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

Get Bodhipakṣa’s book ‘The Heart’s Awakening: 108 Steps to a Life of Love’.

Balajit, Singhashri and Viveka joining forces to offer another wonderful embodied opportunity toward collective liberation.

The Buddha taught that life includes both suffering AND the potential for liberation. In a world racked with suffering, how do we meet ourselves and each other with curiosity, courage and conviction, for our own benefit and the benefit of all beings?

Explore what liberation feels like through an embodied and relational approach to meditation. We’ll get familiar with moment-by-moment experiences of both tension, stuckness, and resistance AND release, softness, and openness, as well as the different parts of ourselves showing up through these experiences.

Collectively we’ll get curious about:

• What supports a sense of safety, dignity, and belonging in the body and helps with nervous system regulation

• Our vision for liberation for ourselves and others and our intentions for practicing

• How our unique social conditioning shows up in our practice and how we relate to what’s happening now

• Embodiment as a radical act

• The role of beauty and joy in opening to ourselves, one another and the world

• How a creative response to fear, grief, shame and anger can support our efforts towards collective liberation

• How to deepen into a direct experience of the impermanent, insubstantial nature of experience as a gateway into qualities of the awakened mind

• The co-created and interconnected nature of experience and reality

Through teacher input, guided meditations, individual and group reflections, mindful movement, neurosensory exercises, chanting and ritual.

“Suffering is part of how it is on earth; it is an inherent part of the fabric of existence. And if we are lucky, it will break our heart open. That is the crack that lets the light pour through. That is the way the world cleanses itself.”
— Roger Houseden

The Four Noble Truths were the Buddha’s first teaching, yet they never grow old. Each time we return to them with fresh eyes, they meet us exactly where we are. Just as in the Buddha’s time, there is suffering in our lives—stress, fear, confusion —that we can do something about.

First Noble Truth — There is dukkha, suffering
Second Noble Truth — Dukkha has a cause: craving rooted in ignorance
Third Noble Truth — The cessation of dukkha is possible: awakening
Fourth Noble Truth — There is a path that leads to the end of dukkha

This retreat explores how this ancient insight can illuminate modern life. We’ll look at how we create unnecessary dukkha, and how we can lessen it—making space for ease, clarity, and kindness.

First Noble Truth — There is dukkha
What did the Buddha really mean when he said we can “end suffering”? After all, pain is an unavoidable part of being human. In this retreat, we’ll learn to recognise the difference between the inevitable pains of life and the extra layers of dukkha we add through resistance, habit, and misunderstanding.

Second Noble Truth — Dukkha has a cause
We’ll explore the roots of suffering in our own experience—those aspects that are within our sphere of influence. Rather than feeling like passive victims of circumstances, we’ll learn how to take responsibility for the ways we contribute to our own difficulty. And seeing that dukkha has a cause, we can be confident that it’s possible to lessen it.

Third Noble Truth — The Cessation of Dukkha
Nirodha, the ending of dukkha, is often mistaken for emptiness or blankness. But in the Buddha’s teaching it is described as freedom, relief, and release—like putting down a burden you didn’t know you were carrying, or stepping out of a prison whose door was never locked. We’ll explore how this “stopping” is deeply positive, a genuine awakening of the heart.

Fourth Noble Truth — The Path: Living the Eightfold Way in Everyday Life
The Eightfold Path is not a monastic checklist, but a practical way of living that can be woven into the fabric of ordinary life. We’ll turn the Eightfold Path into a set of tools and practices that help us generate less dukkha, respond to challenges with wisdom, and meet the unavoidable pains of life with equanimity and compassion.

Retreat Format

This online retreat brings together Dharma teaching, guided meditations, reflection and inquiry, as well as time for discussion. As a home retreat it’s perfect for people who want to engage deeply with this essential teaching—while at home, embedded in ordinary life.

Drawing on an approach developed by Vidyamala over many years of teaching at Taraloka, this weekend retreat invites you to train as a compassionate warrior — courageous, tender, and open-hearted.

We will explore the core Triratna meditation practices of Mindfulness of Breathing and Metta Bhavana. Together, these form a balanced foundation of awareness and kindness, traditionally likened to the two wings of a bird — both needed for the heart-mind to soar.

Across the weekend, Vidyamala will weave together mind-training approaches from both early and later Buddhism. These methods support us in gently unwinding the knots of suffering within, while also turning outward with intentional kindness as a way to cultivate compassion and love.

Many describe our world as being in a state of “permacrisis” or “polycrisis” with overlapping and ongoing global challenges. How are we to respond?

The Buddha’s answer remains timeless: cultivate wisdom, seeing things as they truly are; and compassion, allowing the heart to break open for ourselves and others. The world urgently needs wise and kind individuals, and this retreat offers a grounded, practical training for our challenging times.

The weekend will include teaching, guided meditations, and devotional practice. Let us come together for the sake of the world. It is more urgent than ever.

‘Wings to Awakening’ is a poetic rendering of ‘bojjhaṅgā’ – seven ‘limbs’ or factors that support bodhi – awakening. The bojjhaṅgās are highlighted in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta as crucial to the fourth contemplation, that of dhammas. They are experiential qualities that we cultivate and are integral to entering and deepening into the four dhyanas – and to awakening itself.

In this three day retreat, we’ll explore how the first three – awareness, discrimination and energy – can support the conditions to enter into the dhyānas. And how the other four – wellbeing, serenity,  samādhi (full integration) and equanimity – successively come to fulfilment.  However far we get with this, the exploration and play with possibilities on this retreat will enrich your meditation practice.

This retreat is a follow-up to ‘Dhyāna and Insight’ earlier in the year, but these explorations stand in their own right and people who were not on the earlier retreat are welcome.