Hi

I've about 3 months dedicated to my spiritual practice starting from the 1st of may 2025. I've been thinking about and looking at different options ranging from staying at a temple or retreatcenter, taking multiple smaller retreats and/or diving deeper into physical practices like yoga, tai chi or qigong. I find it really hard to figure out which places and options are of "better quality" and worthwile and at the same time exactly what kind of practices would be the best fit for me at the moment.

I will be copy pasting from my short "practice log" thread here:

"A bit about my meditation journey until now
I've been meditating daily since start 2023 and have slowly increased the time spent. My general practice is now 60 min. in the morning and 15-30 min. in the evening. The first year of my practice was mostly inspired by Eckhart Tolles "The power of now" and some Zen litterature and guidelines, so it was very barebones and focusing mostly on just being present in practice and off the cushion - but also only short meditations max 20 min. This period of like the first 9 months of 2023 felt in many ways like the happiest ive ever been, i was so amazed by this new way of experiencing the world and thinking about "myself" and often felt like i had it all figured out. In January 2024 i came across the Deconstructing Yourself podcast and TMI by Culadasa and from there slowly evolved my practice in the sense that i thought more about where i was in my practice and where i was headed.

I went on my first and until now only 10 day vipassana noting retreat in may/june. In short the first few days was caracterized by agitation, the next few days by drowsines and then some days with joyful feelings, good concentration and a lot of interesting bodily sensations. The last few days was very hard to go through with some of the worst anxiety and dread Ive ever experienced. I was very unsure if I even wanted to keep practising when i got home. I kept practising anyway with a lot of deep breaths and Metta - but everything felt meaningless for a while. In the last few months Ive read abit about the insight stages and I was probably in some dark night territory, but since then it has been very hard for me to figure out where I am and how my practice is going. In the last year ive been going to psychotherapy and while both meditation and therapy has been very meaningful and somewhat transformative I've also been in contact with a lot of unpleasent feelings of anger, sadness, doubt, anxiety, shame and more. These feelings was much more intense in the period right after the retreat, and Ive been working a lot with trying to accept everything. I also wanna say that physical practices like yoga and taiji have been a big part of my routines even if it doesnt have that big of a role at the moment.

Right now my 60 min practice is 30 min Samatha on either stomach or nose and then 30 min vipassana which is one bodyscan followed by noting (seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking - and sometime extra freestyle notes). Im generally enjoying vipassana more that Samatha, at the moment, because i get more curious about the objects and its more stimulating for me. It feels free and alive. Samatha feels more strict and I have a bigger tendency to be judging of my own levels of concentration, which i often have a hard time evaluating. There is often a lot of distractions, but its hard for me to figure out if its mostly what culadasa would call gross or subtle and if i sometimes still experience "forgetting". The shorter daily meditation is whatever i feel like - sometimes more thematic like Metta or forgiveness."

Does anyone have good experiences with any places? - it can be anywhere in the world!
Any recommendations for me in terms of smaller retreats, longer retreat, other practices etc.?

All ideas and thoughts are appreciated!