Sunday, October 17 to Sunday, October 24, 2010
Hidden Villa Retreat Center, 26870 Moody Road, Los Altos Hills, CA 94022
Gil has practiced Zen and Vipassana since 1975 and has a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford. He has trained in both the Japanese Soto Zen tradition and the Insight Meditation lineage of Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia. Gil was trained as a Vipassana teacher by Jack Kornfield and is part of the Vipassana teachers’ collective at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 he received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He has been the primary teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California since 1990. He is a husband and father of two boys.
Heather Martin has practiced different forms of meditation for over thirty years. Her early dharma practice was under the guidance of S. N. Goenka, and has since been influenced by both Burmese and Thai streams of Theravada – just recently while practicing in Burma with Ven. U Tejaniya. She was trained by Jack Kornfield, and teaches at Spirit Rock, in south western Canada and in the Pacific Northwest. She worked for 20 years as a midwife, and lives on Salt Spring Island, off the west coast of British Columbia.