If you're exploring Buddhist meditation, and really want to take a deep dive into meditation, then you have got to go on a Buddhist meditation retreat.

Buddhist meditation retreats happen all around the world. But after having done over 30 retreats.  I can assure you that you don't need travel around the world to find a better meditation center.

Even if you're doing Tibetan meditation.  You don't need to travel to Nepal or Tibet in order to find a good Tibetan Buddhist retreat.  There are Tibetan Buddhist meditation centers all around the United States, Canada, Europe, South America… probably within a short drive or plane flight from where you live.

Similarly, if you want to do a Zen meditation seshin, a seven-day Zen retreat, you'll be able to find Zen centers in almost every major city: New York and Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco.  If you just pick up the phone book in most of those cities you'll be able find a Zen center.

Last year my wife and I were visiting Amsterdam, and while we were just walking along one of the canals we saw a giant Buddha statue in a window. I immediately knew we had found and Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist meditation center.  If you lived in Amsterdam, you could paddle-boat to your next retreat.

I remember one Christmas season, while I was visiting my parents, I picked up an old friend from high school in my father's new car and we went for a drive.  We went out a familiar road, but we were so engaged in a conversation we drove further than we had ever gone before.  At one point, we hit a T-junction and had to decide if we should turn around or continue our conversation by going out even further.  Well, we took a left and then after about 10 more miles, I start seeing Tibetan prayer flags surrounding a large property.  We got closer to the entrance of this property, and I saw a sign that I knew was a Tibetan meditation center.

So we turned into the large circular driveway and passed in front of a house that looked like a miniature version of the White House.  Now this is one o'clock in the morning, and in one of the front windows we see somebody wearing Tibetan monk robes vacuuming under a Christmas tree.  The whole scene seems so odd that we couldn't even wrap our brain around it and we turned around and drove home.  But the next day I found an open book store and a copy of a book that listed every Buddhist meditation center in the United States at that time.

And it turned out that this particular meditation center - just 20 minutes outside of Washington DC, was run by the first American woman who was recognized as a reincarnate Tibetan lama. It was also famous for something that would make New Age meditators very excited: it has the largest private crystal collection in the world.

Needless to say the Internet is a great resource for finding a retreat center.  There's something kind of comical about seeing monks using computers and building websites.  But many Buddhist meditation centers, even those in the middle of Indiana or Nepal where they barely have electricity 24 hours a day, had e-mail addresses or websites and other ways of finding them.

By the way, I'm not suggesting that you don't travel around the world if you want to do a Buddhist meditation retreat or take a deeper dive into Buddhist meditation techniques.  In fact going and doing a retreat in some distant land has great benefits if your traveler.  You'll typically meet wonderful, kind, welcoming people who are locals in your distant location. And you'll also meet fellow travelers.  The combination of those two can add a whole new fun flavor to your meditation vacation.

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