The Buddha taught that life inevitably includes suffering — AND that liberation from suffering is possible. In a world marked by uncertainty and collective unease, how do we meet ourselves and one another with curiosity, courage, and a deep commitment to awakening for the benefit of all beings?

With widespread feelings of anxiety, disconnection, and overwhelm, we will explore what supports a felt sense of safety, dignity, and belonging in the body. How do we learn to expand our nervous systems capacity to stay present to even the most challenging experiences so that we can move through them together, without causing more suffering?  

Collectively, we will tune into the moment‑by‑moment textures of our experience: tension and release, resistance and openness, contraction and spaciousness. We’ll practice recognising the different parts of ourselves that emerge through these patterns and how they can become gateways to insight.

Beauty and joy will be woven throughout the retreat as essential qualities helping us open to ourselves, to each other, our communities, and the world. At the heart of our exploration will be learning to open to and trust the impermanent and insubstantial nature of experience, as gateways to qualities of the awakened mind.

The retreat will include teacher input, guided meditations, 1:1 practice reviews, individual and group reflections, mindful movement, neurosensory practices, chanting, and ritual.

The retreat is suitable for people who already practice within the Triratna Buddhist Community and are familiar with the mindfulness of breathing, the metta bhavana and basic Buddhist principles, as taught within Triratna. You will have at least six months meditation experience and a regular, ideally daily, meditation practice. For more information, read the retreat information sheet. 

There are no single rooms available on this retreat.

This retreat draws inspiration from the Mahayana Trikaya (“three body”) teaching that points to who we actually are via three simultaneous dimensions of reality: 

• Nirmanakaya: coming home to presence within this body, this world
• Sambhogakaya: befriending the dynamic flow of feeling and energy, and the relational dimension of being
• Dharmakaya: opening to the luminous, boundless dimension of awakened being

We will delve into poetic themes of “coming home” and “belonging” as an emotionally engaging and relational approach to insight that allows:

• Respect and appreciation of core human needs – belonging, safety and dignity
• Holding of the tension between our ideals and our current (often messy) experience
• Healing the illusion of separation and the habits of dualism
• Learning to feel sensations of belonging at the levels of self, community, place, world and to express compassionately responsive activity
• Deepening of mindfulness and metta as practices capable of helping us see the true nature of reality

This retreat will include guided and unguided meditations, mindful enquiry, 1:1 practice reviews, teacher input, large and small group exercises and discussions, movement (somatics), chanting and ritual. This is a silent meditation retreat. Participants should expect to go into silence on the first full day, and come out of silence on the last full day.  

The retreat is suitable for people who already practice within the Triratna Buddhist Community and are familiar with the mindfulness of breathing, the metta bhavana and basic Buddhist principles, as taught within Triratna. You will have at least six months meditation experience and a regular, ideally daily, meditation practice. For more information, read the retreat information sheet. 

If we dive deep enough into the sea, we reach a depth where the body is no longer buoyant enough to float nor heavy enough to sink. We remain suspended, hanging in deep blue space, able to move in any direction without the least bit of friction. 

This place is called the doorway to the deep and it promises to open us to our true nature, our deepest potential when freed from afflictive mental states that bind us to suffering, by either taking us back to the surface or pulling us under. From this place we discover a more creative response to life, full of awareness, love and transformation. 

This retreat is suitable for those who have a regular meditation practice and who regularly attend retreats. You will also need to be comfortable with extended periods of sitting meditation and periods spent in silence.

For more information, please read the retreat information sheet.