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
In diesem Retreat werden wir die „Brahma-Viharas“ oder „Vier Unermesslichen“ – grenzenlose Güte (Metta), Mitgefühl (Karuna), Freude (Mudita) und Gleichmut (Uppekha) – als transformative und befreiende Perspektiven erkunden, die unterstützt, gepflegt und vertieft werden können.
A five-week practiced-based survey of key insight/emptiness methods, this course will present a range of insight/emptiness practices that each work in particular ways to release clinging and reveal freedom. The inclusion of a broad range of practices within this course will support a space for clarifying and delineating some of the primary mechanisms of “letting go” that comprise Buddhist wisdom practices.
Samadhi—the quality of collectedness, cohesion, and deep nourishment—is both a beautiful fruit of the path and a catalyst for awakening. In this retreat, we will cultivate the conditions for its emergence and tend to it in a way that supports the journey onward.
Our approach will be guided by the teachings of Rob Burbea, emphasising sensitivity, attunement, and subtle discernment, allowing space for experimentation and the organic rhythms of each practitioner.
Foundations of a Soulmaking Dharma: Re-evaluating Emptiness, Imagination, Sacredness, and Desire is a BCBS Online Immersive Program that offers 10 weeks of focused study and practice of Soulmaking Dharma guided by Catherine McGee and Yahel Avigur.
Application coming soon on BCBS website.
More details via Gaia House website coming soon...
In this annual ‘Ways of Looking’ Retreat we will cultivate our heart’s capability for kindness and compassion; calm; malleability; and creativity. We will inquire into Buddhist teachings as liberating ways of looking. Compassionate and transforming perspectives, when engaged with wholeheartedly, will reduce suffering and unveil the potential of the human heart.
The practice of compassion is in the core of Buddhist teachings. It means the capacity to meet the suffering with an open, caring heart with a wish to alleviate the suffering in one’s experience and around. During this retreat we will explore practices that support our ability to turn toward suffering and tune into compassion toward our experience and toward the self experiencing the suffering..
We will also explore Buddhist teachings of anatta, emptiness of self, and how anatta and letting go of identification can be a form of compassion.
What do Dharma teachings say about beauty? And what is your relationship with this idea? How might an inquiry into beauty serve your practice and help you to navigate wise action?
In this day of practice we will reflect on beauty, its relevance to the path in general and its place in approaching Soulmaking Dharma
Opening our imaginations, hearts, minds and bodies to whatever is our unique relationship with beauty, we will inquire into what might hinder and what might support a fertile and onward leading relationship with this idea and experience.
The day will include formal meditation practice, reflection and inquiry, starting with samatha (calming) practices and opening more to Soulmaking teachings and practices as the day unfolds.
Grasping and aversion towards aspects of experience that feel relatively neutral happens “below the waterline” of overt thought processes. In this course we’ll work with meditation practices and strategies that develop subtlety of attention and have the potential to release clinging that is woven into our habits of perception.
In our meditative practice we may discover that the citta (heart-mind) can be perceived as bright, spacious, unshakable and sky-like.
These expansive perceptions are profound and powerful tools for our meditative exploration. Giving rise to a natural sensitivity and receptivity, they reveal the entire range of nourishing and transforming qualities of the mind and heart such as compassion, steadiness and samadhi. Practicing in this way we can begin to sense the fabricated, malleable and empty nature of all phenomena and the freedom this understanding brings.
During the retreat we will cultivate and explore these beautiful meditative perceptions.There will be reflections, contemplations, guidance and meditative suggestions.
More details via Gaia House website in the next couple of months...
