Home Retreats can be tailored to your needs during the lockdown.

We provide:

• Daily, specially recorded teachings
• Related Dharma resources
• Support, perspective and inspiration from our team online during the live retreat
• Live Home Retreat events
• And 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.

Home Retreats can be tailored to your needs during the lockdown.

We provide:

• Daily, specially recorded teachings
• Related Dharma resources
• Support, perspective and inspiration from our team online during the live retreat
• Live Home Retreat events
• And 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.

The Dynamic Mandala (or Integrated Mandala)

Sangharakshita laid out five principles of meditation which became the foundation of Triratna’s system of practice. This week’s retreat engages with all of them in an integrated, somatic (ie body-based) way as a way of approaching both shamatha (calming/focused) and vipashyana (insight/wisdom) aspects of meditation.

As regards your existing meditation practices, in many ways it involves simplifying and honing them down to essentials.

A brief overview of the integrated approach:

1. Integration – becoming present in our experience by attending to posture, soma (body/energy), hara (lower abdomen), core, breath. As hindrances abate, shamatha (calm) manifests.

2. Positive emotion – further ‘integrating’ with the direct somatic experience of the heart centre and its qualities. Opening to any feelings that are present, letting them be what they are. Opening to kindness, sensitivity, confidence, unconditional love, compassion, etc. Allowing or simply noticing that the heart qualities are boundless.

3. Spiritual death – now, integrating vipashyana (insight/wisdom) inquiry into direct experience. Using prajna (wise discernment) as a nonconceptual ‘tool’ to become experientially clear regarding our essential nature and what is. Somatically, exploring shape, boundaries, somatic space, sensations, somatic energy. Inquiring into all kinds of sense experience – including mental activities – for the substantial entity which our self-narrative posits that ‘I am’.

4. Spiritual rebirth – the corollary of any seeing-through of a previously held illusion (i.e. a ‘spiritual death’), is the state of positive freedom from that illusion and seeing ‘what is’, in its absence. With any such deepening or paradigm shift, there sooner or later comes an arising of unintegrated ‘stuff’ (‘laundry’) that needs integrating – this is the ‘work’ of the spiritual rebirth aspect.

5. Receptivity – effortless and spontaneous integration and embodiment of all the previous principles. Formless shamatha-vipashyana. Unbounded, whole, undivided being.

At any given moment you’ll be working with one of the principles mainly, but aspects of the others are potentially involved. The idea is to ‘integrate’ the successive principles – the ‘previous’ ones are carried on into the next principle that’s being brought into focus.

Integration (embodied presence)

This primarily means integration of dissipated energies, in the broadest sense. Deluded states are characterised by mental proliferation and distraction (prapanca) and little awareness of the other sense fields. So-called ‘concentration’ practices use the mental quality of attention to focus awareness on a single object – commonly the breath – and bring attention back to the object whenever proliferation resumes. Eventually, the mind quietens down. However, there are more relaxed and less wilful ways of achieving access or ‘basic presence’.

Posture is a way into embodiment and presence:

• grounding/earthing – bringing awareness to the strong sensations at the base of our posture (buttocks, legs, feet).
• Aware of the effects of gravity, a direct ‘energetic’ connection with the earth.
• Sense of ‘lift’ or rising energy via breathing up from the earth, through the core, or using the ‘sky hook’ tugging at the top of the head.
• Alignment and poise – tuck chin without bending neck forwards and subtly check whether the torso is leaning over in one direction or other. Find the ‘sweet spot’ of optimum poise in the upper body.
• Let go of whatever tensions, contractions etc. can be let go of. There will most likely be tensions that are resistant at present, but explore to what extent they will allow release.
• Hara, heart and head: Bringing these three centres into awareness and harmonious relation can open out a deeper sense of embodiment and presence.

Getting into ‘basic presence’ – or access: Whatever somatic method you are using for ‘integration’, it’s a question of addressing whatever factors are hindering you from steady presence in whatever you’re focusing on. ‘Basic presence’ is when the hindrances are all in abeyance and you’re basically present in whatever is arising.

