Mindfulness as Intimacy with Life: A Special Event with Howard Cohn

We will explore the potential of mindfulness as a keen and kind observing power, helping us to move beyond just thinking to a more intimate and direct moment to moment experience. Any experience can be a source of insight. Direct experience makes possible a more profound understanding of ourselves and our world, which frees us from common misunderstandings. With more clarity we can move through the world with more wisdom and compassion.

Howie is offering this open public talk on Friday evening, sponsored by Insight Meditation Scottsdale, and will be teaching a two-day, non-residential retreat on the following Saturday and Sunday at the Franciscan Renewal Center. If you would like to find out more about the retreat, go the the Insight Meditation Scottsdale website

Howard Cohn is a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in the San Francisco Bay area. He has guided a local sitting group in San Francisco, been in private practice as a psychotherapist and led Vipassana retreats worldwide since 1985. He incorporates the influences of Theravada, Zen, Tibetan Dzogchen and Advaita Vedanta in his teaching, with an emphasis on reawakening our intrinsic freedom. Howie is known by his students for his kindheartedness and warm sense of humor.  Among his many teachers and mentors are Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, U Pandita Sayadaw, Tulku Urgyen Rimpoche, Tsoknyi Rimpoche, and the Advaita Vedanta Master H.W.L. Poonja. 

He published his first book: Invitation to Meditation: How to Find Peace Wherever You Are

Jack Kornfield, the bestselling author and celebrated spiritual teacher, describes his colleague Howie's teaching as “… offer[ing] the immediacy and freshness of what is known in the Zen tradition as ‘beginners mind’ – that is a state of openness to possibility and insights. They give a deep, practical understanding of how to learn the revolutionary art of mindful presence.”