Welcome to a full intrdouctory session with Singhashri and Balajit to set the shape and tone of the retreat and unpack its connection to freedom in the body and the heart-mind.

After some grounding, arriving work we look at community agreements for the retreat as well as exploring what each of us might need to participate well. Then we get a deeper evocation of the retreat theme and a chance, of course, just to sit still, take it all in, and prepare ourselves for practice.

Singhashri opens with an arriving practice and sets the day’s theme as “embodying safety, dignity, and belonging,” naming grounding as a thread running through the beginning, middle, and end of the session. She reads a short Rumi poem (“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell… Don’t go back to sleep”) and uses it to frame practice as waking up to what we most deeply need, then links these human needs with Buddhist refuge: the Dharma as a “raft” carrying us from the dangers of saṃsāra toward the safety of Nirvāṇa. Another Rumi poem, Bird Wings, is mentioned as a further touchstone.

A guided reflection follows, inviting people to recall a time they felt even a little safe, dignified, and as if they belonged, then to journal on the conditions that supported that felt sense and what it reveals for practice going forward. The session ends with Balajit leading a body scan to deepen embodied settling and resource a steadier sense of safety in the nervous system.

In this session, Viveka welcomes everyone and leads an arriving sit exploring safety in the body with the question: “What helps my body remember or generate safety?” She then invites people to feed back on their experiences. From here she speaks about how the body can store life experiences and how we can work with that within our practice movingly drawing on her own life experiences making links with wider issues such as xenophobia, racism, and our relationship to the planet.

There is also an invitation to discuss the following questions: Where might you cultivate safety and a sense of safety in your life? How do we become bodies that generate safety inside us and around us? How can we generate fearlessness from this place?

To finish everyone returns to the main space to sit with their experiences, with some final comments on the theme by Viveka. Including a heartfelt appreciation the Bad Bunny Superbowl Halftime Show and its central message of love being stronger than hate!

Balajit invites a short reflection on connection: bringing to mind a recent moment of good communication with another person or a group, noticing what made it feel connecting (e.g., being listened to, warmth, ease), and briefly sharing these qualities. He frames them as “sangha-building” energies that can also be brought into relationship with one’s own inner life.

Balajit then guides a longer sit structured around Lama Govinda’s dimensions of embodiment (as received in Triratna through Sangharakshita): settling into the physical body as weight, shape, and contact with the ground; sensing the energetic dimension (including awareness in the palms and the subtle “energy body”); noticing the mental body of thoughts and images; meeting emotional “weather” in belly and chest without getting lost in it; and opening to the “spiritual body” as sky-like spaciousness, stillness, peace, and possible joy. The meditation repeatedly drops in the earlier connection-qualities—presence, openness, authenticity, non-judgement—as supports for deeper embodied ease.

Viveka begins the session with a short somatic practice exploring the link between the voice and the central energy channel in the body. She then explores how modern culture can resist acknowledging suffering as a form of protection and how, from a Buddhist perspective, suffering acknowledged can be a path of liberation through progressive stages of awakening: suffering – faith – joy – rapture – tranquility – happiness.

Viveka links this to how letting the whole of experience in can open us to beauty. This was beautifully illustrated by the story behind Alysa Liu winning her gold medal at the Olympics for figure skating, embodying ease, joy, and free-flow.

There’s also the chance to explore the following questions:

• What is your own relationship to/practice of beauty and joy?
• What is it to practice joy in our world just now? What does this bring up for you?
• What brings you joy?

She ends on an embodied encouragement to live in the flow as much as we can.

Balajit opens with an arriving practice, checking in with breath, mood, and energy, and settling into the support of the body and ground. Singhashri follows with a longer meditation that “pulls together” the retreat’s themes in lived practice: establishing enough steadiness to feel into the body, noticing the dynamic of opening and contracting, and using a few slightly deeper breaths (and sound on the out-breath) to drop into contact, stillness, and a whole-body sensitivity. Awareness then broadens to include breath, sensations, sounds, and the ground, with repeated permission to begin again whenever the mind wanders.

In the second half, Singhashri introduces the theme of unique social conditioning—how it shapes what feels safe or unsafe, and how it shows up in meditation and relationship—framing the inquiry with the question “what shaped you?” She offers a worksheet from her book to support reflection, then closes with a short “blessings” practice, explicitly titrating back toward resource and steadiness. An opening shared audio thread—“We keep by the ones who circle round to attend these fires…”—sets the tone of companionship, courage, and change.

This session opens with an audio reflection—“what a glorious world… if everybody in the world love everybody in the world”—and then turns to the theme of conditioning as both a challenge and a source of connection. Singhashri frames the inquiry “what shaped you?” through Sangharakshita’s emphasis that the Dharma is a path each person has to walk in their own way, referencing What is the Dharma? and The Path as Symbol (also collected in The Essential Sangharakshita). The reflection widens to include ancestral, cultural, historical, and economic conditioning, inviting a stance that neither idealises nor condemns what has shaped us, and remains open to being “blessed” by what has supported us.

Balajit and Viveka then model the inquiry through personal storytelling. Balajit traces his shaping through family history and the long after-effects of the Second World War—evacuation, London wartime stories, and the “overspill” estates that formed his childhood—showing how collective trauma leaves bodily and cultural traces. Viveka speaks as the child of Chinese immigrants, naming both the stability and pressures of diaspora survival imperatives, and links later social-justice formation to lived experience in West Philadelphia, anti-apartheid activism, and a film about Stephen Biko, articulating a felt belonging with those who have been “unbelonged” and a practice of solidarity across communities.

