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POINTING TO THE MOON
A home retreat working Self-View, led by Tejananda with Advayasiddhi Watch practice sessionsDonate and support Home RetreatsWhat 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.
🌅🪷 A home retreat working with Self-View – Led by Tejananda with Advayasiddhi
You can access video recordings of all sessions below under each day’s resources.
The well-known metaphor of ‘a finger pointing at the moon’ is itself a hint at something essential in Dharma practice. It suggests ‘don’t mistake the finger for the moon’. But what is the moon, and what is the finger? The finger could be taken as whatever gets us looking and going in the ‘right’ direction. For example, the eight ‘right’ perspectives on Dharma practice that the Buddha taught.
But neither these nor any other Dharma practices are ‘right’ (or ‘wise’) if we’re relating to them literally, as ends in themselves. That would be ‘attachment to rules and religious practices’ – believing that it’s enough to do our practices by rote, and losing touch with that to which the practices are pointing us.
What they are pointing us to is ‘waking up’ – bodhi. Waking up from the delusions that give rise to suffering. Bodhi is the ‘moon’ of our true nature, which is always here, even when obscured by clouds.
In this retreat, we’ll focus on the ‘moon’ by addressing a core delusion – that “I am separate”. This is better known as anatta, ‘not-self’, but this core pointing-out on the Buddha’s part isn’t suggesting that we’re somehow non-existent! Rather, it is pointing us back to our essential non-dividedness.
We’ll approach this by first cultivating calm, embodied, aware presence and opening to unconditional love. With that as our ground, we’ll explore our experience directly and interactively, using pointers as to how we create and sustain the delusion of separation and a self-other dichotomy. Seeing through such delusions wakes us up from our self-view and to an essential truth of the Dharma, the ‘moon’ of our undivided nature here and now.
Home retreat leader
Tejananda has been teaching and leading retreats for many years at Vajraloka Retreat Centre in Wales, UK, one of Triratna’s earliest and foremost centres of in-depth meditation practice. He also teaches around the world, with a special connection to the Dharma community in and around San Francisco in the USA.
Advayasiddhi is a meditation and Dharma teacher living in Denmark. She loves meditation and has dedicated her life to explore with others how to wake up in the lives we have here and now. She is ordained in Triratna Buddhist Order, leads retreats in many places and also has a particularly strong link with Vajraloka Retreat Centre.
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 dana:
£175 / $220 / €205 or drop in for £30 / $38 / €35 per day.
Welcome to the retreat
Day 1
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
This opening session of the seven‑day online retreat “Pointing to the Moon” sets the ground rules and rhythm. The team explains how recordings, Padlet sharing and breakout groups will work, then outlines the daily schedule: a longer morning teaching‑and‑practice block, a ritual and discussion slot mid‑day, and an evening meditation.
The bulk of the video is a guided practice led by Tejananda. Participants explore embodied awareness—beginning with posture, grounding sensations and the breath—while distinguishing direct bodily experience from mental images. Tejananda introduces simple ways to quiet proliferation, use the breath, and weave kindness into practice. A short Q&A follows, covering anxiety, the “observer in the head”, tinnitus and other common hurdles in somatic meditation.
In the first ritual session of the Home Retreat, we touch the earth with the Buddha Akshobhya and dedicate the retreat for the benefit of all beings. Advayasiddhi guides a beautiful body awareness meditation to ease us into the practice and reads Hakuin’s ‘Song of Meditation’ as a background for reflection. She then recites the Triratna Dedication Ceremony and chants the mantra of Akshobhya, leading an incense offering to help us perfume the world with the Dharma.
We start the session with a warm welcome and the some verses from the Triratna Dedication Ceremony and a short arriving sit. This is followed with a 40 minute sit developing the theme and focus of being with the sensate body, and bringing awareness to the conceptual mind projecting onto the body. There was a short period for questions and comments followed by a shorter culminating sit absorbing and experiencing the sensate body and the fruits of the session.
Day 2
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
Tejananda starts the session off with a talk about how we experience the physical body, samatha and vipassana meditation. He goes on to talk further about the Anatta-Lakkhana Sutta and asks questions. The session continues with the usual program of guided meditation practice on body awareness, then concludes with another sit and final questions.
