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 the annual Ways of Looking retreat, we will cultivate our heart’s capacity for kindness and compassion, calmness, malleability and creativity. We will engage with Buddhist teachings as liberating ways of looking. Compassionate and transformative perspectives that, when we engage with them wholeheartedly, reduce suffering and reveal 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 our heart-mind’s receptivity, intuitive intelligence, and sense of wonder.
If you are not yet familiar with the ‘Liberating Ways of Looking’ approach, as articulated by Rob Burbea, this retreat is a valuable opportunity to get to know it. If you are familiar, the retreat invites to revisit, consolidate, and deepen your insights and understanding.
This retreat will be livestreamed. If you wish to attend this retreat online please click here.
This human heart meets challenges in life. The Buddhist teachings acknowledge suffering as part of our shared human condition. The practice starts with this understanding, and the teachings introduce a path for finding freedom.
At the core of Buddhist practice are also the beautiful qualities of brahmaviharas – loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity – which offer both nourishment and protection for the heart. They offer resources and refuge amid challenge and difficulty.
These skillful qualities of heart can be cultivated in meditation practice, and during this retreat we will explore creative ways of engaging and cultivating a capacity for the heart to be unshakeable, compassionate and loving.
The premise of this online course is to offer a chance to play with perceptions of space, awareness, unobstructedness and absence through exploring a range of meditation practices. These practices encourage us to tune into what surrounds the obvious, most noticeable aspects of experience. We will be working with meditative ways of looking that include, emphasize, or engender perceptions of space in ways that will support the deepening of our emptiness practice and capacities as insight meditators. As well, when we cultivate perceptions of spaciousness, openness, and lack of obstruction we may open lovely flavors of samadhi and mystical perception.
Following the first offering of this program through the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Seeing That Frees will be offered again as a six-month online practice program, running from January 17 to June 20, 2027.
Through a series of meditative explorations, participants gradually explore liberating ways of looking that are freeing in themselves, while also opening doorways to seeing the empty nature of experience as something to be discovered in lived experience.
Rather than moving through the book chapter by chapter, the course focuses on its central meditative practices, allowing time for sustained experimentation and integration. Together we will explore the liberating perspectives of anicca, dukkha, and anattā, vast awareness, and ways of seeing through dualities, while supporting this unfolding with ongoing cultivation of mettā and samādhi. The main teaching sessions will take place online every other Sunday. Alongside them, the program will include recorded materials, readings from Seeing That Frees, and additional opportunities for shared practice and support, supporting continued exploration between meetings.
For those who wish to continue, an optional two-month Summer Expansion will follow the main program. It will explore more deeply the emptiness of mind and the emptiness of subtle and fundamental phenomena, with meetings on June 20, July 11, July 25, and August 8.
Further information, including the full program description and registration details, will be available on the BCBS website from mid-August. If you would like to be notified when registration opens, you can also join Yahel Avigur's mailing list:
