This week-long retreat includes meditation sessions, dharma teachings, and guided yoga with certified yoga instructor and meditation teacher Laura Sicari. Teachings, offered by Lama Willa and Lama Liz, will explore the nature of awareness as an innate embodied and loving resource for human flourishing. We will pay special attention to the importance of stability, self-compassion, ease, and freshness, while considering how meditation can become a resource of skillful action.
Experience the wonder of awareness by engaging, sustaining, and deepening into the vibrant heart of meditation practice within community. Mixing our experience, no matter what it is, with practice, we discover how meditation can provide a powerfully transformative container for everything that arises.
In this Resource:
Topics include but are not limited to…
- Reflecting on the Two Phases of Awareness and Non-Meditation Awareness
- The View of Rigpa: The Infinite Present & Non-Meditation: Encountering Rigpa
- Unimpededness
- Blessed Exhaustion
- Actionless Action
- and more…
Opening Talk and Meditation – 1/3/21 – Lama Liz and Lama Willa
- Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “The Power of an Open Question: The Buddha’s Path to Freedom”
- Chamtrul Rinpoche
Go beneath the waves of anxiety, and swim in the stillness of your inner peace. And experience all of life with stillness in motion.
- Maitripa
Don’t search for isolation in a mountain retreat. The mountain of your body is the best sanctuary.
Sunrise Meditation – 1/4/22 at 7 a.m. – Lama Willa
- Pali Refuge Prayer
Buddham saranam gacchami.
Dhammam saranam gacchami.
Sangham saranam gacchami.
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma.
I take refuge in the Sangha.
Dharma Talk on Awareness – 1/4/22 at 10 a.m. – Lama Liz and Lama Willa
- Socrates
Wisdom begins in wonder.
Flexible Session – 1/4/22 at 7 p.m. – Lama Liz
- Tilopa, “The Six Nails”
Don’t recall
Don’t imagine
Don’t think (fixate/cogitate)
Don’t examine
Don’t control
Rest
Dharma Talk – 1/5/22/ at 10 a.m. – Lama Willa
- Dzogchen view of Rigpa
Perceiver and perceived have never been separate
All things are primordially free.
The body is primordially wakeful.
Your feelings are primordially free.
Your mind is primordially free.
Guided Meditation – 1/5/22 at 11 a.m. – Lama Willa
- Lama Willa Blythe Baker, “The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom” – see ch. 7, “Nurturing,” p. 141.
- Lama Willa Blythe Baker, “Meditation only goes so far.”
Dharma Talk – 1/8/22 at 10 a.m. – Lama Liz
- Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Let yourself be the emotion, go through it, give in to it, experience it. You begin to go toward the emotion, rather than just experiencing the emotion coming toward you. A relationship, a dance, begins to develop. Then the most powerful energies become absolutely workable rather than taking you over because there is nothing to take over if you are not putting up any resistance. Whenever there is no resistance, a sense of rhythm occurs. The music and the dance take place at the same time.
Resource Includes
- 1 Lesson
