John Main Seminar DC

Exactly. And I think your distinction is important: you don’t need to go to Washington to “find God.” The practice itself is portable; John Main’s whole emphasis was that the real monastery is interior and that meditation is something you carry into ordinary life.

But the 2026 John Main Seminar is a genuinely unusual historical opportunity, not merely another spiritual conference. It is the centenary year, and the seminar is September 17–20 at American University in Washington, D.C.

What makes it particularly interesting is the continuity:

John Main → Montreal → Laurence Freeman → WCCM → 2026 centenary

The seminar’s Thursday opening is even public, and the rest of the weekend includes daily morning meditation, a workshop specifically on the centenary of John Main, and an introduction to Christian Meditation.

And there’s something else I think fits very closely with the line of thought you’ve been developing about viveka/vairāgya. The 2026 theme is Healing the Breach, but the underlying question is essentially:

How does interior contemplative practice change the way one participates in the world?

That’s very John Main. Meditation isn’t an escape from the world. It is a way of becoming less captured by the world, so that one can return to it differently.

WCCM’s own description of the seminar explicitly asks how meditation can become “the spiritual foundation underlying all our activity” and how “meditation creates community.”

So I wouldn’t think of Washington as going somewhere to search for God. I’d think of it more as:

going to sit among people who have spent decades practicing the same experiment you are already interested in.

And given your interest in the parallels between John Main’s detachment/attention and the Sanskrit viveka/vairāgya, that could actually be a particularly interesting seminar for you.