This program explores ways of accessing and settling into our innate awakened awareness through practices adapted from Tibetan Buddhism. By participating in an empowering field of loving, spiritual connection, we can become increasingly receptive to the unconditioned openness, wisdom, and compassionate energy of our Buddha nature. Yet parts of us, often unconsciously, may prevent us from becoming more fully receptive to such qualities of awakening. This is true even for long-time practitioners. To address that, we will focus on ways that the healing powers of our Buddha nature can help realign all parts of ourselves with that nature.
Then our innate awareness can increasingly manifest of itself, unleashing powers of discernment and creative responsiveness for action, while empowering all other practices of awakening. This retreat is both for practitioners who identify as Buddhists and for people of all faiths and backgrounds who seek an accessible way to cultivate unconditional powers of love, compassion, and discernment for action. Guided meditations, explanations of key principles, and group discussions will clarify and empower our collective practice.
Learning Intentions: To enter into a process of awakening that draws from the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism by learning: to find access to the loving, compassionate qualities of our Buddha nature (our primordial awareness); to draw on those loving qualities to help us reunify with the openness, clarity, and energy of our buddha nature; to rediscover our relation to others and to the natural world in light of those loving qualities; to embrace protective parts of ourselves and our emotions in the same qualities, so they may heal and be incorporated into this process of awakening rather than impeding it.