A somatic way of addressing hindrances:

• Having a sense of the hara, heart and ‘core’ or central channel (the area of this behind the heart centre is often effective) are the basis of this approach. This doesn’t interrupt your ‘integration’ practice insofar as you are still focusing on an aspect of your somatic experience.
• With ‘sinking’ hindrances (sloth, torpor), bring the awareness up to the crown of the head and open the eyes, maybe looking straight ahead or slightly upwards.
• With ‘upwards’ or heady hindrances (restlessness/anxiety and doubt), try “enfolding” the thoughts in awareness and on the in-breath, bringing them down into the hara where, on the out-breath, they dissolve.
• With both desire (projecting forward, towards) and aversion or ill-will (projecting backwards, away), bring awareness strongly into the core, e.g. the part of the ‘central channel’ behind the heart and just in front of the spinal column.

The advantage of this approach from the point of view of calming the mind (shamatha) is that it involves the minimum of thinking about what hindrance you’re in and what antidote to use – awareness ‘unhooks’ from the hindrance and returns to the soma directly and the mental activity tends to reduce of itself.

All the same, if these somatic approaches don’t work for you, feel free to use other appropriate antidotes. The underlying question is: ‘is this reducing mental proliferation or not? Always feel free to try a different approach if the one you’re using is not reducing proliferation.

Finding somatic space: Once proliferation and dullness has died down, you’re in access or basic presence – you’re really present in or as whatever experience is happening. Being aware of the whole breathing body, notice whether the sensations are ‘heavy’ or ‘light’ – does a body sensation have any weight as such? Get a sense of the soma as a ‘cloud’ of living, energetic and ever-changing sensations. Then, using the metaphor of the cloud, become aware of the ‘space’ in which the sensations are happening. Can you find any boundaries to that sense of space? Having a sense of unbounded somatic space is helpful when it comes to the ‘integrated’ approach to positive emotion and the ‘boundless states’ of love, compassion, joy and equanimity.

Positive emotion (heart qualities)

On the basis of somatic integration, bring awareness to the heart centre – another aspect of the soma – as you’re experiencing it now. Notice and let go of any assumptions that the heart ‘ought’ to be a certain way. What are its qualities now? Possibilities could include anything between open or contracted, blissful or painful, connected or disconnected, richly alive or just inaccessible, and so on. Be open to whatever turns up, turn towards it. Simply doing this is already an activity of metta and compassion.

You can drop a question into the heart, such as ‘what is the heart’s wish?’ or ‘what does my heart most deeply long for?’ If you remain open, you may find a word, image or feeling emerges which reveals more of the heart’s nature to you. You can, in fact, drop any ‘existential’ question or inquiry into the heart in this way. Be clear that the response comes from your heart & being, rather than from the conceptualising mind.

Metta – benevolence, well-wishing, goodwill, unconditional kindly regard, or simply love – and other divine abode qualities need to be ‘simple’ to be integrated. It’s fine to do the full metta bhavana practice if this is helpful or needful at this stage, but what is ‘integrated’ is the simple sense of all-pervading metta that the final stage involves. This involves first contacting metta as ‘already here’ – can you simply open to it and find it? If you just assume it’s here to be opened to, you may well discover that it actually is. Then you allow it to pervade ‘whatever is here’ in direct experience, i.e. everything that we sense and are (not just what we conceive as ‘in me’). Keep with awareness of the heart and see whether the benevolence seems to be located in, or radiate from, the heart. There can come a moment when the heart centre ‘ignites’ with the divine abode quality, but don’t be concerned if it doesn’t happen in this way for you.

Then, recollecting somatic space, recognise that the boundary of ‘what I am’ is just a mental assumption and can be let go. The benevolence or compassion etc. can now become boundless, without limits. It can include particular individuals (people, animals, trees, rocks…) or be ‘without an object’, which means simply for everyone and everything – there aren’t any rules, let it take its course. This brings the practice into the area of spiritual death – there is just metta rather than it being ‘my’ metta, or ‘me’ having metta for ‘them’.

Unconditional love: this is realising that maitri is just here or ‘simply is’ – not me or mine, not ‘what I am’ in the limited-self sense (to that, it is ‘other’) but what I am in the ultimate or true sense. Thus it can seem either ‘other’ or ‘here’ – or both. It’s not the ‘metta’ that ‘I bhavana’, i.e. not what I fabricate – it’s unconditional (=unconditioned) love, sensitivity, compassion, joy, equanimity, peace, gratitude, confidence-trust and other ‘heart qualities’.

Can I open to unconditional love that is already here and doesn’t need to be developed?

