[LIVE]

LOVE AND INSIGHT

A meditation weekend retreat with Bodhipakṣa on the Brahma Viharas
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Day 1    Day 2

What is a Home Retreat? (click to read)

Home Retreats can be tailored to your needs.

We provide:

  • Live Home Retreat events daily
  • Specially curated Dharma resources
  • A chance to catch up each day on the event sessions by video if you missed them – so you can do the retreat in your own time
  • Share your own inspiration and reflections on the private retreat Padlet space (shared by email)
  • A chance to connect with the retreat leader to ask questions about your practice

Whether you have the time to engage with a full-on, urban-retreat style week at home – or are super occupied already with kids or work and just want some useful structure to book-end your days with a little calm and inspiration: this is for you.

Following on from his recent five-day retreat (“The Heart’s Awakening”) Bodhipakṣa 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.

 

All our events are offered by donation. If you can, donate to allow others who can’t afford it to access these vital Dharma resources when they need them most. Thank you!

Suggested donation:
£90-50 | $120-65 | €105-60

 

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Welcome to the retreat


Day 1


watch the Live PRACTICE sessions

Bodhipakṣa opens the session by acknowledging the wider world’s difficulty and inviting a grounded, compassionate arrival. He then guides a meditation that begins with posture (a strong back and an open heart) and introduces “soft eyes” as a key move for broadening attention. From there, the practice shifts mindfulness of breathing away from a single, narrow spot and into the whole body: tracking breathing-related movement and sensation wherever it’s felt, letting attention be spacious and inclusive, and allowing calm, pleasure and joy to emerge naturally—pīti (energised pleasure) and sukha (happiness/well-being)—without straining.

In the teaching and discussion that follows, Bodhipakṣa explores how modern “flashlight attention” (screens, reading, problem-solving) can carry into meditation, and how soft eyes support a more panoramic, easeful awareness. He connects this with mettā as a foundational heart practice—“not looking for kindness, but looking with kindness”—and offers practical ways to work with thoughts and feelings without getting pulled into them. A shorter return to practice reinforces the same principles: embodied breadth, gentle curiosity, and cultivating a steady, kind relationship with whatever is present.

Bodhipakṣa guides a meditation that starts with settling posture and introducing “soft eyes” as a way of opening attention and relaxing effort. From there, the practice stays grounded in the body, letting awareness spread through the whole field of sensation, and inviting kindness and ease to permeate experience rather than trying to “force” calm. The session keeps returning to noticing how attention narrows, how it can soften again, and how thoughts and feelings can be met without being followed.

The teaching then explores how jhāna develops as something we can help to cultivate, not just a state we “arrive” in. Bodhipakṣa reads a passage on the first absorption using Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation (with “mendicants”), highlighting seclusion from sense-desire and unskillful qualities, and clarifying pīti as “aliveness” and sukha as bliss/joy. He also references a Guardian piece discussing Michael Pollan and an experiment suggesting brain activity precedes conscious thoughts, to underline that thoughts arise from conditions rather than from a controlling self—supporting a lighter, less personal way of relating to what appears in meditation.

Bodhipakṣa explores the Buddha’s approach to self-view, stressing that the teaching is not a simple “there is no self,” but a practical invitation to notice how identification (“me” and “mine”) is continually constructed and how any fixed view becomes unhelpful. He touches on trusting our inner ethical sensibility, references his essay sequence “The Boys in the Basement, The Empty Room, and the Plagiarist,” and draws on the Kālāma Sutta to model intellectual integrity around questions like rebirth. He also situates contemporary meditation culture in relation to early texts such as the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and Ānāpānasati Sutta.

The session then moves into short guided practices oriented around trust and impermanence, before shifting into mettā with “soft eyes, kind eyes.” Bodhipakṣa reads the “river flowing down from the mountains” passage on the brevity of life, then guides kindness phrases—“May you be well; may you be at ease; may you be kind to yourself and others”—first toward oneself and then toward someone difficult, using awareness of impermanence to deepen tenderness and urgency. In discussion, he offers practical ways to work with distracting thoughts: expand into the whole body (and even the space around it), notice the feeling-tone underneath the thought, and meet that feeling with compassionate attention so the mind doesn’t need to fabricate relief.


