Omega Institute
Rhinebeck, New York, United States
A Hudson Valley retreat campus where the human potential movement found its East Coast home, founded in 1977 on land that was a Yiddish-language summer camp, now running hundreds of programs a year.
Omega was founded in 1977 by Stephan Rechtschaffen and Elizabeth Lesser, inspired by the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and named for Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point. It began at the New Lebanon Shaker Village's Abode of the Message and moved in 1982 to the former grounds of Camp Boiberik, a Yiddish-language camp of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, now a 250-acre campus of more than 100 buildings. Omega became the East Coast counterpart to Esalen, hosting Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, Maya Angelou, Jane Goodall and Eckhart Tolle's intensives; the Ram Dass Library is built in an eight-petal lotus shape, and the Omega Center for Sustainable Living was among the first two buildings ever certified Living by the International Living Building Institute.
Today it runs more than 300 events a year for tens of thousands of people, on an all-inclusive model of accommodations, meals and daily classes in yoga, meditation, tai chi and art.
Visiting
Omega's campus runs a seasonal program (roughly May through October) for registered workshop participants and Rest and Rejuvenation guests; pricing varies by program, with scholarships and sliding-scale tuition available; no general walk-in access.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanctuary_at_Omega_Institute,_Rhinebeck,_New_York.jpg), CC BY-SA 2.0, Ken Wieland.
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