Spiritual death (seeing through)

Spiritual death has two aspects – the wisdom practices we do in order to make the dharma teachings experiential and any actual arising of insight, the latter being a ‘seeing through’ of a particular delusion or ‘seeing clearly’. This could be called an actual spiritual death – what has ‘died’ is a delusion we were holding onto. We’ll look at this latter aspect more under the heading of spiritual rebirth.

The most ‘basic’ insight from which the path of vipashyana really begins is seeing through the deluded view of existing as a substantial and separate ‘self’ entity. We constantly reinforce this self-view by immersing ourselves in ‘the story of me’. Along with this view goes a largely unconscious cognitive-emotional holding to our being separate and special (including especially flawed, unlovable, etc.).

Before anything else, it’s important to bring the ‘story of me’ into consciousness – become aware of our telling it, whether the story is a happy or a painful one. Then we use insight practices to see directly that the separate, independent, substantial ‘self’ which our self-narrative takes as ‘me’ is, in fact, ‘not me, not mine, not myself, not what I am’.

It’s important to be clear that the not-self teaching is pointing to a delusory view of separation which gives rise to dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness) – it’s not implying that somehow ‘we don’t exist’ – this is a common misunderstanding. It is the delusion itself which is not real and it’s this which ‘dies’ when the self-view is seen through.

If we’re not a substantial, separate self, what are we? In a sense, we’re just what we’ve always been – the not-self teaching does not negate experience of body, senses, memories, relationships, personality and other proclivities – all of these still arise, but they do so without the often-painful narrative of a separate ‘me’, sustaining the self-view. This is something of the import of the Buddha’s teaching to Bahiya. We do not exist in a substantial, separate or independent way; rather, we are completely connected and interdependent with life, others and the world – with wholeness or totality.

The occurrence of a spiritual ‘death’, in the sense of an arising of insight, represents the seeing-through and waking up from a delusion which has been tightly held energetically-emotionally. It is the deluded view that ‘dies’ and as a direct result we wake up to the immediate experience of energetic-emotional freedom around that release.

If a seeing-through is thorough, it will tend to persist. If that’s the case, seeing and knowing that the ‘self’ to which the self-view refers does not exist can be directly and non-conceptually recollected at any time.

If the seeing-through is more of the nature of a glimpse, that kind of direct recollection won’t be possible and you may have a sense of trying to ‘get back to’ the insight. It would be better to engage one of the ‘basic insight’ methods above.

There can be energetic / somatic / phenomena around an insight which are by-products, e.g. priti, bliss, lights, visionary experiences, and these can be mistaken for the ‘actual insight’. Hence, when they cease, it can feel like the insight has been lost, but this is not (necessarily) the case.

Looking into the self-view: We cling to the self-view in a variety of ways so we need to use a variety of perspectives:

a) To enter into the territory, we can contemplate of the six-elements or five skandhas as ‘not me, not mine, not my self” in order to get a sense that ‘we’ are simply the processes of the elements and skandhas – no separate, stable entity can be found. Also reflecting that the principle of dependent arising, “this being, that becomes”, etc. demonstrates that no phenomenon exists substantially in its own right or from its own side.

b) With the experiential somatic approach, integrating the spiritual death aspect is quite straightforward. Having already become integrated somatically, with the positive emotion being integral, you integrate the spiritual death aspect by non-conceptually inquiring into direct experience of the body. Experiential inquiry can then be extended into the other sense fields.

– Having ‘integrated’ embodiment and heart-qualities, have direct experience of the ‘somatic cloud’ as somatic energy and somatic space then ‘look’ or ‘feel’ into your immediate non-conceptual experience of the somatic body.

– Explore the sense of ‘solidity’ regarding body experience vs. finding as sense of ‘somatic space’. This can profitably have been done already as an aspect of somatic integration and can lead to direct experience of openness / emptiness of soma. It’s also helpful in getting a sense of the boundless aspect of metta and the other brahmaviharas.

– We impute weight and lightness in the body, but are sensations ‘heavy’ or ‘light’ in themselves? Discern whether, in your immediate experience, the body is solid and bounded or spacious and unbounded. Then look (with awareness, not the conceptual mind) for the ‘me’ our narrative imputes when we think, for example, ‘this is my body’. Where is this ‘me’ in the ‘somatic cloud’ – can it be found? What do we suppose it it would look or feel like if we actually found it?

