Weekend Urban Retreat at Manchester Buddhist Centre
2024-12-14 10:30 - 2024-12-15 16:00 (Europe/London) | Manchester Buddhist Centre, 16-20 Turner Street, MANCHESTER, M4 1DZ, United Kingdom
Flagging up these dates for my forthcoming December weekend workshop for Order members and mitras at the Manchester Buddhist Centre. I’ll share full details as soon as the theme is settled.
Both days will start at 10.30 am and finish at 4.00 pm. Booking is now available on the website link below.
Watch this space!

Dhyana Through the Body - residential retreat at Rivendell
2024-12-06 16:30 - 2024-12-13 10:00 | Rivendell, Chillies Lane, High Hurstwood, East Sussex, TN22 4AB, United Kingdom
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 shamatha (mental tranquillity) as well as for the sheer psycho-somatic pleasure that some of these states afford. On this retreat, we’ll be suggesting approaches that people have found to be helpful and effective for entering into dhyana. This may well involve questioning both our own views and approaches, and some of what the tradition has to say about dhyana. We’ll proceed on the basis of asking ‘What, in our experience, is and is not actually helpful?’
We have found that by becoming alive to the immediacy of our sensate experience, particularly body experience, resources for entering absorption 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 and between body, awareness and insight.
This retreat is now fully booked but you can join the waiting list

Form is empty - is it? - Online retreat
2024-11-29 19:00 - 2024-12-01 17:30 | ONLINE
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 isn’t ‘here’, it’s still ‘there’ in some way, even when we don’t experience it.

Say you’ve been somewhere away from home (even just out shopping) – where is that place in experience now? Quite simply, it’s nowhere, other than in our imagination. This is not suggesting that the place ‘doesn’t exist’, it’s about directly knowing the distinction between what is experienced and what is imagined or mentally constructed. Once we gain clarity around this, the liberating path of insight (prajñā) can unfold.

We’ll use the Buddha’s method to explore areas of our experience of bodily form, space and consciousness – gaining clarity about what is actual experience, what is imagined or constructed and what the emptiness teachings are actually pointing to.

Click here for the booking details

The Awakening Body - Online weekend co-led with Balajit
2024-11-22 16:00 - 2024-11-24 17:30 | East Sussex
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 weekend we’ll start by clarifying the distinction between mind and body. This will lead us into an exploration of embodiment – literally, coming to our senses. Embodiment can take us deep into the experiential truths about our nature to which Buddhist teachings are pointing.
We can also discover subtler dimensions of embodiment in our experience, including the energy body and even the mentally unfabricated dharma body.
Our body is potentially a source of wisdom. At the same time, we have a ‘pain body’. This holds all the tensions, contractions and emotional avoidance patterns that have built up. These patterns, and the suffering associated with them, can gradually release through turning towards them. We will be exploring how to deepen into this vital transforming work.
Join us from 4pm on Friday the 22nd November to 5.30pm on Sunday 24th.
Please note this retreat is only open to people who have been practising within the context of the Triratna Community for at least three years.
After you have reserved a space you will be sent a confirmation email. Closer to the event, you will be sent an email with a Zoom link, where the event will be hosted.
Dana
This retreat is offered on a dana (donation) basis. Donations can be made either before, during or after the event. A link for dana will be sent closer to the start of the event. The dana is to support the retreat leaders in meeting their living costs and being able to organise and run these events.
No one is turned away for lack of funds.
Session Timings
The session timings (UK) will be:
Friday
16.00 – 17.30
19.30 – 21.00
Saturday
9.30 – 12.00
16.00 – 17.30
19.30 – 21.00
Sunday
9.30 – 12.00
16.00 – 17.30
Click on ‘website’ below for booking details

The Awakening Heart and the Divine Abodes - Vajraloka
2024-11-08 16:30 - 2024-11-17 09:30 | Vajraloka, Tyn Y Ddol, Corwen, Denbighshire, LL21 0EN, United Kingdom
Co-led with Rijumitra

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 on this retreat are all ways of opening our hearts and responding to the joys and sufferings of living beings – opening to the inseparable wisdom and compassion of the awakening heart itself.
This retreat is suitable for people who have been meditating for at least 3 years

