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.
This will be the seventh year of this online retreat, dedicated to cultivating samādhi and jhānas.
Having practised under the guidance of Rob Burbea, we’ve discovered the profound beauty and transformative power of Samadhi and Jhana. We invite those who already have some familiarity with these practices, and who wish to explore their subtle and delicate beauty more deeply, to join us for a dedicated week of practice.
During the retreat, we will invite you to explore the beauty and benefits of Jhana practice, as well as its relationship with dependent arising and emptiness. You’ll receive personalised support to deepen your skills and insights, and have the opportunity to practise alongside others who share your love of and interest in the Jhanas, with the retreat rooted in the practice each participant undertakes in their own home throughout the week.
This six-month program offers a gradual and in-depth exploration of the emptiness teachings and practices presented in Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees, with space for sustained practice, study, and reflection.
Emptiness is sometimes described as the crown jewel of the Dharma—a profoundly transformative realization.
Such understanding goes beyond any particular meditative experience, impressive as it may be, and reveals something profoundly true, compassionate, and awe-inspiring about the nature of all things. The path to such realization is subtle and gradual, unfolding through liberating experiences and the understandings they give rise to.
In this course, we will engage in meditative explorations central to the Buddha’s presentation of the path: liberating ways of looking that free the mind in the moment, point toward deeper understanding, and together form a cohesive whole that may gradually transform one’s intuitive sense of the nature of self and the world.
Our exploration will be based on Rob Burbea’s book Seeing That Frees
Samadhi – bringing joy and catalyzing awakening – is at the heart of the Buddhist path. It may be described as collectedness, cohesion, calm, aliveness, and the delight that arises from meditative sensitivity.
In this retreat, we will explore and develop samadhi through approaches inspired by the late Dharma teacher, Rob Burbea. We will emphasize cultivating skill, sensitivity, attunement, and subtle discernment – inviting the heart and body to taste the joy that can arise from refined perception.
The retreat can also be attended in sequence with the Seeing That Frees retreat that follows it, creating an opportunity for a longer period of sustained practice and deepening.
In Seeing That Frees, Rob Burbea describes a gradual path, leading from the foundations of Insight Meditation to the perception of emptiness, the lack of intrinsic existence in all phenomena. Burbea’s approach invites us to practise ways of attending to experience that reduce dukkha and give birth to freedom and relief. These liberating ways of looking, suggested by the Buddha and later Buddhist teachers, may gently and gradually relax our perception of self and world as they are usually constructed. Tracking such alterations of perception can be a doorway to deepening insight into the empty nature of phenomena, revealing a natural sense of perfection and boundlessness in experience.
In this short retreat, we will take the time to practise these ways of looking, to begin or deepen our sense of their liberating potential.
This retreat may also be attended in sequence with Deepening Joy, allowing a period of samādhi practice to flow directly into an intensive exploration of emptiness.
