We start with some simple housekeeping to help us settle into the retreat, considering how we can set up conditions to be on retreat at home. We then move into our first period of guided meditation practice.

Vajradarshini then begins to outline the enigmatic theme of the retreat by showing us a crushed Coca-Cola can! Quoting from a book called Leonard Koren’s book ‘Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers’, she evokes beauty and impermanence, sharing more images she’s collected over the years reflection on the art of wabi-sabi.

The session ends with a short meditation.

This session features teaching on wabi-sabi through the lens of the Japanese tea ceremony — how it shifts from elite fine china to rough, ordinary wares in order to catalyse a change of perception. Vajradarshini quotes Leonard Koren on “revolutionary tea masters” choosing conventionally “not beautiful” things, and cites Andrew Juniper on wabi-sabi art. The “tea master” qualities are framed as daily practice with the objects of home — mindfulness, relaxed acceptance, seeing equal value in things, equanimity, and muditā (from the brahmavihārās). Participants share a personally meaningful wabi-sabi object and story and reflect.

The session closes with a reading of Rumi’s “The Guest House,” linking wabi-sabi appreciation to welcoming whatever arrives in experience. Attendees are invited to continue the exploration with the three lakṣaṇas before the next session.

The session begins with Vajradarshini sharing a few words about the first of the lakshanas (characteristics of conditioned existence) – impermanence – how we often take it for granted, and how, if approached with curiosity, it can become a doorway (vimokşamukha) into liberation or freedom from suffering. 

There’s time in this session for questions and answers with Vajradarshini, and a chance to reflect further on the nature of impermanence. This is followed by a period of meditation, guided beautifully, in which Vajradarshini encourages us to pay attention to the impermanence in our own direct experience.

We move into our second session looking at the lakshanas (characteristics of conditioned existence) – impermanence, lack of fixed self-nature, the suffering that arises when we forget these aspects of the way things are.

Vajradarshini encourages us to spend time in relaxed, kindly awareness of our experience of the lakshanas – all the wanting and not wanting, all the resisting and letting go. After some exchanges about this kind of practice in meditation, we sit together in an atmosphere of metta (loving kindness) itself.

Vajradarshini and friends from the retreat then discuss what a world would be like without the lakshanas, with reference to Franz Kafka, Brave New World, Pluribus, and Milarepa. She particularly considers Issa’s poem:

The laksanas can cut like blades sometimes.
While the dewdrop world, is the dewdrop world, but yet, but yet…

For the rest of the retreat we’ll be exploring each characteristic in turn with the corresponding doorway to liberation. This session continues with some very moving sharing from retreatants about their encounters with the lakshanas manifesting in and around their homes and lives. This is followed by a closing meditation cultivating a sense of warm, spacious awareness of the arising and passing away that is continuous through all our experience, body, heart and mind.

The session begins with a warm welcome and a settling-in period, during which participants and facilitators reconnect, share their arrival experiences, and setting the tone for the day.

The core of the session centres on guided meditation and the exploration of loss and gain. There are two periods of meditation during this session, in which Vajradarshini interweaves practice and teachings on how to meet the experience of loss with curiosity, how to navigate inner resistance, and how to deepen into stillness while remaining open and connected.

In the final portion, the group moves into shared reflection and discussion. Participants speak about what arose for them in meditation—challenges, insights, emotional senses—and Vajrdarshini responds with her usual clarifying encouragement. The session concludes with practical guidance for integrating the practice into the rest of the retreat day, along with a sense of collective appreciation and renewed intention.

After a short appeal from Candradasa to support Dharmachakra’s programme of Home Retreats on The Buddhist Centre Online, today’s second session invites us to stay with the insubstantial nature of all things – every being, every thing, without any lasting essence – and open up to the ‘signless’ doorway (animitta) to liberation. In this Vajradarshini evokes the possibilities in a vivid and clear experience of reality without anything overlaid: like seeing a tree for the first time, all the time. 

The signs by which we recognise things are conditioned by many things and are very useful. And they stop us seeing the fullness of things. We are training our minds to learn how to see differently, to stop telling the same stories about the world all the time. Vajradarshini opens an inspiring space to consider, reflect and meditate on this with everyone on the retreat. 

The lakshana / vimokṣamukha meditation is a form of ‘Memento Mori’ (“Remember you will die!”), focussed on what we take in with our senses, really looking to see if we can find something unchanging. We touch on both death and grief here, and also on the grounded, joyful space that can open up to us in this kind of work – which is why it is a doorway to freedom.

Memento Mori: Vajradarshini’s links
🖥️ Francis Alÿs – Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, 1997

🖼️ Traditional memento mori images

🌄 Modern memento mori type images from Wolfgang Tillmans

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The session begins with a chance for participants to ask questions and share reflections from the last few days. There are questions of altruism, imperminence, and much more.

After that, there is a meditation that begins with a poem written by someone on the retreat that very morning, as well as a poem by Hildegard of Bingen.

Vajradarshini then begins to talk about the next lakshana, that of insubstantiality. Suggesting how we might find the freedom through that.

The session ends with another longer period of meditation led by Vajradarshini.

This session, led by Vajradarshini, opens with a short settling to the heart and a recap of the lakṣaṇa of insubstantiality (anattā). Teaching contrasts impermanence as seen “through time” with emptiness as seen “in space,” and points to classic analyses—the six-element practice, the five skandhas, and the sense bases—alongside the Dhammapada triad: “All conditioned things are impermanent; all conditioned things are unsatisfactory; all things whatsoever are insubstantial.”

Vajradarshini then reads a contemporary poem about everyday rituals and habit (keys, cups, the order of shoes) to loosen identification, before guiding a meditation on openness/emptiness: noticing the space in which experience unfolds, seeing thoughts, feelings, and sensations as an ever-changing pattern, and “relaxing ourselves away” into openness, clarity, and sensitivity—nothing fixed, nothing graspable. The session closes by previewing tomorrow’s focus on dukkha.

In this session, we move on to examining suffering, also known as Dukkha. Firstly, there is a period of settling meditation, during which Vajradarshini shares an image on her shrine that reads, “Wanting to be anything other than what is, hurts.”

Vajradarshini then begins to unpack what the Buddha had to say about suffering. Emphasising the kind of suffering he was referring to and what he wasn’t. Noting the fact that many enlightened teachers experienced such emotions as grief. Something we might not associate with enlightened beings.

The session ends with a longer period of meditation.

This session recaps the “wishlessness” doorway and links it with wabi-sabi: acceptance that is creative and compassionate rather than passive. Drawing on Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi and his line about “coaxing beauty out of ugliness,” Vajradarshini uses the Japanese tea ceremony to illustrate how the “not-beautiful” can be perceived anew, connecting this to dukkha as imperfection—“the beauty of things imperfect.”

Vajradarshini then guides a quiet meditation on letting things be: first acknowledging any present difficulty, then balancing it with what feels simple or OK now. The sit includes an image of the heart–mind as a perfect sphere resting on a flat surface—equanimity without strain—before closing in shared stillness.