About the Retreat - Taking the Backward Step Mind is usually taken to mean all kinds of mental activity, but what we’re interested in here is ‘mind itself’ – the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Accessing dhyana (jhana), or absorption, seems to be very natural for some people, and a complete mystery to others. Dhyana is well worth cultivating as a way of deepening […]
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 […]
On this retreat, I will be offering embodied approaches to dhyāna (jhāna) that people have found to be helpful and effective. This may well involve questioning both our own views […]
The Heart Sutra is one of the most well-known and loved of all Buddhist texts. Inevitably, there are innumerable takes on what it ‘means’. Early western commentators treated it […]
“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 […]
Our ‘precious human body’ is the first and most important foundation not just of mindfulness, but of meditation and Dharma practice as a whole. The teaching of the Buddha’s […]
“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 […]