Day 2

watch the Live PRACTICE sessions

Bodhipakṣa introduces “soft eyes, kind eyes” as a practical way to shift out of “flashlight attention” and out of low-level vigilance, describing how softening the gaze supports a parasympathetic “rest and relax” response. He explores working with tiredness not just as a physical issue but also as something to meet emotionally, and he brings in Padmasambhava (the “Second Buddha”) as a model of heroic compassion—mentioning a text attributed to him that includes very down-to-earth advice on fatigue (including, sometimes, simply taking a nap).

A longer guided sit follows as a recap practice: posture and ease, soft eyes, and whole-body breathing. Attention rests with the felt sense of breathing-related movement throughout the body (including subtle “referred” movements), using long out-breaths/sighing to release tension and letting the in-breath naturally energise and brighten the mind. The meditation repeatedly returns to “meeting everything with warmth,” allowing awareness to fill the body like rising and falling waves, and encouraging a steady, kind relationship with whatever is present.

The session begins with a dana (generosity) appeal for Dharmachakra and Bodhipaksa: Please support Bodhipakṣa and Dharmachakra!

This was followed by a 40 minute period of meditation where Bodhipaksa continues to encourage us to broaden and embody the breadth of their experience through the breath while keeping a kindly perspective on whatever is arising. He lightly explores the insubstantial and impermanent nature of all things by drawing our attention to the everchanging flow of sensations in the body, mind and environment.

Following the sit, Bodhispaksa speaks about the importance of love, joy and mettā (loving kindness) as a foundational aspect of practice, particularly as a safeguarding practice against intense or negative experiences in meditation. He draws out the significance of this touching on the advice of the Buddha in the Vesāli Sutta in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, on scientific evidence, and on lived experience. There is then a period of Q & A on this theme, which also touches on trauma-informed mindfulness.

Bodhipaksa finishes the session with a period of just sitting, to absorb the practice, encouraging us always to view the world from the perspective of this flow of experience. He also brings in the 16 stages of mindfulness meditation.

We begin the final session with a sneak peek at a brand new website from Dharmachakra, exemplifying the spirit of play in the Dharma and what your dana (generosity) supports. Give now if you can to help keep this free for everyone!

Then it’s straight into meditation together, the mind resting with, rooted in our breath: noticing sensations, our awareness potentially that little bit brighter and sharper as ‘experience comes to us. We can look for enjoyment and ease, we can be present to whatever arises.

Bodhipakṣa then beautifully unpacks the ways the Buddha talks about dhyana and insight, our whole experience tingling with change and challenging the way we usually see things. With reference to the Jhana Sutta, he explore the skandhas, starting with the lack of any fixed, self-nature in any ‘form’ through the lens of science and atomic analysis where there is mass, energy and yet the idea (for us) of solidity.

Feeling too can lend itself to the misapprehension of permanence and solidity, and Bodhipakșa encourages us to gently investigate how meditation can help us loosen up our sense of the ‘texture’ of our feeling experience and our perception of its apparent fixedness. The same for thought, for samskaras (habits, choices, “movements of our being”, conditioned by experience and view), for desire, and for consciousness itself (vijnana – tentatively explored as “divided knowing’).

We also hear about Mara as “the death of the spiritual life” – all the forces within us that get in the way of understanding things clearly. All the things that cause us to fear and act from fear. The Buddha describes the skandhas themselves as a manifestation of Mara. Bodhipakṣa enjoins us to learn to recognise Mara in our own life, and to calmly work to acknowledge the effect on us as a practice that can help overcome the fear at the root.

We close with a guided reflection looking at how insubstantial all of the things that make us up actually are. Sitting with soft eyes, with kind eyes, a body alive and an open field of attention.

Everything we offer is by donation – give today and help us keep it free for everyone!


We hope you find the Home Retreat helpful. We are committed to providing excellent Dharma resources and spaces to connect with community online and go deeper in your practice. And to keeping this free to access for anyone who needs it! If you can, donate and help us reach more people like you.

Make a regular gift and you’ll be supporting Home Retreats through the years ahead.

Thank you from our team and from the online community around the world!

May you be well!

Suggested donation:
£90-50 | $120-65 | €105-60

 

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With deep thanks to Bodhipakṣa and the Dharmachakra team for their generosity in setting up the conditions for this retreat, as well as leading live events each day.

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