The Courses and retreats listed here are led by the teachers on the Teachers page. The page is current - listings appear in date order and are taken down one day after the start date. Buttons take you to the relevant websites with all information and application processes.
Past Retreats and Courses
These six meetings are a chance to explore the intersection of creativity, art making, and dharma practice from different angles. The sessions will include guided meditations (on the theme of creativity/insipiration/imagination), as well as teachings related to these themes. There will be an optional creative process session after each meeting - see the full description of this offering for more details on what these are about. You can attend some or all of what is offered each month (guided meditation, teaching session, creative process session).
You don't need to be any particular kind of art-maker or creative so long as you feel called to explore around meditation, dharma and creative endeavors. Writers, painters, dancers, textile people, ceramicists, crafters, and more are all welcome. If you're not currently engaged in creative practice, but might like to be, you might find these sessions stir up some inspiration.
We won't share any work within these sessions - instead they offer a chance to be inspired / reconnect with our own creative process. As well, there is time for sharing/reports/questions about creative process and meditation practice within the teaching session - it can be really fun and enriching to spend time with other meditators drawn to creative practice.
Samadhi means meditative calm, collectedness, cohesion and harmony of mind, heart and body. It is a skill and resource presented and taught by the Buddha and practised for thousands of years. When cultivated in meditation and based on discernment, this collectedness and cohesion of heart, mind and body enrich our hearts with joy, happiness and calm coming from within. Thus, it creates resources for day-to-day life and for deepening practice.
During this retreat, you will be invited to explore meditation practices and attitudes that encourage the arising and deepening of Samadhi. We will follow and honour Rob Burbea’s approach that emphasises sensitivity, responsiveness and turning toward well-being. These are complemented by willingness and skill in meeting challenging aspects of the heart-mind, an integral part of Samadhi work.
These tools and approaches may also support the arising of Jhanas, states of meditative absorption, and the deepening of insight that comes with them.
Over this four session online course, we’ll explore together the practices of vastness of awareness. Through these practices we can notice how the mind can appear to us in meditation as a bright, spacious, unshakable and sky-like space. These expansive meditative states are referred to by many names in the Buddhist tradition: primordial mind, ultimate wisdom, and Buddha nature, and are described as containing all the noble qualities of mind and heart. In this course we can begin to open up to these meditative experiences through simple and practical exercises of listening and opening up the sense of awareness.
Die buddhistischen Lehren über Nicht-Selbst können leicht missverstanden werden. Sie sind eine Einladung zu erkunden, wie Selbst, Andere und die Welt von Moment zu Moment geschaffen werden. Oft übernehmen wir, unbewusst und unhinterfragt, beschränkende Selbstwahrnehmungen, mit ihren begleitenden Denk-, Handlungs- und Wahrnehmungsweisen. In unserer meditativen Erkundung, können wir das Erschaffen von Selbst als eine Reise entlang eines Spektrums, vom mehr Verdinglichten, zum äußerst Subtilen, erkennen. Dieses Erkennen ermöglicht eine befreiende Flexibilität, die die einzigartigen, vielfältigen und persönlichen Ausdrucksformen des Selbst ebenso wie seine Leerheit feiern kann.
Dieses Retreat ist nicht für Anfänger geeignet und steht allen offen, die ein Grundverständnis und Erfahrung mit Achtsamkeits-/ Einsichtsmeditationpraktiken haben
In this retreat we will attend to our heart-mind and body with sensitivity and curiosity. Cultivating the heart’s capacity for kindness and compassion, we will inquire into the Buddhist teachings as liberating ways of looking. Compassionate and transforming perspectives, when wholeheartedly engaged with, will reduce suffering and unveil the potential of the human heart.
We will discover how experience is shaped and co-created by our ways of relating to what is unfolding in our inner and outer life. Establishing and deepening this insight can open possibilities of seeing and understanding that will allow us to explore new, liberating ways of experiencing ourselves and the world. We may also recognize unexamined, habitual ways to perceive and interpret, along with their accompanying limiting narratives, dynamics and beliefs. By questioning and loosening these, we can sense what is possible for our heart-mind, its receptivity, intuitive intelligence and sense of wonder.