– Then, can you actually experience an ‘inside’ separate from ‘outside’ (i.e. inside ‘me’ or outside ‘me’)? At first, it’s probably most accessible via the body as ‘somatic cloud’ and the sphere of sounds.

c) Recollect (or discover) that neither past, future nor present can be found in experience, that time is a mere concept – it’s always ‘now o’clock’. Right now ‘when’ can the separate self-entity we suppose ‘ourselves’ to be actually exist?

d) If the thought arises ‘I’m the thinker’, look at how thoughts arise. Can you find a self-entity which somehow pre-thinks and decides the thought ‘I’ am about to have? Do ‘we’ ever actually decide the thought we’re going to have next? Even with thoughts that seem quite deliberate.

e) If it seems that ‘I’m the decider’, take a walk (without any pre-planning) and notice how it comes about that we go this way or that, walk on this side of the road or the other – how do what we subsequently define as ‘decisions’ actually arise? Do they arise from an executive self-in-the-head, or from a whole admixture of contingent arisings?

Spiritual rebirth (freedom)

Spiritual rebirth as a principle is the natural corollary of a spiritual death. As mentioned above, an actual experience of ‘spiritual death’ or vipashyana is an arising of insight – a shift from what I thought was the case about some aspect of ‘me’ or ‘the world’ to a clear, experiential, non-conceptual knowing ‘this is how it actually is’. This means an aspect of delusion has been seen through. Such seeings-through can be temporary or persistent.

Spiritual rebirth arises as a direct knowing together with a genuine shift in our way of being. What we’ve seen through is one of our self-sustaining ‘ego stratagems’. These stratagems always involve self-referential, afflictive ‘negative’ emotions (klesha).

As these stratagems cause and indeed are dukkha (unsatisfactory), when one of them has been seen through, there is a sense of liberation and freedom. This is the ‘positive’ corollary of a spiritual death – the sense of freedom when a certain dukkha-causing holding on or delusion has simply dropped away – and it can be quite blissful for a while. Sometimes it’s not so much blissful as just a kind of wholesome feeling – it just feels ‘right’.

Enjoy it when it’s like this because generally, sooner or later, it just becomes the ‘new normal’ and no longer feels like anything special. Though actually, if you look back, you’ll almost certainly notice that there is less secondary dukkha in your experience now. Another very likely development following any such shift in our being is the emergence of previously unacknowledged layers of reactivity. This is good news! Working with this insightfully is the active aspect of spiritual rebirth.

The fundamental ‘basic’ insight – the actual spiritual death – is seeing directly the illusoriness of the view we have of ‘me’ (atta) as potentially permanent, satisfactory and substantial. Put another way, it’s a direct seeing that the supposed separate ‘self’ is merely a product of our internal narratives (stories) – it doesn’t exist outside of our narratives. Thus the self-view could also be described as the ‘narrative self’. Either way, this view is what is seen through.

As long as the self-view is intact, there is always an underlying sense of lack – sometimes described by theists as a ‘God-shaped hole’. Whether we’re theists or not, all humans feel this lack as it’s a fundamental aspect of ‘secondary’ dukkha, and we attempt to remedy it via acquisition and rejection, i.e. getting what we want (craving) and avoiding whatever feels threatening (aversion). This ‘hole’ can never be filled because it is ultimately nothing other than the very view, or rather deeply held belief, that we are separate and lacking.

The self-view together with the craving and aversion which support it arise directly from delusion or ignorance (avidya) – literally our ‘not-knowing’ that permanence, satisfactoriness and substantiality are simply unavailable. The ‘narrative self’ – our mind – is always seeking something which we hope will permanently and dependably fill the ‘empty hole’ in our being thus confirming our substantiality and giving us the real lasting satisfaction we long for. This is never going to happen – because it’s based on the delusion that permanence, satisfactoriness and substantiality are actually available.

All these stratagems to ‘fill the hole’, are called kleshas, or ‘afflictions’. Kleshas are ‘self-support stratagems’ which have become deeply entrenched, compulsive habits (samskaras) in which we impulsively and compulsively engage. As the dharma primarily addresses the cause and cessation of dukkha, our practice is first and foremost oriented to countering and seeing-through the kleshas.

We counter them initially – and indispensably – through undertaking ethical precepts and cultivating states of shamatha or ‘calm abiding’, in which the hindrances are in abeyance. We ultimately see through them via the practice of vipashyana or spiritual death. In terms of the ‘integrated practice’ there are two ways that you might approach the vipashyana aspect. One is called ‘bringing the kleshas to the path’ – this is from Mahamudra, but it’s actually found in various forms in all the major Buddhist paths and involves experientially deconstructing negative emotions and seeing their emptiness directly.

