Sitting practice on the dock or in the quiet room, guided by someone who does it themselves and is not going to mystify it for you.
Beginners are welcome and are not made a spectacle of. The instruction is plain, the sit is short to begin with, and the practitioner will tell you honestly that a wandering mind is the exercise rather than a failure at it.
Experienced sitters can ask for silence and a bell and nothing else. Both are equally normal here, and neither is treated as the advanced version.
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Guided stillness on the dock or in the quiet room. Presence, not performance.
Beginners get plain instruction and a short sit; experienced sitters can ask for silence and a bell and nothing else. Neither is treated as the advanced version.
Twenty to forty five minutes · The dock, or the quiet room
The research
The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality: a systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2019
This meta-analysis gathered randomized controlled trials of mindfulness meditation for people with sleep problems. It included 18 trials with 1,654 participants and analysed two kinds of comparison separately. Against established sleep treatments, mindfulness showed no difference in sleep quality, with low strength of evidence, meaning it performed about the same rather than better. Against control activities that matched time and attention, mindfulness significantly improved sleep quality, with moderate strength of evidence, both straight after the program and at follow-up. The authors suggest mindfulness meditation may help with some aspects of sleep disturbance and call for more research. A limitation is that the evidence that mindfulness is as good as established sleep treatments was rated low, so it should not be seen as a substitute for them.
Yoga, mindfulness-based stress reduction and stress-related physiological measures: A meta-analysis
Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2017
Rather than relying on how people say they feel, this meta-analysis looked at physical markers of stress. It included 42 randomised controlled trials comparing practices that involve yoga postures (asanas), with or without mindfulness-based stress reduction, against active control groups. Compared with active controls, yoga-based practices were associated with lower evening and waking cortisol, lower ambulatory systolic blood pressure, lower resting heart rate, changes in heart rate variability, and lower fasting blood glucose, total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol. The authors conclude that yoga-based practices appear to be associated with better regulation of the body's main stress systems, the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The main limitation is that the yoga programs studied were very different from each other, which makes it hard to say which style, dose or format matters most.
Effects of Singing Bowl Sound Meditation on Mood, Tension, and Well-being: An Observational Study
Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine · 2017
This observational study looked at how people felt before and after a Tibetan singing bowl sound meditation, a format close to what many people call a sound bath. Sixty-two women and men with an average age of about 50 took part. Compared with how they felt beforehand, participants afterward reported significantly less tension, anger, fatigue and depressed mood, and their sense of spiritual well-being increased. People who had never tried this kind of meditation before showed a larger drop in tension than those who were already familiar with it. The authors suggest singing bowl meditation may be a low-cost, low-technology way to ease tension and low mood. The key limitation is the design: there was no control group, so the changes cannot be separated from the effect of simply lying down and resting in a calm setting.
Pick your nights, choose who guides you, and see the whole retreat on one ticket before anything is charged.
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