Retreat Calendar

Retreat Rates
  • £567.00 – Full Rate
  • £468.00 – Concessionary Rate
  • £0.00 – Retreat Team members only

Date & Time Details: The retreat starts on the first day at 6.45pm with the evening meal and finishes at about 9.45am on the last day.

Suitable For: Experienced Meditators

Dhyana Through the Body – Re-evaluating Dhyana

With Tejananda

February 20 - March 1, 2026

“Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states… one suffuses, fills, and permeates one’s entire body with rapture and pleasure born of seclusion, so that there is no part of one’s whole body that is not pervaded by it.” AN 5.28

On this retreat, we’ll be offering embodied approaches to dhyana (jhāna) that people have found to be helpful and effective. This may well involve questioning both our own views and approaches, and a good deal of what the tradition has to say about dhyana.

Dhyana is far more than samatha, or mental calm. Recognising the liberative potential of the first dhyana was the key to the Buddhas own awakening and he taught dhyana as inseparable from insight. Only later tradition came to regard the dhyanas as ‘just’ highly concentrated states.

The dhyanas are, rather, states of deep, embodied mental unity, integrated with awareness of the foundations of mindfulness (satipatthana) and the factors of awakening (bojjhanga).

In practice, the most useful question is: ‘what, in our experience, is actually helpful?’ We have found that by becoming alive to the energetic immediacy of body experience, resources for entering dhyana can be discovered as already present – just waiting to be noticed. We’ll explore this in direct experience by delving into the relation between body and breath as well as between body, awareness and insight.

Leader

Tejananda
Tejananda has been practising meditation and dharma since the mid-70s. He was ordained by Sangharakshita in 1980 after which he participated in the setting-up of the FWBO Bristol centre and was centre chair for six years. After several years working for the Karuna Trust in Oxford, he joined the team at Vajraloka in 1995. His book,’The Buddhist Path to Awakening’ was published by Windhorse around that time. Since then he has been leading and supporting retreats at Vajraloka and at other retreat centres in the UK and worldwide. Although no longer living at Vajraloka, he remains part of the wider…
Learn more about Tejananda