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 and approaches, as well as some of what the tradition has to say about dhyāna.

Dhyāna is far more than samatha, or mental calm. Recognising the liberative potential of the first dhyāna was the key to the Buddha’s own awakening and he taught dhyāna as inseparable from insight. Only later did the tradition come to regard the dhyānas as ‘just’ states of concentration.

The dhyānas are, rather, states of deep, embodied mental unity, integrated with awareness of the foundations of mindfulness (satipatthana) and the factors of awakening (bojjhanga). Dhyāna is where insight takes place.

In practice, we’ll ask, ‘what, in our experience, is actually helpful?’ By becoming alive to the energetic immediacy of body experience, resources for entering dhyāna can be discovered as already present – just waiting to be noticed. We’ll explore this in direct experience and delve into the relationship between body, dhyāna and liberative insight.

Following on from his recent five-day retreat (“The Heart’s Awakening”) Bodhipaksa will guide us through a weekend of practices for developing insight through cultivating love, and deepening our capacity for love through developing insight.

• We’ll explore experientially how observing change and impermanence can help us bring more kindness, compassion, and appreciation into our lives.

• We’ll see how dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness) can be regarded as a gift, because it shows us the need for love, which helps us overcome dukkha.

• We’ll reflect on how kindness and the other brahma-viharas are the result of letting go of the sense of self, and how they help us to let go of the sense of self — not just our own sense of self, but the sense we have that others have or are selves.

This won’t be done in an intellectual or theoretical way, but through the path of direct seeing and experience. This retreat is best for people who have at least a year’s consistent experience of lovingkindness practice.

Get Bodhipakṣa’s book ‘The Heart’s Awakening: 108 Steps to a Life of Love’.

‘Wings to Awakening’ is a poetic rendering of ‘bojjhaṅgā’ – seven ‘limbs’ or factors that support bodhi – awakening. The bojjhaṅgās are highlighted in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta as crucial to the fourth contemplation, that of dhammas. They are experiential qualities that we cultivate and are integral to entering and deepening into the four dhyanas – and to awakening itself.

In this three day retreat, we’ll explore how the first three – awareness, discrimination and energy – can support the conditions to enter into the dhyānas. And how the other four – wellbeing, serenity,  samādhi (full integration) and equanimity – successively come to fulfilment.  However far we get with this, the exploration and play with possibilities on this retreat will enrich your meditation practice.

This retreat is a follow-up to ‘Dhyāna and Insight’ earlier in the year, but these explorations stand in their own right and people who were not on the earlier retreat are welcome.