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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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! […]
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 […]
In essence, ‘simply being’ evokes the effortless flow of embodied presence. Presence is this ‘timeless moment’, where there is no observer nor observed, no subject or object. It is always unconditionally ‘here’. Yet, we remain ignorant of it owing to the deep conditioning of our self-narratives. Nevertheless, it is what we are and we […]
Seven days of meditation, lively exploration, and strong, supportive friendship: a space to explore why the wisdom of emptiness is, precisely, compassion. Led by Tejananda, with Kusalacitta leading ritual and meditation in the afternoon slot *** The Heart Sutra is one of the most familiar of all Buddhist texts and, inevitably, there are innumerable takes […]
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 […]
In Zen, a sesshin is a period of especially intense all-the-time formal practice. For three days on this retreat, we will adopt - and adapt - this approach. Each day, there will be several two-hour periods of sitting and walking, and we’ll be opening to the presence of awareness in all of our activities […]
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. […]
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 ‘Three Bodies’ (trikaya) suggests that there is far, far more to the body than meets the eye. These could be summarised as the bodies of truth […]
