Welcome to Mountain Stream Meditation
Nevada City Insight Center
Background & History
Mountain Stream's Founding Teacher, John Travis, began leading Buddhist meditation groups in the Sierra Foothills in 1986. Mountain Stream became a California Non-Profit Corporation in 1994, and in 1995 received 501(c)(3) tax-exempt designation as a church from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In 2010, Mountain Stream purchased a unique property and remodeled it into a beautiful meditation center, which opened in January 2013 to host weekly sitting groups, daylongs, and other meditation programs. We've come a long way since then!
For over thirty years, we have taught Vipassana, or "Insight" meditation, part of the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Learn more about Insight meditation here. Theravada is one of Buddhism's two main vehicles, alongside Mahayana, which includes Zen and Tibetan practice. Theravada traces directly back to the Buddha's original teachings and has been carried forward for centuries by monasteries throughout Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma.
We serve a diverse community of practitioners by offering a variety of programs, meditation groups, community events, and two residential retreats per year. This past year we have added a robust eco dharma program, queer sangha, the dzogchen circle, and a metta meditation group to the mix, and welcomed two new Teachers to our Teacher’s Council. Mountain Stream is guided and held by the Teacher’s Council, under the leadership of Guiding Teacher Adam Stonebraker. The council sets the spiritual and ethical tone for our center, creates our schedule, and advises the Board of Directors and staff. To learn more about them go here.
““I am so pleased that over the years through a grassroots system we have each discovered the dharma, and through that inspiration we have created a wave....a movement that now manifests itself as a viable center which will serve us now and into the next generation.”
- John Travis”
Special Relationship With Other Organizations
Mountain Stream Meditation may be considered an informal spiritual affiliate of the centers in Massachusetts and in Woodacre, California. There is, however, no official connection among the centers and no fiduciary relationship. In every legal sense, Mountain Stream Meditation is a freestanding organization, and its Board of Directors is answerable to no other organization.