In-Person and Online: Coming Home to Kind Awareness – A Daylong Retreat
with Bart van Melik and Leslie Booker
Saturday, January 25th, 2025 | 10:00am – 4:00pm ET
In-Person Location: New York Insight at 115 West 29th Street, 12th Floor
As our climate, society, and collective values change and shift, it can be hard to know how to sit with it all. What do you do when it feels like your practice no longer “works”?
Join teachers Bart van Melik, Guiding Teacher of Community Meditation Center, and Leslie Booker, Guiding Teacher of NYIMC, for a day of practice and communal reflection. Participants are encouraged to slow down, drop into their experience, and find support in both stillness and shared connection.
Drawing from personal experiences and insights, Bart and Booker will share wisdom on navigating critical or anxious inner dialogue, finding peace amidst life’s challenges, and uncovering the innate qualities of the heart. By taking refuge in the heart of kind awareness, we can listen to the truths of the present moment, bear witness to our personal and social pains, and find peace in our own awakened hearts.
Together, we will immerse ourselves in timeless teachings to incline our heart-minds towards appreciating the joys of living; refresh our capacities to bring awareness to the present moment; and to cultivate kindness towards ourselves and others.
This event is co-hosted by New York Insight Meditation Center and the Community Meditation Center.
In-Person Registration:
Please register below. If you are able, registering at the “Supporter” level enables others to attend at the “Subsidized” level. Thank you for your generosity! (Please note that the registration price includes a base level of teacher support, and you will have the opportunity to donate more after the program.)
If you are registering via a mobile device such as a phone or tablet, you can scroll right and left and up and down within the below form if it is partially obscured or cut off.
CLICK HERE to open the registration form in a new browser window.
Online Registration:
If you are registering via a mobile device such as a phone or tablet, you can scroll right and left and up and down within the below form if it is partially obscured or cut off.
CLICK HERE to open the registration form in a new browser window.
Volunteering
All of our programs rely on volunteers to support our teachers and staff with various tasks and responsibilities. Volunteering allows you to participate in our programs at no cost. To inquire about volunteering opportunities, please fill out our inquiry form, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Teacher(s)
Bart van Melik
Bart van Melik is the Community Meditation Center Guiding Teacher. Trained by Joseph Goldstein, Carol Wilson, and Gregory Kramer, he has taught meditation worldwide since 2009. Co-author of Still, in the City: Creating Peace of Mind in the Midst of Urban Chaos, Bart has been bringing the practice to diverse communities like juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters and NYC public schools. He is passionate about supporting people to discover how they can find new ways to relate to life’s stresses. Bart graduated from the IMS/Spirit Rock Teacher Training. Bart is originally from Holland.
Leslie Booker
Booker is a heart – centered, spirit – driven activist and meditation teacher committed to creating a culture of belonging through her teaching and writing. She completed Spirit Rock’s 4 year Retreat Teacher Training in 2020, and shared the practices of yoga and mindfulness with New York City’s most vulnerable populations for over a decade. Booker has co – authored and contributed to several publications including the trauma – informed anthology Practicing Liberation and its accompanying workbook, for folks working towards social justice. She is a co-founder of the Yoga Service Council at Omega Institute and the Meditation Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. In 2020 she was invited to be a Sojourner Truth Leadership Fellow through Auburn Seminary and was voted by her peers as one of the 12 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement.
Booker moved to Philadelphia in August of 2020 to vote in a swing state, and currently serves as the Guiding Teacher of New York Insight.
W | LeslieBooker.com
IG | TheRealBookerProject
FB | LeslieBooker