Category: Uncategorized

What’s a meditation retreat with Tucker like?

The retreats are held in Noble Silence. This means that while you’re on retreat, you’ll abstain from communicating with other students, though there will be plenty of opportunity to interact with the teacher(s). And if there’s something urgent to say (like asking the chef about food allergies), that’s totally fine to do.

We’ll have three meals per day, plenty of time for sleep (usually around a nine-hour sleep window), exercise time, and a nightly dharma talk. While the schedule will suggest meditation times throughout the day, most of these are optional. So if you want to do a super-long meditation sit, or take a nap, or go for a hike, that’s possible during much of the day.

What’s the meditation technique we’ll be using?

Unlike most teachers, who teach one particular technique, Tucker supports people using a wide variety of techniques. They tend to fall into the categories (followed by a few examples) of focused attention (shamatha, anapana, jhana), insight (vipassana, noting, choiceless awareness), cultivation of positive states (metta, karuna) and non-doing (shikantaza). If you don’t know what technique to do, this is a great thing to talk to the teacher(s) about on retreat.

What are the retreat rules?

They’re posted over here, and they include that you cannot use any communication technology (phone, tablet, etc.) while we’re on retreat.

All my teaching is by donation except individual meetings, which have a fixed cost, since they minute-by-minute conflict with my job as a psychologist.  The procedure for these is:

• Sessions are 50 minutes for (USD) $185-300 or 25 minutes for $95-150.
• If your money is in USD, Venmo or PayPal work great.  If your money isn’t in USD, it’s generally cheaper for you to pay via a website/app called Wise.  If you put in my name and email (my name, period in between first and last, at Gmail), all the other questions will disappear from the form, so you don’t need my bank info, address, etc.  If you use PayPal, please don’t use the donate button on this website, and make sure it says “Friends and family” somewhere in the transfer.  Otherwise, PayPal takes a significant fee.  (The fee is for fraud prevention, which you hopefully don’t need for talking to a dharma teacher!  The friends-and-family option waives the fraud prevention and is free).  I can also take Revolut or cryptocurrency (BTC, ETH, or MOB via Signal), and if you’d like to pay this way, please contact me first.  
• Generally, I’ve found it helpful to do a full 50-minute session for the first meeting, unless we already know each other fairly well.
• If you find you do not need all the time that you booked, you do still need to pay for the whole amount.
• There is a 48-hour cancellation policy.  If you cancel with less than 48 hours’ notice, you’ll need to pay the full price. If you miss more than two appointments, we’ll generally create a new fee structure (eg missed appointments cost 150% of appointments you attend).
• I’ll send you a calendar invite for the appointment, and that calendar invite is the official time we’ve committed to.  Please double-check that the invite is correct, as you’ll be billed for that slot.
• Please make sure you’re at a stable internet connection, as we can’t always extend or reschedule the appointment due to faulty internet.