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
Vedana is the second Satipatthana or foundation of mindfulness. Vedana refers to the feeling tone of any perception, which can be sensed as one of three kinds: pleasant, unpleasant or neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant.
The meditative exploration into vedana, as simple as it may appear, begins a profound unfolding journey of insight into the basic reactivity of the mind and the fabrication of perception and experience. This practice can organically lead to a deep experiential understanding of dependent origination, the emptiness of vedana, clinging, and all phenomena.
During this practice weekend, we will focus on the theme of letting go, drawing inspiration from the chapter “Dukkha” in Seeing that Frees. We will explore—and perhaps re-explore—how the mind becomes entangled in a push-and-pull relationship with experience. Patiently and gently, we will relax entanglement while attuning to various levels of experience. As we do so, we will naturally begin to access the ease, flexibility, and stillness that arise when the entanglement with self and world decreases.
This four week course will offer ways to play meditatively with the impression of place (spatial relationships, directionality) as well as our sense of the location and nature of awareness. These aspects of self-construction are part of the habitual, self-oriented way of looking that builds and fixates our experience. The practices offered within this course will provide ways to play with these relationships and orientations in service of our emptiness practice. As well, some of the angles of practice may be useful to those working with releasing subtle forms of clinging within their practice.
Divine Abidings - The Imagination and Skill of the Boundless Heart
Four ways of looking. One loving heart. Together we will cultivate multiple skilful ways of coming into the world.
As Rob suggested, we could helpfully see our Dharma practice as the development of skill and flexibility with a range of ways of looking. On this retreat and in the company of sangha, we will cultivate kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. Learning to tune our bodies, hearts and minds to perceive in ways that bring sanity to our relating, skill in our service, and open us to more freedom and mystical senses of existence.
Wisely attending to whatever hinders us, we will draw upon the heart’s imagination to engage in these timeless loving arts - allowing the healing, nourishment and wisdom that arise through these ways of seeing and sensing.
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