We are living in a time of deep fragmentation. This can be felt individually, collectively, and at the planetary level. In this weekend retreat, we will steep in the practice of metta, loving-kindness, to heal and restore wholeness for individuals, our human family, and the natural world.

Led by IMT dharma leader David Bornstein and guest teacher Jacoby Ballard, the retreat will include guided meditation, dharma teachings, inquiry, and Q&A. We will invite in all parts of ourselves including those we habitually turn away from, ignore, or don’t see. We will expand outward, taking in the human collective, and our conditioned relationship to discriminatory social systems that separate. And we will open our hearts to all beings, exploring how our thoughts, words and actions may serve well-being for the entire web of life.

Teachers

David Bornstein, MSW, (he/him), is a Dharma Leader for IMT. He was introduced to Insight Meditation in 1997, and has sat one or more residential retreats most every year since 2000. David graduated from Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioner Program in 2016, the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program in 2019, and was a member of Spirit Rock’s most recent Community Dharma Leader cohort, until it was cut short by COVID. David lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter, and will be moving back to Tucson in the summer of 2023.

Jacoby Ballard teaches yoga and dharma as it intersects with social justice and leads trainings around the country on diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a yoga teacher with 20 years of experience, he leads workshops, retreats, sections in yoga teacher trainings, and teaches at conferences and universities. He has meditated since he was 17 years old, has resided in the Insight tradition for the past 14 years, and trained to teach meditation at the Interdependence Project in New York. In 2008, Jacoby co-founded Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, to work at the nexus of healing and social justice. Since 2006 Jacoby has taught Queer & Trans Yoga as a weekly class, a traveling workshop, and an annual retreat, and has offered yoga at the annual Garrison Institute LGBT Meditation Retreat. Jacoby has taught yoga in schools, hospitals, non profit and business offices, a maximum security prison, a recovery center, a cancer center, LGBT centers, gyms, a veteran’s center, and yoga studios. Jacoby lives with his beloved, his gender-expansive child, and dog companion on land known as Co-Karmi to Ute, Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone people, now understood as Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation. More at jacobyballard.net.