An online retreat on spiritual death and rebirth

The Auckland Buddhist Centre is delighted to invite you to a weekend retreat on The Buddhist Centre Live in collaboration with the team at Dharmachakra.

Featuring experienced Triratna teachers and leaders from both hemispheres, this is a wonderful chance wherever you live to meet a new set of friends in our worldwide community. Join us as we embrace new beginnings together on a special online weekend retreat honouring the sacred spaces of our lives and the many re-makings of ourselves we go through on the Dharma path.

This retreat will feature inspiring keynote talks from Suryagupta and Paramartha, and a chance to meditate and connect with Dharma friends in the Auckland sangha who will be sharing their personal stories of letting go and building their practice anew.

Hosted by Jnanadhara and Suvarnadhi, this event is also a fundraiser for the renovation of the new Auckland Buddhist Centre in Aotearoa, NZ.

Friday 25th April – Sunday 27th April

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