Harvard Spring Break Retreat
March 13th – 16th, 2023
The Connors Retreat Center in Dover, MA
This retreat is for Harvard students (undergraduates and graduate students)
Connect with yourself in community
Step outside your daily routines in an off-campus retreat open to undergraduate students who are part of Harvard College. Learn the foundational practices for cultivating mindfulness and compassion or deepen your existing practcie. Expand your capacity for focus, freedom, joy, and tolerating discomfort. Be guided in practical ways to sustain your practice in everyday life.
Who is this retreat for?
Anyone with an open mind and heart who is willing to try something new and do their best to be themselves and accept everyone else in being themselves. You leave an iBme retreat with mindfulness practices and communication skills that you can practice in everyday life to continue to learn, grow, and cultivate your inner life.
Learn the fundamentals
Meditation
Using a variety of formats and teaching frameworks, we impart lessons in self-awareness, compassion, and offer techniques to increase concentration and focus the mind.
Mindful Movement
Spend time each day with a small group of peers, connecting and deepening authentic relationships with other teens who are experiencing the world in similar and different ways from you.
Inner Stillness
Being on retreat offers a rare opportunity to experience a life without constant distractions. We create a technology-free environment that flows back and forth between silent and social times.
Suggested Age
This retreat is Harvard students.
Application Deadline
February 27th or until spots are filled
All applications received after then date will be put on a wait list.
Number of participants
Capped at 20
Cost
$50
If you receive Financial Aid at Harvard, this cost is $0
Duration
4 days, 3 nights. Attendance at the whole retreat is required.
Transportation
Transportation provided from Cambridge Campus
Harvard Spring Break Retreat Staff
Cara Lai
Cara Lai spent most of her life trying to figure out how to be happy, or at least avoid total misery, which landed her on a meditation cushion for the majority of her adulthood. She’s explored the wild beauty of the human experience through many adventures in consciousness, including a few mind-bendingly long meditation retreats, chronic illness, and the profound experience of motherhood.
In the past, Cara has worked as an artist, wilderness guide, social worker and psychotherapist, but at this point she’s given up on being an adult in exchange for an all-out mindfulness rampage. Her teaching is relatable, authentic, funny and sometimes crass, and is accessible for many people. She teaches teens and adults at Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Society, and UCLA; ultimately hoping to be able to bend spoons with her mind. And to help people be happier.
Nina Bryce
Nina [she/her] supports people in cultivating embodied presence as a way of coming home to themselves. She is a mindfulness facilitator rooted in multiple lineages of meditative practice, including both stillness and movement. Starting with her spiritual roots in her Jewish-Buddhist upbringing in a family of meditators, through her teen years as a student and eventually teacher of yoga, and into her training in Buddhist spiritual care and secular mindfulness education, Nina is grateful for a life path that has allowed her to explore contemplative practice in many forms. Nina holds a Master of Divinity, focused in the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, from Harvard Divinity School. Through her graduate studies as an M.Div, she is trained in facilitation of multifaith contemplative practice, interfaith chaplaincy, and leading mindfulness programs in both religious and secular settings, ranging from teen camp at a monastery to the cancer floor of a hospital. Her formal meditation practice and teaching has been shaped most by the Insight Meditation tradition, in which she was raised and continues to practice, and by the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. Nina is also trained as an RYT-200 yoga teacher in Vinyasa and Kundalini yoga, and her approach to leading mindful movement is informed by both yoga and modern dance. Nina is currently training as a non-denominational Spiritual Director with Still Harbor. She completed the iBme Mindfulness Teacher Training in 2018, and has been involved with iBme teen and college mindfulness retreats since 2014. She especially loves LGBTQIA+ mindfulness community, both as a participant & as a facilitator. As a Mindfulness Director with Mindfulness Director Initiative, she currently leads mindfulness programs at Harvard College. Nina is energized by working with young adults, because she believes that these years are ripe with potential for inquiry into core questions of who we are and how we relate to the world. She is inspired by the way that youth long for, and create, spaces where they can reflect honestly on their experiences, learn to take care of themselves and others, and build authentic, loving communities that support deep well-being and freedom.
The Connors Retreat Center
The Connors Retreat Center sits on an 80-acre estate in Dover, Massachusetts. The peaceful site makes it an ideal place for an iBme retreat. We’ll enjoy the views from inside, explore the outdoors as well, and gather for nourishing meals in the Dining Room. Our rooms are all close by, creating a supportive environment for solitude and social time.
In partnership with:
