On Thursday, July 30th from 6:30-8PM, the Bozeman Insight Community will host Shannon Smith via Zoom. Over the last decade Shannon has been sitting and studying in the Theravada tradition integrating Dharma Practice and addiction recovery practices resulting in more than 25 years of sobriety. In 2014, she stepped out of a long and successful career to have her first son and to become a Co-Founder to a Buddhist-based Recovery Treatment Center working with recovering addicts and their families. During this time, she also graduated from a four-year teacher training program with Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. Shannon has taught meditation, led Recovery groups and co-facilitated Year-to-Live groups since 2008. She founded the Secular Dharma Foundation with Dave Smith.
Category Archives: Insight
Getting Familiar with the Flavors of Dukkha
Bozeman Insight Community welcomes Ann Brand (in person!) to the Thursday May 7 sangha meeting from 6:30 to 8 PM. Please join us!
Ann Brand is a mindfulness teacher, facilitator, and mentor based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Since receiving her mindfulness teacher training in 2014, Ann has brought the practice of mindfulness to both K-12 and higher education and her community in Western Wisconsin. In 2019, Ann started mentoring with Dave Smith, rooting her practice and study in Theravada Buddhism and Secular Dharma. Ann mentors meditation students one-on-one, integrating Insight meditation practices, concepts from early Buddhist teachings, and contemplative Christian practices to encourage individuals in cultivating a practice that supports flourishing, skillfulness, and ease.
Breaking the First Fetter: Seeing Through the Self-Illusion
With Brittany and James Nepenthe, Saturday March 28, 9 AM-12:30 PM. Zoom only!
This half-day workshop offers practical tools for directly investigating the sense of self. Through guided inquiry and experiential exercises, participants will learn how to look closely at present-moment experience and examine whether a separate self can actually be found. The emphasis is on active investigation rather than philosophy, supporting clear seeing in everyday life.
Brittany & James Nepenthe are dharma practitioners specializing in the intersection of relationship as spiritual path, transcendent awakening, and trauma healing. With years of extensive silent retreat experience, they are committed to deep realization in the midst of ordinary life. As a married couple and expectant parents, they are devoted to awakening as householders, with no part of life excluded from the path.
Buddhist Practice for Living and Dying: What Does It Mean?
The Bozeman Insight Community welcomes Floyd Fantelli as a guest speaker via Zoom on Thursday July 10 from 6:30 to 8 pm.
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.
Untangling Patterns of Reactivity
Join the Bozeman Insight Community for a half-day online retreat with guest speaker nico hase.
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 on Saturday June 21 from 10 AM to 1 PM, 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.
We invite you 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.
Speaker bio: 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
The Path of Most Resilience: Buddhist Perspectives on Facing Adversity
Bozeman Insight Community invites you to join an evening with guest speaker, nico hase. Online, Thursday June 19, 6:30-8 PM.
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.
In this evening gathering with nico hase, co-author of How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Buddhist Survival Guide for Modern Life, we will explore teachings and practices that contribute to resilience. 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.
Join us for an intimate evening of stories, reflections, and meditations about how Buddhist teachings and practices contribute to our resilience in the face of life’s challenges.
No registration necessary.
The Noble Search with Chaim Bryski
Saturday, March 15 from 11 AM – 4:30 PM
While myths and legends abound surrounding the life of the historical Buddha (Pāli: Siddhattha Gotama; Skt: Siddhārtha Gautama), much of the traditional folklore began appearing only centuries after the Buddha’s lifetime. Yet the earliest Buddhist discourses (as collected in the Pāli Canon and its Chinese and Sanskrit parallels), focused as they are on the content of his teachings, contain no comprehensive biography of the Buddha.
Rather, scattered throughout these many thousands of discourses, we find numerous snippets of autobiographical narrative attributed to the Buddha himself. In these first-person accounts, often shared with his audiences for didactic purposes, the Buddha recounts a number of his own early-life experiences on his path to awakening, as a means of imparting some of the hard-won lessons and insights he gained over the course of his personal struggles and breakthroughs.
During this daylong study and practice program, we will examine a number of these ancient texts, explore their practical lessons and insights, and discuss and reflect upon their relevance and application to our own lives.
To enhance our exploration of the texts, the day will also incorporate short dharma talks and guided meditation practices, as well as periods of group discussion, peer-based dialogue, and personal reflection.
*Please note that all participants will receive a collection of the relevant texts we will be exploring. Hard copies of the material will be available to those attending in-person at the Bozeman Dharma Center, while those joining online will receive a digital PDF copy via email.
The Way of Meditative Warriorship
Join the Bozeman Insight Community on Saturday February 1 from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for an online half-day retreat with visiting teacher James Frank titled, “The Way of Meditative Warriorship.”
The uncertainty of these times calls for a commitment to live the truth and love this world yearns for. During this half-day retreat, we will explore the foundations of living a heart-centered and wakeful life. By emphasizing stillness and relaxation, we will support the natural and fearless qualities of the heart that characterize meditative warriorship. This period will involve sitting, walking, and relational practices that deepen a felt sense of belonging and inspiration for the journey ahead.
James Nepenthe Frank is a meditation teacher and somatic healing practitioner. He began practice as a young child in the Plum Village Tradition with Thich Nhat Hanh and began formally sitting in the Western Insight tradition at the age of 15. While dedicating years of his life to silent retreat, he serves a commitment to live this path in everyday life. He began teaching at the invitation of his teacher, Rodney Smith. He lives in Lincoln, Vermont.
Cultivating Emotional Balance
Dave Smith will be offering an online workshop on Cultivating Emotional Balance on Saturday November 23 from 9 am to noon.
Emotions lead us to our greatest joys and most painful sorrows. They also provide the inspiration for what is most meaningful in our lives. When they become destructive, we are lost in the grips of anger, fear, sadness, and overwhelm. As we develop emotional awareness, we find that we are able to become honest about the difficulties in our lives. We can take responsibility for our destructive emotional episodes, diminishing guilt and regret. We learn the power of gratitude and compassion and promote positive change in our lives and in this world.
The Cultivating Emotional Balance training was sparked during a meeting between behavioral scientists, a neuroscientist, a monk, a philosopher, and the Dalai Lama as a new approach to understanding our emotional lives. Combining contemporary scientific research with contemplative practices drawn from Buddhism, this practice provides participants with tools for working with emotion and shows how mindfulness practices can be constructively integrated with emotional intelligence.
During this training, participants will:
- Understand how emotions work and how they can work for and not against us;
- Recognize and work with emotional triggers;
- Deepen awareness and stabilize attention;
- Increase compassion for the self and others;
- Cultivate genuine happiness and mental balance.
Residential Retreat Registration Open
Tempel Smith Residential Retreat Registration is Open! This is the last week our local community has priority access to the Bozeman Insight Community’s residential retreat at the BBar ranch Oct 17 – 21 with Tempel Smith. Tempel’s students and out-of-state residents will be invited to register after August 1st. We hope you can join us in this beautiful setting for a rich, transformative experience. See details and link to registration here.
