At any moment we can recognise, directly and viscerally, that we are alive and awake. With a settled and embodied awareness, this may open into an intuitive glimpse of what we truly are, beyond concepts. This might be evoked as a spacious yet embodied presence, a timeless awareness-emptiness, or unconditional love, compassion and pure energy. We’ll explore this by way of a somatic approach to just sitting meditation together with experiential inquiries – discovering aliveness, sensitivity, simplicity and clarity in our immediate experience. These subtle yet accessible qualities of our ordinary mind and being can act as gateways to the…

Body, heart and mind are essential facets of our being. Mind is usually taken to mean all kinds of mental activity, but what we’re interested in here is ‘mind itself’ – the awake, aware quality of mind. Awakeness is here even when we feel sleepy and dull. How do we know that we’re sleepy and dull? We are awake to it. We’re even awake to our dreams, despite the body being asleep. This quality of wakefulness, knowingness or clarity is intrinsic to all of our experience and yet it is mysteriously ungraspable and unfindable. To know it, we need to…

Bodhicitta – the awakening heart – is both the heart–response of wisdom to the suffering of living beings everywhere and the urge to realise full awakening for the benefit of all. This retreat will focus on love, compassion, joy and equanimity – the four ‘divine abodes’ or brahmaviharas – in the context of cultivating bodhicitta. To support this, we’ll also introduce tonglen, the ‘sending and receiving’ practice which opens the heart to universal compassion. The divine abodes are also known as the ‘boundless states’,¬ because they are inclusive of all living beings without exception. The practices that we’ll explore together…

Retreats evolve, and I’ve been leading ‘Emptiness and the Heart Sutra’ for many years now. I love the Heart Sutra as a chant, a text to study and as an entryway into the wonderful territory of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. However, I see it primarily as a pointer, a means, for transformative realisation. Realising the Heart Sutra means awakening to Prajñāpāramitā, which also means awakening from the delusions that underlie our unnecessary, self-caused, suffering. We’ll approach that realisation by cultivating the three levels of wisdom: First we listen. The sutra is expressed in concepts and we need to be…

The Satipatthana Sutta, one of the most influential of the Buddha’s discourses, shows how wakeful, insightful attention to body, feelings and mind can enable us to wake up to our true nature. This radically transformative teaching is described as a ‘direct path’ to the cessation of suffering. Offering effective approaches that address the alienation and disembodiment which characterise life today, it can restore a deep integrity of body, heart, mind and being. In this retreat, we’ll explore a number of practice approaches inspired by the original mindfulness teachings attributed to the Buddha that take awareness, insight and compassion ever deeper.…

Central to our dharma life is a simple yet profound distinction; between our direct experience mediated through the senses, and the thoughts and ideas we have about those experiences. We are usually unaware that the concepts we base our sense of self on and navigate our world by, are frequently flawed in a deep and on-going way. We look through the distorted lens of our own views and assumptions, making us an unreliable witness to our own inner experience. On the retreat we’ll cultivate Awareness and Right View, to become mindful of, and curious about, what is actually happening in…

The Buddha taught the divine abodes – unconditional love, compassion, joy and equanimity – not just as states of calm, but as ways to liberate the mind. The Brahmavihara practices enable us to cultivate these qualities and to engage with our afflictive emotions – craving, hatred and ‘ignoring’ – in relation to them. In doing so, we’re already engaging with insightful perspectives. Sooner or later, we’re likely to start glimpsing the uncultivated, unlimited, unconditional nature of these qualities, free from afflictions. We’ll explore these possibilities in the first part of the retreat from a perspective of deep, embodied awareness and…

Dhyāna (jhāna) is far more than samatha, or mental calm. Recognising the liberative potential of the first dhyana was the key to the Buddha’s own awakening and he taught dhyāna as inseparable from insight. Only later did the tradition come to regard the dhyānas as ‘just’ states of concentration. The four dhyānas are, rather, states of deep, embodied mental unity, integrated with awareness of the foundations of mindfulness (satipatthana) and the factors of awakening (bojjhanga). Insight emerges inseparably from dhyāna, hence the title ‘Dhyāna as Insight’. On this retreat, I will be offering embodied approaches to dhyāna that people have…

Deep emptiness is none other than deep compassion, leading to the end of suffering. In “Compassion and Emptiness” we explore the teachings that Bhikkhu Analayo highlights in his book of the same name. These combine the divine abodes with the progressive series of emptiness contemplatins found in the Shorter Suññata Sutta I’ve found that on these retreats we rarely have sufficient time to adequately explore all of the contemplations. It may seem audacious to suppose that we can even approach the emptiness of the formless attainments (ārupa dhyāna). But they are all pointing to ways in which we fabricate ‘self’…

Bodhicitta – the awakening heart – is both the heart–response of wisdom to the suffering of living beings everywhere and the urge to realise full awakening for the benefit of all. This retreat will focus on love, compassion, joy and equanimity – the four ‘divine abodes’ or brahmaviharas – in the context of cultivating bodhicitta. To support this, we’ll also introduce tonglen, the ‘sending and receiving’ practice which opens the heart to universal compassion. The divine abodes are also known as the ‘boundless states’,¬ because they are inclusive of all living beings without exception. The practices that we’ll explore together…