Entering the Mandala of Awakening: The Four Great Stages of the Path - residential Order Retreat - Vajraloka
2024-10-04 16:30 - 2024-10-25 09:30 | Vajraloka, Tyn Y Ddol, Corwen, Denbighshire, LL21 0EN, United Kingdom
Co-led with Prakasha
This retreat is for members of the Triratna Buddhist Order only
This retreat will introduce the four principal stages of the spiritual path. Firstly, the contemplation of the three lakshanas. Secondly, entry into the three liberations. Thirdly, the exploration of the perceptual situation. Fourthly, entry into the Mandala of Awakening. Through this approach we gain a deeper understanding of the four levels of Sunyata that Sangharakshita introduces.
Prakasha will give a series of presentations that clarify the stages of the Path leading to Awakening. Tejananda will introduce a parallel series of integrated, somatic and meditative inquiry-based approaches to calm and insight based on the principles of the Triratna system of practice.
The retreat will mostly be in silence with meditation reviews, pujas and ritual.
Currently full, but check with Vajraloka in case places become available at short-term notice

Meditation and inquiry weekend at Triratna Highland Buddhist Centre, Inverness
2024-09-21 10:00 - 2024-09-22 16:30 | East Sussex
Mind, Body and the Three Marks
Distinguishing our mental activities (‘mind’) from immediate sense experience (‘body’) is vital to all kinds of meditation. If we can develop clarity about this, we can become increasingly embodied and no longer try to ‘think’ ourselves into meditation.
This clarity is essential to mindfulness of breathing, metta bhavana, and ‘clear-seeing’ (vipashyana) practice, such as contemplating the first two ‘marks’ of conditioned existence, impermanence and unsatisfactoriness. On day one, we’ll explore all of this.
On day two, we’ll focus more on the third ‘mark’ – that “I am separate”. This is better known as anatta, ‘not-self’, but this core pointing-out on the Buddha’s part isn’t suggesting that we’re non-existent! Rather, it is pointing us back to our essentially undivided nature.
As Sangharakshita commented: “delusion may … be there in the form of a belief in a fixed, unchanging self or essence or soul, but that … is not there, it never was and it never will be.”
On the basis of unconditional love and calm, embodied, aware presence, we’ll explore our experience to see how we create and sustain the delusion of separation and a self-other divide.
Each day will run from 10.00 – 4.30

Simply Being - Dhanakosa
2024-09-13 16:30 - 2024-09-20 09:30 | Dhanakosa, DHANAKOSA Buddhist Retreat Centre, Balquhidder, Lochearnhead, FK19 8PQ, Scotland, Balquhidder, Scotland, FK19 8PQ, United Kingdom
‘Simply being’ points to the aliveness and awakeness that we can recognise at any moment. It’s an openness to full presence, our full being – in body, senses and awareness. It points to being what we really are, beyond conceptual fabrication. In recognising and opening to the steady and spacious aspects of experience here and now, we may glimpse a timeless awareness-emptiness that is inseparable from loving, compassionate energy.
We’ll explore all this through sitting meditation, experiential ‘lookings’ and by discovering our own direct experience as awareness, simplicity, intimacy and aliveness. These qualities are gateways to the five ‘undivided knowings’ (jnanas) which are the essence of the mandala of the five Buddhas. This offers a very practical ‘map’ of our immediate experience, pointing to what has been here all along, unnoticed – simply being.

Compassion and Emptiness - Vajraloka
2024-08-30 16:30 - 2024-09-06 09:30 | Vajraloka, Tyn Y Ddol, Corwen, Denbighshire, LL21 0EN, United Kingdom
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 in a spirit of openness and curiosity.
This will provide us with an excellent basis for our contemplations of emptiness. Based on the ‘Shorter Discourse on Emptiness’, an early Buddhist text, this approach to emptiness is less analytical and more experiential than many of those developed in later Mahayana schools. Starting with our everyday experience, it enables us to ‘experience’ emptiness progressively in relation to some subtle states of formless meditation and the liberation of ‘signlessness’. It doesn’t matter how far through this progression we manage to get – emptiness is emptiness and discovering it in relation to our ordinary experience now can be quite profound enough!
Currently full, but check with Vajraloka in case places become available at short-term notice
