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. To view past retreats and courses in order to get a sense of the range of offerings over time, please click the button below.
Past Retreats and Courses
Relating to our practice as the fashioning and tuning of an instrument of perception, we will explore our seeing and sensing not as ‘revealers of truth’ but as ‘arts’ – engaging the materials of our lives with more freedom and exploring an infinite field of richness and meaningfulness. Inquiring into the emotional, ideological, and practical barriers that can prevent this opening, constrain its range, or render it ineffectual for our lives, we will trace a path towards more sacredness and beauty. Drawing our hearts onward in devotion, the beauties we encounter in these practices have the power to orient and inspire us during better times and during troubled times too — and can give to everything, including our sufferings, a necessary place.
During this Soulmaking Dharma retreat we will have time to learn and deepen the sensitivities, skills and flexibility with working with images, imaginal perception and sensing with soul. We will make a home base in practices of kindness throughout this retreat and we will also give time to work on deepening skills with our emotions and mind states ( as taught by Rob Burbea in the Boundless Heart retreat). These practices with and for the heart provide a rich and steady platform for Soulmaking Dharma, letting us become more available and attuned to mystical perceptions.
This retreat is for those already familiar with Rob Burbea’s ‘Ways of Looking’ approaches to the Dharma — please see the specific criteria.
“Thus have I heard. The Venerable Ānanda went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and said to him: “Sir, good friends, companions, and associates are half the spiritual life.”
“Not so, Ānanda! Not so!” Good friends, companions, and associates are the whole of the spiritual life.”
Upaḍḍhasutta (Samyutta nikāya)
How might we understand what it could be to see friends, companions and associates as the whole of the spiritual life? What could this mean to you and to us? How can we use different ways of looking and Buddhist cultivation to expand our ideas around participation in friendship and community?
This five-day residential experience will offer us a dedicated container to explore these questions together. Through meditation, dialogue, deep reading, inquiry, silence, ritual, dance, and collective joy, we will investigate for ourselves and with each other what it might mean for ‘spiritual life’ and ‘ saṅgha’ to be created and discovered in ways that reach and touch every aspect of our lives.
Created and peer-facilitated by Nicole Marie and Wah Isaacs in their roles as HAF community members. Both are longtime students of Rob Burbea and Catherine McGee.
