Friday 13th to Sunday 15th June, 2025

Weekend retreat: Singhashri & Balajit guide practical Buddhist methods to meet anxiety and grow a fearless, compassionate heart.

Many meditators come to practice in the hope of reducing or even getting rid of difficult feelings like stress and anxiety. Yet, to feel anxiety about our lives and especially the current state of our world is a completely understandable and even appropriate response. So how do we learn to listen deeply to our anxiety without allowing it to overwhelm us?

Anxiety can have a debilitating effect on our lives. Popular techniques that emphasise trying to calm or relax, whilst having a place, on their own provide surface and temporary relief. Buddhism teaches that contracted mental states are driven by deeper underlying causes and conditions that through practice can be seen through and released.

Anxiety is also sending us an important message: that we are struggling to tolerate our current bodily experience. It is a messenger of information. On this practical and experiential weekend retreat, guided by the core teachings of the Buddha, we will be exploring effective and creative ways of responding to this.

How in relationship with others, can we resource ourselves to stay present to our body of experience that includes others and the world? How do we build emotional resilience and therefore be less vulnerable to overwhelm? How can we show up in the world with a more fearless compassionate heart?

Triratna Earth Sangha – Online day retreat

Members of the Triratna Earth Sangha are offering this retreat as part of BAM (Buddhist Action Month) 2025. This year’s theme is the same as the the theme if this retreat: Sowing seeds of compassion in the world.

Buddhist Action Month (BAM) is an annual opportunity to put our Buddhist values into action. It’s a time to reflect on how our compassion manifests in the world, celebrate what we are already doing, and challenge ourselves to do more. Founded by the Network of Buddhist Organisations in 2012, BAM quickly grew into a month-long initiative every June, inspiring practical action throughout the year. Individuals, groups, and Buddhist Centres across the world participate each year, making a collective impact.

This year the theme is ‘Sowing Seeds of compassion in the world’, which includes creating stories of positive ecological and climate action to inspire others so we can face the future together more joyfully. We invite you to get involved in ecological and climate action in your local communities by joining already existing groups and creating your own.

To act with gentleness and endeavour towards the collective wellbeing of all life, is to follow the Buddhist path and our aspiration to address suffering. The future emerges from our present actions and therefore sowing seeds is the most important thing we can do – both literally and metaphorically.

Join us for our day retreat online on 7 June as we explore this theme!

Join Yashobodhi on this day retreat for a breath of fresh air through meditation and reflective writing.

The writing we’ll do together is about process rather than product. We are not crafting polished texts, but using our writing for reflections and explorations.

It would be ideal if you attended both parts of the day, but you are also welcome to only come to the morning or the afternoon.

What to expect from the day:

• guided meditation

• prompts for reflective writing

• some interaction in friendly, optional small groups (3-4 people)

• hopefully some new insights!

Come along and delve a bit deeper: explore reflective writing with us to connect with yourself and others.

Sunday 29th June, 2025

First session (3 hrs): USA & Canada PT 2:00 am | México CST 3:00 am | USA & Canada ET 5:00 am | IE & UK BST 10:00 am | Europe CEST 11:00 am | India IST 2:30 pm | Australia AEST 7:00 pm | New Zealand NZST 9:00 pm

Second session (2.5 hrs): USA & Canada PT 6:30 am | México CST 7:30 am | USA & Canada ET 9:30 am | IE & UK BST 2:30 pm | Europe CEST 3:30 pm | India IST 7:00 pm | Australia AEST 11:30 pm | New Zealand NZST 1:30 am (next day)

Event image by Kseniya Lapteva

Connecting and engaging with whatever truly moves and sustains us!

“We heal through the imagination, through images and fictions.”

James Hillman, ‘Healing Fiction’

At its best, meditation practice and Dharma reflection can be a means to help us gain access to the unseen underlying currents and forces that shape our lives. Yet, as practitioners in day to day life, many of us can still have an experience of somehow being ‘out of touch’ both with ourselves and with the world in all its fullness.

On this Home Retreat, Paramananda will bring his usual rich blend of meditation, magic, warmth, encouragement, challenge, poetry, authenticity and diamond-sharp clarity to help us contact something deeper that can transform this feeling of loss and restore our sense of agency with the mysterious reaches of our being.

We’ll share the space online together: listening internally; paying attention to what’s arising and passing away; sharing and questioning with a profound curiosity; and activating our imagination to try to connect and engage with whatever truly moves and sustains us. You never know what you’ll find under the surface of things! By learning to settle and rest in an experience of ‘soul’ we can begin to feel the flow of the ever-changing river that runs through it and mysteriously nourishes us in ways that are genuinely restoring for the heart.

Join us for an emergent space that will include meditation, poetry, reflections, small and large group discussions and enquiry, teaching input, drumming, guided practices, and creative Buddhist ritual.

This retreat is presented in collaboration with Melbourne Buddhist Centre. The second session each day will be broadcast live from the Centre shrine room in Melbourne. Come and practise in truly international community!

FRIDAY JULY 11 – THURSDAY JULY 17

A home retreat exploring awareness, acceptance, and wisdom.

Awareness is crucial to Insight, but a Dharma perspective is even more important. Without ‘Right View’ informing what we’re aware of, we run the risk of reinforcing ‘wrong views’. Wrong views are naturally present in the unenlightened state, but we can train ourselves to become aware of those ideas and distortions through learning to watch our minds. Mind watching reveals how we are relating to whatever is happening in experience, whether it be a thought, an emotion, or an arising through one of our senses.

We can relate to experience with acceptance, interest, and impartiality. Or we can resist and proliferate around what is happening, seeing a painful state grow before our eyes, feeling that we are seemingly powerless to stop it. All our dukkha; our dis-ease, dissatisfaction and disappointment come from this resistance.

We can see Right View as a ‘curative’ perspective. It helps us see how we cling and how through that clinging we create our own suffering. Mindfulness and Right View give us tools to relate to ourselves in ways that don’t create further suffering for ourselves or others. We have freedom from fixed views and wise attentiveness in the palm of our hands.

There will be talks and led meditations, using the framework of the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha’s primary teaching on Mindfulness. We’ll relate the sutta to the aspects of Spiritual Death and Spiritual Receptivity in our Mandala of Practice.

We will meditate using all 4 postures (walking, sitting, standing and lying down). The emphasis is on continuity of awareness outside of formal practice times. You will receive encouragement to stay present to whatever is happening, and whatever is needed, in any moment. This is a receptive and flexible approach to awareness with kindness as an implicit thread running through it, and understanding and wisdom, a potential in every moment.

Friday 1st August – Tuesday 5th August