After a brief welcome, Advayasiddhi turns to the theme of embodiment. She presents an image of Akshobhya, linking the Buddha’s unshakable qualities to grounded bodily awareness. Guided body‑awareness exercises follow, leading into a short meditation that includes a passage from Tsongkhapa.
She then directs a ritual sequence: the Going for Refuge verses from the Sevenfold Puja, followed by the refuges and precepts chanted in several languages. The session closes with the Akshobhya mantra and a final brief sit.
Tejananda encourages us to hold in the background to this retreat a sense of a stream of ‘metta’–unconditional love–as evoked by the figure of Amitabha, the red Buddha of the west. The point is to cultivate a way to be open to something beyond our own self-view, and a loving attitude helps!
In today’s session, we hear some thoughts and answers in response to retreatants experience and questions about how to be present with our experience in our bodies, including working with fear. And we move into two full guided meditations, continuing to sit through all “moods” that arise in our body and mind, attuned to our changing landscape of sensation. emotion and thought. We are encouraged in this to include all of our experience of ourselves and of others—of the world itself—in an underlying sense of love and compassion.
Day 3
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
Tejananda begins by talking about various aspects of Sangharakshita’s System of Practice, outlining the resources we have available to aid us in moving towards our true nature and a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world as we experience it. He then leads a meditation guiding us through our somatic experience, before questions & comments.
In the second half, Tejananda speaks more about samatha and vipassana practices before leading an exploration of the self in a second meditation.
Advyasiddhi begins by introducing Green Tārā and leading a brief sit followed by the Green Tārā mantra. Participants then take turns reciting the Brahma‑vihāra verses in their own languages. The session concludes with a second period of meditation.
This follow‑up session opens by clarifying terms from the first day (e.g. “plumb‑line” posture cue) and explaining how the central energy channel fit into the retreat’s embodiment work. Tejananda answers questions on the link between basic samādhi and vipassanā, handling hindrances via breath placement, and how the mind continually projects a “self” onto changing sensations, thoughts or emotions.
The main practice revisits full‑body awareness, adds gentle breath‑visualisation through the central channel, and deepens the self‑inquiry: participants note whatever presently feels like “me” and examine whether it truly is. A second, shorter sit focuses on “inhabiting” all sense fields—body, sound, sight, smell, taste and thought—without locating a separate observer. The video ends with advice to explore these methods (or classic metta bhāvanā and mindfulness‑of‑breathing) before the next session.
Day 4
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
Tejananda talks about non-self and the Anatta-Lakkhuna Sutta. He relates the story of the Buddha’s awakening and his first teachings with the ascetics, including the 3 Lakkhanas, which led to the awakening of the ascetics.
In the first meditation, Tejananda guides us towards a felt sense of non-self through bodily awareness and what he terms the ‘somatic cloud’. He then opens the session up to questions and comments.
Advyasiddhi introduces Māmaki and reflects on beauty and reverence for life as an antidote to nihilism. She explains that Māmaki—the consort of Ratnasambhava—embodies the spirit of seeing everything as “mine” in the sense of cherishing all phenomena rather than grasping at them.
After a short sit, the group moves into a Māmaki ritual: call‑and‑response verses, a reading of David Whyte’s “Everything Is Waiting for You,” chanting the Māmaki mantra, and two final verses on Māmaki.
It’s mid-retreat, so to start this session we hear a short presentation about the recent work and history of Dharmachakra, providers of Home Retreats like this one, which are always offered on the basis of the Buddhist principle of ‘dana’ or generosity. It’s important to us that everyone can attend these events regardless of their circumstances—please support us and help keep these amazing retreats, The Buddhist Centre Online and Free Buddhist Audio available to all! 🙏
Tejananda leads us in some short ‘Just Sitting’ meditations, with comments and questions from practitioners in-between. We stay in a space of compassionate practice throughout, being as present as we can be with our bodies and and letting a sense of spaciousness arise. The session ends with a short sit dubbed the “Teflon Practice” by Tejananda—because “nothing sticks”!
Day 5
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
Tejananda gives some teaching about samskaras (our habits and patterns which keep us from making spiritual progress) and the skandhas (the various ‘categories’ of experience).
He talks about the danger of alienated awareness, and how, as we get older, we learn ways to avoid experiencing our emotions or difficult experiences. He then leads two meditations exploring thoughts and the mental activity that arises, and whether we have any control over them.
