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
Mettā means loving-kindness, loving intention, or friendliness. Such friendliness is an essential quality for a sincere and persistent deepening of Dharma practice. Mettā realises the potential for freedom of our hearts.
We will practice Mettā as it has been practised for thousands of years: turning toward and holding the experience of body, heart, and mind with kindness. From there, we will expand that kindness to those who are close to us, those who are distant, and in every direction.
Gradually, we will integrate additional directions into the practice - gathering the heart and mind in Samadhi, working with emotions, integrating compassion, joy, and equanimity, and exploring liberating ways of looking.
The teachings will be informed by Rob Burbea’s approaches to Mettā, Samadhi, and Insight practices.
All are welcome to explore these practices during this residential retreat. This retreat is appropriate for everyone, whether they have extensive meditation experience or none. However, if you cannot attend the residential retreat, you can alternatively join online for the Dharma teachings, meditation instructions, and guided meditation sessions. For online attendance, you will need some stability in your practice, as you will need to sustain your practice independently between sessions.
Teachings are offered in English and will not be translated. The daily routine consists mainly of sitting and walking meditation, with instructions for meditation, an evening talk, an hour-long work period, and a voluntary mindful movement exercise. The retreat is held in silence except during individual or group interviews with a teacher.
Over this nine-week course, we will cultivate metta (loving-kindness & friendliness) – a quality as powerful as it is healing, suffusing the totality of our experience with metta and allowing it to flow outwards, eventually to all beings and phenomena.
Into these loving realms of metta, we will introduce several different ways of practising with emptiness. Turning with wisdom and compassion toward the dualities created by the mind, we can explore what it means to begin to see through them skillfully. Using a variety of analytical practices, we may support the arising of insight into the emptiness of self and phenomena. Though less commonly taught, these tradition-rooted contemplative analyses can provide powerful, liberating insights when applied in the crucible of meditation.
We ask participants to bring their playful readiness and open curiosity, as well as steadiness of practice, to explore different ways of practicing over this nine-week course.
This four-week meditation course will offer tools for meeting and cultivating ease within our inner experience. We’ll be working with approaches to attend to our emotional experience in ways that work against the habitual tendencies to build up and emphasize the negative, while encouraging a possibility that the neutral and positive aspects of our experience are intentionally included.
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:
