Spirit Rock Meditation Center

Spirit Rock Meditation Center, commonly called Spirit Rock, is a meditation center in Woodacre, California. It focuses on the teachings of the Buddha as presented in the vipassana, or Insight Meditation, tradition. It was founded in 1987 as Insight Meditation West, and is visited by an estimated 40,000 people a year. The San Francisco Chronicle has called it one of "the Bay Area's best-known centers for Buddhist meditation."

In 1975 the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) was founded in Barre, MA by a group of Western meditation teachers trained in Asia, including Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. In 1986, after ten years at IMS, Kornfield moved to Northern California with his family and began hosting a Monday night meditation class in a private home in San Anselmo. Eventually the class expanded to a clinic and then to a local church. In 1987 a group of meditation teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area incorporated as Insight Meditation West, for the purpose of acquiring land and establishing a west coast Insight Meditation center. The group included Kornfield, James Baraz, Sylvia Boorstein, Anna Douglas and Howard Cohn.

In 1988, with funds from an anonymous donation, 412 acres of undeveloped land in the San Geronimo Valley, an hour north of San Francisco, was purchased from The Nature Conservancy in order to start a permanent meditation center, and the name Spirit Rock Meditation Center was formally adopted. In 1990 temporary construction trailers were erected to house the community meditation hall, administrative offices and caretaker residences. Construction for permanent replacement facilities began in 2014. and in 2016, a new Community Meditation Center, staff village and administrative buildings were completed.

The residential retreat center opened in July 1998. The majority of the center’s land is protected by an open space easement and kept in conservation.

The teachings at Spirit Rock focus on the practice of vipassanā as taught in the Theravada tradition. Teachings focus on training and quieting the mind, on the teachings of Gautama Buddha as found in Buddhist texts, and on incorporating the Dharma into daily life. Retreats are modeled on those held for lay people in the Thai Forest Tradition, including sitting and walking meditation, meetings with the teachers and the observation of silence by practitioners.

...
Wikipedia