Meditation Retreat for Law Professionals and Students

Mindfulness meditation can provide a practical tool for busy legal professionals to quiet the mind, enhance clarity and professional effectiveness, and restore a more peaceful balance to their lives. This program will include meditation instruction and practice, and will explore the interplay between contemplative and legal practices and the role meditation can play in the professional and personal lives of lawyers, judges, law professors, law students, and other legal professionals. There will be periods of silent meditation, lectures, and group discussions concerning skills training and the ethical practice of law..

The Center for Contemplative in Society has offered retreats for legal professionals for ten years, offering annual retreats in California since 2004. We are pleased to return to the East Coast to present this special program.

This retreat is co-sponsored by the City University of New York School of Law.

September 11-14, 2008
(Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon)
Menla Mountain Center, Phoenicia, NY
4 hours of MCLE Credits

The leadership for the retreat is comprised of individuals who have been leading retreats for law professionals for the past five years:

Norman Fischer | Founder and Spiritual Director, EveryDay Zen Foundation
Susan B. Jordan | Nationally recognized criminal defense lawyer
Charles Halpern | Founding Dean, CUNY School of Law; Chair, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Douglas Chermak | Law Program Director, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

This retreat was brought to my attention, and I hope this notice will be well-received here, a place where many contemplative attorneys have been spotted, from time to time.

About the Law Program

The Law Program explores ways of helping lawyers, judges, law professors and students reconnect with their deepest values and intentions, through meditation, yoga, and other contemplative and spiritual practices. We run retreats and events which provide a framework for considering ways in which contemplative awareness can enhance and enrich our professional and personal lives, and bring them more into balance. Our retreats address questions and ideas from both a contemplative and legal perspective: the nature of winning and losing, the role of compassion in adversarial situations, truth and "right speech," Socratic and contemplative methods of inquiry, action and nonaction, separation and connection, and listening.

read more here.

When I heard about this retreat, amid the hair-on-fire New Yorker issue, and the FISA debacle, etc., I was inspired to offer this, as a reminder to take the long view, and to be thoughtful.