About the Retreat
Led by Sogyal Rinpoche and his senior students, the retreat will give both beginners and experienced practitioners the opportunity to get in touch with Buddhist teachings. Group instruction and personal meditation practice together with periods of silence combine to offer a rare chance to experience, integrate and stabilise the teachings in the unique retreat environment.
With his gift for presenting the heart essence and flavour of Tibetan Buddhism, Sogyal Rinpoche is one of the most renowned teachers of our time. The atmosphere created by Sogyal Rinpoche is one of incredible warmth, love and penetrating insight – as if he were speaking directly to the heart of each and every person present.
2012 Retreat Theme
The Wisdom of Compassion:
Awakening the Mind, Opening the Heart
“It is compassion, then, that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.” Sogyal Rinpoche
Compassion, when developed to its deepest extent, and linked with wisdom, is embodied in bodhichitta, ‘the heart of the enlightened mind’. Bodhichitta is the spirit, the source and the root of the entire spiritual path. It is, in the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the very highest form of altruism and the highest form of courage, the source of all spiritual qualities and the essence of all the teachings of the Buddha. The great spiritual masters have shown us again and again that the power of bodhichitta has no bounds, and that compassion is truly our greatest treasure.
One of the most marvellous aspects of the Buddhist tradition is its development of a vast array of practices that fill us with the power and joyful enthusiasm we need to unblock our hearts and so allow the healing energies of wisdom and compassion to unfold. Sogyal Rinpoche brings these ancient practices together with his understanding of modern therapeutic methods, in order to address the particular concerns and challenges of the western mind.
Some of the most powerful and useful of the compassion practices are taught in Lojong, the training of the mind. According to the Lojong teachings, we begin with the preliminary practices of meditation and contemplation, which help to dissolve the cloud-like confusion of our ordinary thoughts and emotions. By bringing the mind home, releasing the grasping and relaxing into our true nature we are able to make friends with ourselves, defusing negativity and inspiring healing. In this way, we begin to reveal our essential Good Heart, our fundamental goodness, which is the source of compassion.
We then develop the four immeasurables: the love, compassion, joy and equanimity of bodhichitta. Exploring them, we are introduced to a variety of extraordinary practices, including Tonglen, the practice of ‘giving by means of love’ and ‘taking by means of compassion’, and the practices of the six transcendent perfections. The sixth transcendent perfection involves cultivating wisdom—the penetrating insight into ‘shunyata’, the nature of reality itself. All these teachings show us how to transform negative circumstances and suffering into the path of enlightenment, and how to use these practices throughout every aspect of our lives.
We need the compassion and wisdom of bodhichitta in all situations, but never more urgently than at the moment of death. Whether it is we who are dying, or someone we love, death is one of the greatest opportunities to translate into action the love and compassion we have discovered within ourselves through practice.
In this retreat, Rinpoche will demonstrate just how powerful and miraculous the working of compassion can be, whether in life or in death, and how, through consistent spiritual practice, we can transform ourselves into truly compassionate, healthy and whole human beings.