The other has been characterised as ‘sitting with your own shit’! This is also known – less colloquially – as shamatha-vipashyana.

For shamatha-vipashyana practice, set up your meditation posture and get to a point where all the principles so far are integrated and accessible. Then sit, without deliberately moving, with whatever experiences, feelings, emotions and so on arise, but resist impulses. Impulses to move, scratch etc. are a quick fix for any uncomfortable feelings. By resisting the impulses, the uncomfortable feelings and embodied (unconscious) traumas we’ve been resisting then emerge into consciousness.

If an impulse takes you ‘out of the practice’, come back to the posture: grounding, poise/balance, breathing ‘up’ the core, tucked chin, relax. This ‘down-regulates’ you from ‘flight, fight, freeze’ reactions in a very direct way. Then breathe into the hara – lying down or sitting up. Relax and connect with the open, impartial space-awareness of the soma and deeply feel the sensations. This can be very effective in releasing and healing traumas.

Receptivity (wholeness)

In terms of the dynamic mandala, this is the central principle, which embodies and integrates all the others. In the centre, there is no doing or cultivation (bhavana) – it’s a ‘non-practice’, a formless meditation. It’s just simply being – whatever happens just happens. This means there is no interference from the ‘narrative self’. While thoughts about just about anything can still arise, they are just passing through – there is no ‘stickiness’.

While this is what might optimally be happening in just sitting, what actually arises will tend to be a reflection of where we are with the other four principles. Sangharakshita recommended just sitting at the end of any other practice and in terms of the integrated practice, what transpires in the just sitting will reflect which principle we’ve mainly been working with.

For example, if we’re working mainly with integration and hindrances are still present, the just sitting is likely to full of prapanca, dullness, or both. It’s nevertheless still worth just sitting at the end of the meditation period because sometimes the very effort that we are making is keeping us in prapanca rather than helping release it. This is often the case when it’s a forced and goal-oriented kind of effort.

Similarly, whether we have reached the point of basic somatic presence (access), opened up heart qualities (benevolence, etc.), got a sense of the boundlessness of the body or are assimilating an insight that has arisen, the just sitting will tend to reflect and embody this effortlessly. So the centre of the mandala has a kind of chameleon-like quality – it reflects whatever and wherever we ‘are’, which in principle could be anything from complete delusion to complete awakening.

However, if the other four principles have been well integrated, just sitting can be a genuine state of shamatha-vipashyana, a relaxed, effortless presence imbued with openness or receptivity and absence of ego-grasping. This is where the underlying formless – ‘unformed’ or unfabricated – (asaṅkhata) nature of things can potentially come ‘into view’ spontaneously.
Non-forming is in contrast to forming (saṅkhata). Forming is another way of talking about the deluded mental activity which characterises ‘samsara’.

Having integrated the other four principles and just sitting in a very positive, open and receptive state, some kind of dharma ‘pointing’ to or ‘pointing-out’ of ultimate truth can now be very effective. If the words or images strike home, mental construing, forming and fashioning can suddenly cease of itself and there is a glimpse – or more than a glimpse – of what is asaṅkhata, unformed, non-forming, or ‘unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated’.

At this point it can be helpful to have some very pithy ‘pointing-out’ text or phrase at your disposal, such as the Buddha’s teaching to Bahiya, or part of Padmasambhava’s direct introduction to the nature of mind from ‘Self-liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness’. There are plenty of other examples – though this seems to be most effective if you hear someone else saying it out loud. If no-one else is available, try bringing the phrase or the part of it that resonates most to mind and then ‘just let go and go where no mind goes’ – there is nothing you can do to ‘make it happen’.

The ‘Integrated mandala’ in relation to body and being

HARA / GUT ‘Integration’ – connection of the body’s energy with that of the earth, biosphere, spaciousness …

HEART ‘Positive emotion’ – unconditional love, heart wish, compassion, soul, connection

HEAD ‘Spiritual death’ – clarity, spaciousness, openness …

ENTIRE BODY ‘Spiritual rebirth’ – opening to ‘this’ as it is, beyond concepts; suchness …

WHOLENESS “Receptivity” – integrating all the above, beyond inside/outside, space/time and any dividedness …

This is rough and by no means exhaustive. Any of these qualities can be accessed from other centres, and of course the last two are increasingly holistic.