Spacious Heart

About This Retreat

“Sharp like a razor’s edge, the sages say, is the path, difficult to traverse”. Katha Upanishad

The doorway to this middle path is that of a letting go or of ‘releasing into’. We will embrace practices that allow us the possibility of truly feeling into our experience and story. These will include Tonglen (the Tibetan Buddhist practice of receiving and giving) and Metta (Loving Kindness) to help us cultivate that sense of kindness and acceptance for ourselves and others as we are. The practices open the door to us being able to meet the ‘stickiness’ of our embodied experience with a ‘kind attention’.

In addition, and as importantly, we explore practices that allow to cultivate and experience that oceanic stillness that lies at the heart of our being. Amongst others we will use simple, yet so profound, practices from the Vigyana Bhairava Tantra.

Through the marrying of these different practices we create the possibilty of holding the whole of experience in a spacious heart, meeting life as it is.

And then, maybe, that razor’s edge loses it’s sharpness – maybe then we walk a more forgiving path through the bittersweet wonder that it is to be embodied.

As well as the meditation practices mentioned above we also share hatha yoga, chanting, yoga nidra, kirtan & satsang (and no doubt some tears and laughter) during our time together.

All of the great spiritual traditions teach us that beneath the apparent turbulence of both what we perceive as our inner and outer worlds lies infinite stillness. The opportunity presented to us as spiritual practitioners is to walk the middle path that lies between these seemingly contradictory states – we neither strive to bypass the ‘reality’ of our day to day experience by attempting to remain in a state of constant transcendence nor do we lose ourselves, i.e. fully identify, with the constant changes we experience in our thoughts & feelings and in the world of form around us. During this 4-day retreat, we will explore ways of finding this middle ground.