Nashville Silent Meditation Group

We are a meditation group focused on silent meditation sitting sessions. We are based in Nashville, TN, USA. We prefer in-person sits but have conducted online sits during pandemic outbreaks.

Our focus is on providing longer silent group meditation sits without the distractions of teachers, dharma talks, chanting, performances, group sharing sessions, and so on.

Our regular sits are 1 hour of silent sitting. Longer sits are possible.

We expect that meditators have a practice of silent meditation already and are comfortable sitting quietly for some time.

We are an invite-only group. New members must be recommended by an existing member and approved by the organizer(s).

If you are serious about joining us and do not know a member you may contact the organizer(s) to inquire about setting up an interview.

Until further notice, meditators attending an in-person sit must provide a negative COVID rapid test result (or PCR result) taken the day of the sit.

If you are unable to acquire a COVID rapid test, contact the organizers (in advance of the sit) who can typically provide a COVID rapid test. Expect to show up 30 minutes earlier than the normal arrival time in order to allow sufficient time to take and process the test.

We are not requiring masking or proof of vaccination. Feel free to wear a mask when you attend our in-person sits.

Our sits are typically held in a private residence. The address is provided to members only.

We usually have 2-3 spare cushions (something close to zafu+zabuton) and 3-4 straight-backed wooden chairs onsite. We recommend bringing the cushions or supports you find best for your practice.

We typically use Insight Timer or similar to play starting/stopping bells. We ring a bell, sit silently for an hour, and then another bell rings.

For best results, arrive around 10-15 minutes prior to the starting bell time for the sit. If you arrive late please join us quietly.

Usually our sits scheduled for the top of the hour will begin 5 minutes after the hour. For example, for a sit scheduled for 7:00pm, the starting bell will ring at 7:05pm. This habit emerged out of accomodating online sits where joining the sit at the normally scheduled top of the hour still left some preparation time for the remote meditators to get everything set up and ready to go.

If you must leave before the end of the sit please do so quietly. Thank you for joining us!

There may be a few minutes of chitchat after the sit. It's not unheard of for meditators to continue on to a restaurant (etc.) to continue to hang out.

For some or maybe even all in-person sits we also run a Zoom session for remote meditators who are members of the group. If you would like to be off-camera during the in-person sit let the organizer(s) know.

Remote sits are held on Zoom. The Zoom link is provided to members only.

A remote sit may be purely remote, or may be an extension of an in-person group sit.

Feel free to be either camera-on or camera-off for sits.

We ask that online attendees mute their microphones during the duration of the actual sit (between the starting bell and ending bell).

As with in-person sits -- if you come late or leave early do so quietly. Thanks for joining us!

What's wrong with teachers and dharma talks (etc.)?

Absolutely nothing. On the contrary, we recommend and expect all our meditators to have an ongoing practice of some sort with a teacher and/or sangha. Learning and connecting with others is a fundamental part of whichever path we find ourselves on.

Around 2011 some of us visited the various communities doing meditation groups / sits / classes / etc. in Nashville. We found that most of the groups were focused on teaching and sharing, and were consequently often light on actual meditation. Typically the meetings would involve teacher-led instructions and/or dharma talks and/or chanting or reading and/or group sharing, etc., with the silent meditation portion of the meeting limited to 20 minutes or so. We found that we were not getting the benefits of silent meditation that we were looking for, and so we started a group focused on group silent meditation for practitioners who were already practicing silent meditation.

Reviewing the in-person and online offerings at the end of 2022, we found a similar situation and decided it was important to continue with our group, even if it had to be an invite-only private group.

Can I attend if I practice in [specific tradition]?

If your practice is silent meditation, yes. If your practice is not silent meditation, no.

Why isn't this group open to the public?

For roughly a decade this group was open to the public, and coordinated via Meetup. We had ~250 registered members and held over 500 sits. Most of our group sits were small (2-8 people), but meditators typically attended sessions for months or years at a time. When the pandemic started we were forced to adapt, and we moved our sits online (mostly on Zoom). This reduced the number of local meditators attending, but surprisingly we attracted meditators from other cities and countries in the process.

In 2020/2021 we learned about the phenomenon of Zoom-bombing (also: Vice: "'Zoom Bombers' Are Still Blasting Private Meetings With Disturbing and Graphic Content" ). We learned that to prevent Zoom-bombing we needed to not publish our Zoom link. We eventually learned that requiring group membership, and requiring an RSVP, and even requiring that attendees message organizers were insufficient to prevent Zoom-bombing. Despite wanting to keep our sits open to the public, we learned as well that Meetup had few protections against forged accounts and many new "meditators" were mostly interested in attending sits to disrupt them.

We decided to close our Meetup group to new members and to take down the Zoom links. This meant we privately shared a link among a small group of known people who would attend online sits.

In late 2022, as we considered returning to in-person sits, we also reconsidered having a public group that brought unknown people to our homes and into contact with other meditators. Despite the large number of registered members, only a small number of people actually attended sits. We decided to focus on those people and other dedicated meditators rather than on the general public. We took the group private, invite-only, and moved off of Meetup.

This group was founded in 2011 (note: hazy estimate) by a small group of meditators who were looking for a group that focused on longer sits of group silent meditation. Some of us came out of the Vipassana tradition and so this was initially a Vipassana group. We quickly realized that the meditators seeking longer group sits were not necessarily interested in Vipassana, and so we opened the group to all meditators who were interested in silent meditation. We coordinated the group via Meetup up until 2023 (see more above in the "Questions and answers" section) when we took the group private and left Meetup.

We initially were sitting on weekends at various office spaces we had access to. Sometimes these spaces were difficult to access (parking, weekend door access, etc.). We eventually moved to holding sits at a private home, and hosting occasional sits at a local yoga studio, as well as at other private homes from time to time.

Typically we would hold an in-person sit every other weekend, until the pandemic when we went online-only for a few years, but increased to 3 online sits per week. We discuss the pandemic and our online sits in the "Questions and answers" section above.