Balajit opens the session by marking the day as a more meditative one—extended silence and sitting “peppered by readings”—and leads an arriving practice to settle into the body.
He introduces a simple nervous-system settling technique (credited to Stanley Rosenberg’s writing on the vagus nerve), then sets the context of a Zen-style sesshin: an uninterrupted, structured period of practice alternating seated meditation and mindful walking/movement.

Then the practice moves through the sesshin rhythm—sitting, walking, sitting, walking, and a period of lying-down meditation—returning repeatedly to kindness, embodied presence, and coming back from thought-vortices into the senses. Further short readings frame later sits, including meditation instructions from Tilopa (“Neither giving nor taking… leave your mind at rest”) and a closing Tilopa passage on leaving mental activity “just as it is” so consciousness releases into its nature.

Viveka opens the session with gentle qigong-style joint-opening and grounding movement: softening into the feet and earth, circling head, shoulders, wrists and hips, swaying, and then working with breath along the central channel and humming to enliven energy and flow. From there, the session settles into meditation, with repeated invitations to feel support from the ground, soften the “grimace,” and let stability, interconnection, and embodied ease be received rather than forced.

Throughout the practice, Viveka weaves in passages from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Earth Touching, using the poem as a field of mettā and remembrance: “Come back to the here,” “Sustain the mudra of earth touching,” and “Walk as if you were kissing the earth with your feet.” The meditation unfolds in silence and changing postures—sitting, lying down, or walking—as participants are invited to keep returning to mindful breathing, the touch of the earth, and the patient path that is “always waiting” for us to come back.

The session opens with a somatic grounding exercise led by Balajit. Singhashri explores the difference between emotions and kleśas, reflecting on grief, anger, shame, and fear as energies that can be met without turning into hatred or suppression. She references stories from the Pāli Canon, recommends Sangharakshita’s Know Your Mind, and welcomes reminders of Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. 



The session closes with Singhashri’s PEACE meditation—developed while writing for Lion’s Roar and described as her own version of the first and last stages of karuṇābhāvanā—guiding participants through pause, grounding in earth, acknowledging suffering, bringing compassion, and opening into a wider, kinder holding of what is here. We also hear the Padmasambhava mantra to conclude the session.

Balajit continues the retreat’s exploration of difficult emotion with teaching on “loving release and resistance,” beginning with an arriving practice of listening, looking, and sensing the body’s contact with support, and briefly evoking the Bāhiya Sutta’s “in the seen, just the seen; in the heard, just the heard.” He reflects on the qualities that arise when experience is allowed to be—peace, spaciousness, relief, stillness, freedom—and then turns toward what happens when unresolved material surfaces in meditation. Drawing on Sangharakshita, Thich Nhat Hanh, Reginald Ray, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Tara Brach, he frames tension not as a mistake to get rid of but as part of the body’s holding process: something that can be met with patience, kindness, and increasing capacity.

A guided meditation then explores this directly. Balajit invites attention to areas of bracing or contraction in the body, sensing their shape, texture, heat, density, and edges, while noticing any secondary resistance to the tension itself. Rather than trying to relax or fix anything, the practice cultivates equanimity around tension, then widens back to the whole body so that tension is held within a larger field of awareness. From there, resources are brought in—the support of the ground, the wider feeling body, visual contact with the room, or birdsong—so that tension and support can be felt together. The session closes with inquiry into how this work lands in practice, including reflections on nausea, tension, dysregulation, and the need to balance staying present with resourcing and self-care.

After a short grounding exercise led by Singashri, Balajit picks up the previous evening’s firework display as an image for impermanence and insubstantiality, describing all six senses as an ongoing “firework display” of arising and passing experience. He links this with the Kaccānagotta Sutta, using the Buddha’s teaching on the middle way beyond clinging to existence or non-existence to frame the retreat’s exploration of form and emptiness, and to show how deepening mindfulness can reveal the fleeting, conditioned nature of what we take to be solid.

The session then turns toward the heart. Balajit introduces the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta and uses it as the basis for a guided mettābhāvanā: receiving a golden light of wisdom and compassion, then extending that blessing to a good friend, a neutral person, a difficult person, and finally all beings. The inquiry afterwards stays close to lived experience, exploring how sensory openness, emotional sensitivity, safety, and clinging interact, and how compassion practice can help what is held tightly begin to soften and fall away.

To begin our penultimate session we do an arriving exercise around the breath and making mantric sound, with an element of play too.

As an aspect of reviewing the retreat, we explore what supports a sense of safety, dignity, and belonging in the body – and helps with nervous system regulation. Asking, what our vision is for liberation for ourselves and others as reflected in our intentions for practicing,

One way is to look at deeper working with conditionality, remembering the role of beauty and joy in opening to ourselves, one another and the world. And how our unique social conditioning shows up in our practice, and relates to what’s happening now.

We can then connect with how a creative response to fear, grief, shame and anger can support our efforts towards collective liberation.

Finally, we also engage with the Insight dimension of practice. How to deepen into a direct experience of the impermanent, insubstantial nature of experience as a gateway into qualities of the awakened mind. How to let in a co-created and interconnected nature of experience and reality.