - 20:00 | 3810 Valley Commons Dr, #6
with nico hase
Thursday June 19
6:30 – 8 PM
Online Only!

Join the Bozeman Insight Community in welcoming nico hase who will talk on Buddhist perspectives on facing adversity. No registration necessary. All welcome!
Adversity is an inevitable part of life: from illness to loss to the moral injury that comes from witnessing injustice. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity. It keeps us engaged, calm, and energized as we continue to serve a world on fire.
nico will discuss how hyper-individualism contributes to fragility, and why community is so important for overcoming our obstacles. The session will also unpack how meditation can help us balance our hearts and minds so that we can connect with others, navigate the difficulties of shared spaces, and ultimately find resilience in the engaged sangha that our world so desperately needs.
About the teacher
nico hase lived in a monastery for six years before earning a PhD in counseling psychology and becoming an Insight Meditation teacher full time. He currently mentors mindfulness teachers, teaches online and in-person retreats, and speaks with students in one-on-one sessions. He and his beloved life partner devon are the authors of How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Buddhist Survival Guide for Modern Life. Find out more at www.devonandnicohase.com

Untangling Patterns of Reactivity
2025-06-21 10:00 - 13:00 | Online Offering
with nico hase
Saturday June 21
10 AM – 1 PM
Online Only

Even if you consider yourself the kind of person who remains calm in the face of crisis, sometimes things just get to us. If we’re not careful, we might find ourselves growing tangled in negative thought patterns. Without a dose of healthy awareness, a cycle of reactivity can deepen, leaving us feeling disconnected from what we truly feel in every moment.
The Buddhist path offers us a way to untangle the tangles and step into freedom. In this half-day online retreat, visiting teacher nico hase will offer reflections and practices that help us understand where our reactivity comes from, and how to gradually release ourselves from its grip.
Join the Bozeman Insight Community for a morning of meditation and inquiry as we walk the path together to greater freedom, connection, and space.
The session will begin with a 30-minute conversation and opening talk around the theme, followed by alternating periods of sitting and walking meditation with light guidance. We’ll conclude with a closing talk and time for questions and dialogue.

About the teacher

nico hase lived in a monastery for six years before earning a PhD in counseling psychology and becoming an Insight Meditation teacher full time. He currently mentors mindfulness teachers, teaches online and in-person retreats, and speaks with students in one-on-one sessions. He and his beloved life partner devon are the authors of How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Buddhist Survival Guide for Modern Life. Find out more at www.devonandnicohase.com

BIC Special Guest: Floyd Fantelli!
2025-07-10 18:30 - 20:00 | Online Offering
Buddhist Practice for Living and Dying: What Does It Mean?
with Floyd Fantelli
Thursday, July 10
6:30-8 PM
ONLINE ONLY

In this personal and reflective talk, Floyd explores the question at the heart of both life and death: What does it mean? Drawing on the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence, presence, and compassionate care, he shares the intimate journey of accompanying his beloved wife through her final days. Grounded in Buddhist practice, Floyd reflects on how mindfulness, the Five Daily Recollections (Remembrances), and the cultivation of loving awareness supported him in facing death—not as an end, but as part of a sacred continuum. This talk invites us to look closely at how our practice prepares us not only to die with grace, but to live with meaning, love, and clarity.

BIC Special Guest: Julie Wester
2025-07-31 18:30 - 20:00 | Hybrid Meeting
Recognizing the Sacred Feminine
with Julie Wester
Thursday, July 31
6:30-8 PM
In Person & via Zoom
Every person has a unique balance of feminine and masculine energy and wisdom. These sacred energies live in each of us in personal, human and quite ordinary ways— whatever our gender identity may be.

But we live in a world in which the energy and the wisdom of the feminine are not equally seen, valued or reflected. We are all impacted by this imbalance, as is absolutely everything in our world. We can see it in the dishonoring of the earth and the dishonoring of women. We can see it in the separation of earth and spirit, of body and mind, and in our disconnection from the natural world and from each other.
When we begin to consciously recognize and honor the sacred feminine energies in ourselves and in each other, we become part of the healing and rebalancing of our world.

Bozeman Insight Community has invited Julie Wester to speak to us about her book, Recognizing the Sacred Feminine: Stories and Meditations for the Rebalancing of Our World, available from Country Bookshelf on Main Street in Bozeman. Also available in paperback and ebook from Amazon.com
About the Teacher

Julie Wester is a Spirit Rock Meditation Center Teacher Emerita. For 30 years, beginning in 1985, she supported women to remember and trust their innate wisdom in a world that does not equally reflect feminine wisdom and sacredness. Her teachers are now the vast space and open skies of Montana.
