The Awakening Body - Online Retreat! An online weekend of embodied meditation and inquiry with Tejananda and Balajit Our mind - all our conceptual faculties - is not what, or who, we truly are. It cannot awaken. It is our sensate body and the other ‘body senses’ that are our gateways to awakening. On this […]
Online weekend retreat with The Buddhist Centre (Live) Earlier this year we explored how the Buddha's teaching in the Shorter Suññata Sutta establishes emptiness in a very direct and experiential way, by noticing absence. Experience is empty of whatever isn't right here in experience now. This seems obvious, but we delude ourselves into thinking that although something […]
Body Heart Mind Awake – taking the backward step This is my first 'personal' online retreat, exploring the title I've given to my website. 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 […]
The well-known metaphor of ‘a finger pointing at the moon’ is itself a pointer to something essential in dharma practice. It suggests ‘don’t mistake the finger for the moon’. But what is the moon, and what is the finger? The finger could be taken as whatever gets us looking and going in the ‘right’ direction. […]
A weekend exploring suññatā as non-separation In my online retreat earlier in the year, the ‘moon’ to which I was pointing was the unfindability of a separate self. The kind of self that we think we are - persisting, potentially satisfactory and somehow ‘who and what I really am’ - is nothing but a mental […]
Deep emptiness is nothing other than compassion, leading to the end of suffering. In the retreat on “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 emptiness teachings found in the Shorter Suññata Sutta. In this sutta, the Buddha […]
We will start by clarifying a crucial distinction - that between mind and body. Mental contents, such as thoughts and images, cannot awaken. Our conceptual mind is not what, or who, we truly are. It is the immediate experience of our sensate body and the other ‘body senses’ that are our gateways to awakening. […]
