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
Catherine McGee and Yahel Avigur are offering the above online course this autumn. There will be 12 weeks of focussed study and practice re-evaluating Emptiness, Imagination, Sacredness and Desire. Over the first weeks you will be supported to build a practice foundation that can open this Soulmaking paradigm, and then you will have the chance to work with images as the course progresses.
The teaching is offered entirely on a dana basis. However If the course fee from BCBS is too much for you please see the financial assistance information on their website here. BCBS intend that no one is turned away on financial grounds.
Applications are now closed
This four week insight/emptiness meditation course will explore strategies for softening the mind’s habitual activities of comparison and distinction making. These activities of mind shape and fixate the ways we habitually perceive experience, and therefore learning to lessen them can open the door to a range of beautiful meditative perceptions. As well, comparison and distinction making are necessary components of clinging and attachment - paying attention to and working with these activities of mind allows insight into the way experience is fabricated.
In this retreat we will attend to our heart-mind and body with sensitivity and curiosity. Cultivating the heart’s capacity for kindness and compassion, we will inquire into the Buddhist teachings as liberating ways of looking. Compassionate and transforming perspectives, when wholeheartedly engaged with, will reduce suffering and unveil 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 what is possible for our heart-mind, its receptivity, intuitive intelligence and sense of wonder.
Important note: Yahel Avigur, co-teacher on this residential retreat, will be teaching remotely.
For online participation: https://gaiahouse.co.uk/programme-2024-25/ls-liberating-ways/
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.
Registration now closed