This session addresses how to meet experience—especially strong or unfamiliar emotions—without turning the task into yet another self‑improvement checklist. Advayasiddhi explains that our emotional habits are conditioned by family and culture, and encourages a compassionate, curiosity‑driven approach: notice alienation from experience, recognise conditioning, and invite in every part of ourselves with kindness. To embody that fearless compassion the group calls on Green Tārā and Padmasambhava, figures who transmute inner “demons” and risk‑averse habits into awakened energy.
The heart of the ritual is a multilingual recitation of the Heart Sūtra, followed by chanting Padmasambhava’s mantra to send the insight of emptiness and compassion into the world. Participants are reminded that awakening is lived through the whole body‑mind, sustained by love rather than self‑critique.
We continue our exploration of our experience of the sensate body (referred to by Tejananda as the “sensate cloud”) with a series of three short meditations, always with a background of kindness, compassion and awareness of the breath. There is particular encouragement in the second sit to open up to the experience of the second dhyana.
Throughout the series Tejananda offers his usual thoughtful responses to questions and shared impressions from those on retreat.
Day 6
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
Tejananda starts the session by giving some more teaching on the klesha’s and working with difficult emotions like anger and annoyance with a focus on bringing awareness to the sensation and come into the body.
Following a similar program to the other first sessions, we then move into two periods of meditation. This time with a emphasis on trying to identify a sense of self within experence, noticing how it changes and passes like a cloud.
Tejananda introduces Amitābha, emphasising his discriminating wisdom, and offers a few words on Padmasambhava. After a brief meditation, he leads a puja for both figures with the precepts recited in several languages. The ritual continues with drumming and repeated chanting of Amitābha’s mantra and an entreaty to him. Tejananda then chants Padmasambhava’s mantra and ends with a short sit.
We begin this final session of the penultimate day on retreat together with a longer meditation, dropping into our experience of mind and body and just sitting in the open space of absorption and discernment of whatever gets in the way of it. As ever, the background is an active sense of love and compassion suffusing the context of practice.
Tejananda’s responses to questions and comments are particularly helpful around working with ambient sounds and potential distractions (like ’80s rock music played loudly by neighbours or buses passing outside the window!). We close the session with a further meditation, a great encouragement to let go and just be in the space of practice.
Day 7
watch the Live PRACTICE sessions
Tejananda summarises what we’ve explored over the week, including the sensate body and his metaphor of the somatic ‘cloud’. He then goes on to talk about the nature of compassion, how it is embodied and how it informs our practice, but most importantly how we work with the hindrances that hold us back.
He also says a few words about spiritual death and rebirth, before leading two meditations with a break and questions in between.
Advayasiddhi frames this final ritual session as a send-off for the retreat’s insight: participants each hold a small stone, symbolising their own practice and the lineage behind it, then “charge” it with aspiration before later placing it somewhere in the world. She reads stirring verses from Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra on becoming “a light, a bridge, a medicine” for all beings, and the group voices its commitment through the refuges and precepts—first together in English, then in French, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish—to affirm that no one practises alone.
Tejananda follows with David Whyte’s poem “Everything Is Waiting for You,” reminding us that every moment invites fearless engagement. A collective Green Tārā mantra, incense-offering and the traditional Transference of Merit and Self-Surrender seal the intent: may the energy stored in those stones, and in our own hearts, move outward to benefit every being we meet.
Our final meditation session begins fittingly with a practice set against the backdrop of wishing everyone, everywhere, well. We notice and surrender to any sense of a flow of undivided experience bigger than our routine sense of ourselves, letting our sensate body be immersed in metta (love and compassion).
These practices are also a chance to take stock and check in on whatever is arising in our mental and emotional states; and through our senses, noticing where we feel separated from our sense experience: we have and can use the space to just let all that move through us and pass away. “In the seen, only the seen. In the heard, only the heard. In the cognized, only the cognized…”
Tejananda rounds off the retreat with his usual good natured, encouraging responses to the experience of those meditating together: challenges, questions around life and death, comments, inspirations! 🙏
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May you be well!
Suggested dana:
£175 / $220 / €205 or drop in for £30 / $38 / €35 per day.
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With deep thanks to Tejananda and the Dharmachakra team for their generosity in setting up the conditions for this retreat, as well as leading live events each day.
Event images by Sean Sinclair, BoliviaInteligente and Jason Leung
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