The Brahmaviharas: a complete path
With Rijumitra and Tejapushpa
February 7 - 16, 2025
Do we dare to turn towards suffering or even the joy of the world? Do we dare to remain open to experience and see the truth of situations unfold? Do we dare to respond? Subtly, we turn away from life and dull down. This retreat will challenge this habitual response and give you the tools to turn towards experience and embrace it with the love and responsiveness of the Brahmaviharas. We will engage with the Brahmaviharas drawing out both their active and receptive components and show how they can be a complete path to awakening.
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Illuminating Sadhana **Order Retreat**
With Rijumitra and Jinapalita
February 21 - 28, 2025
Sadhana is the main expression of the principle of spiritual rebirth in the Order. During this retreat we will contemplate the evolution of sadhana as an Order practice and explore the stages through which sadhana plays out. As well as being redolent with rich images from the sambhogakaya, sadhana also requires presence, inviting the accomplishment of both tranquillity and insight, shamatha and vipashyana. We will explore how these qualities relate to the dynamic or unfolding of sadhana, suggesting practical ways of evoking the samayasattva, the imaginal sense of the Buddha or Bodhisattva which we conjure up. And we’ll explore the…
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Emotional Intelligence in Practice: Working with the Kleshas
With Vijayamala
March 7 - 16, 2025
The heart/mind of each one of us is essentially open, dynamic, and connected to all life. However, we easily lose track of that open-hearted fluidity and feel isolated and disconnected. This is due to our limiting habitual tendencies, which can be very tenacious. These tendencies are called 'kleshas’ – afflictions that both stir us up and narrow our view of ourselves and life. On this retreat we’ll explore how we tie up energy, and how it can be freed into something much more creative and unlimited. Through learning and practising the 5 meditative methods set out in a Tibetan text…
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Embodying Love
With Rijumitra and Balajit
March 21 - 30, 2025
Metta is seen as a great potential source of happiness in the Buddhist tradition – an openness to and love of life in all its forms – which spontaneously manifests as compassion and joy. Yet the cultivation of metta can sometimes seem very ‘heady’, at times forced and dry. How can our practice of kindly awareness gain fresh inspiration? On this retreat, we will explore opening to metta as an innate quality of our body, heart and being – literally embodying love. Becoming and being truly embodied is not just a preliminary practice, but integral to the whole path. We will look at…
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This, just this – with sesshin
With Tejananda
April 4 - 11, 2025
In Zen, a sesshin is a period of especially intense all-the-time formal practice. For three days on this retreat, we will adopt - and adapt - this approach. Each day, there will be several two-hour periods of sitting and walking, and we’ll be opening to the presence of awareness in all of our activities throughout the day. This will be preceded by two days for us to arrive in our bodies, our senses and the beauty of Vajraloka’s environment. The main practice will emphasise undivided mental calm (shamatha) and clear-seeing (vipashyana) - or ‘silent illumination’. During the ‘sesshin’, there will…
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Compassionate Freedom
With Advayasiddhi
April 18 - 27, 2025
Buddhism often poses a seemingly paradoxical question to us: How to be truly happy and free, yet have the ability to meet suffering intelligently and care deeply for all beings? On this intensive meditation retreat we will explore and deepen our understanding and experience of personal liberation and how that is possible right here in our moment to moment experience. At the same time, we will also explore how opening our hearts and deepening our compassion are an intrinsic part of the path to awakening, and how it is possible to deepen this through meditation practice with the support of…
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Wake Up, Just Sit
With Rijumitra
May 2 - 9, 2025
"Just Sitting" is perhaps the most regal of all meditation practices. It could even be said that it goes beyond meditation. When asked how to practice "just sitting," Sangharakshita simply replied, "You just sit." This captures the essence. However, many find that "just sitting" often turns into endless mental chatter. This compulsive, deluded thinking, known as prapanca, is not the true nature of just sitting. Clearly, this is not what Sangharakshita intended. How do we truly embrace this simple practice? During this retreat, we'll explore direct and effective methods to quiet the mental noise. This will allow wakeful, spacious awareness…
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Vajraloka Spring Work Retreat
With Vajraloka Team
May 15 - 19, 2025
Experience living and working with others in beautiful North Wales this spring. We're looking for people to help us with some gardening, cleaning and decorating. A structure of daily work periods with meditation and ritual means you'll get to have a retreat, experience sangha and support Vajraloka. Anyone who has been on retreat at Vajraloka before, and can do physical work, is invited to come on a work retreat free of charge.
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Uncontrived Mindfulness & the Unreliable Witness
With Vajradevi and Tejananda
May 23 - June 1, 2025
Central to our dharma life is a simple yet profound distinction; between our direct experience mediated through the senses, and the thoughts and ideas we have about those experiences. We are usually unaware that the concepts we base our sense of self on and navigate our world by, are frequently flawed in a deep and on-going way. We look through the distorted lens of our own views and assumptions, making us an unreliable witness to our own inner experience. On the retreat we'll cultivate Awareness and Right View, to become mindful of, and curious about, what is actually happening in…
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Wisdom Energy
With Tejananda and Padmadrishti
June 20 - 29, 2025
Our ‘precious human body’ is the first and most important foundation not just of mindfulness, but of meditation and Dharma practice as a whole. The teaching of the Buddha’s ‘Three Bodies’ (trikaya) suggests that there is far, far more to the body than meets the eye. These could be summarised as the bodies of truth (dharmakaya), of living energy (sambhogakaya) and of manifestation (nirmanakaya). While they are fully realised with awakening, we can attune and open to them right now through meditation and Dharma practice, especially body and heart-based practice. Tejananda and Padmadrishti will guide explorations into the extraordinary nature of…
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Emptiness and the Heart Sutra
With Tejananda
July 11 - 20, 2025
The Heart Sutra is one of the most familiar of all Buddhist texts and, inevitably, there are innumerable takes on ‘what it means’. How do we square the opening statement that the skandhas (our psycho–physical constituents) are ‘empty’ with the following one that ‘in emptiness’ there are no skandhas, no senses, no conditioned–arising? Early western commentators saw the sutra as full of paradox – but what if it is not an attempt to bamboozle our minds, but a hands–on method of practice and realisation? These are some of the questions that we’ll be exploring on this retreat. We’ll see how…
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Meditating on the Bahiya Sutta
With Padmasagara and Rijumitra
July 25 - August 1, 2025
In the Bahiya Sutta of the Udana we not only find an inspiring story of one person’s spiritual quest and awakening, but also a simple yet profound guide to meditation. The Buddha instructs Bahiya: “…as regards things seen, heard, sensed or cognised, there will be in the seen only the seen, in the heard only the heard, in the sensed only the sensed, in the cognised only the cognised.” In other words, the Buddha invited Bahiya to remain present with what is, without overlaying, projecting or reading anything whatsoever into his experience. On this retreat we’ll cultivate clarity, metta and…
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The Radical Embrace
With Singhashri and Balajit
August 8 - 17, 2025
How can we learn to embrace ourselves, others and the world more deeply and radically, with awareness and compassion? Together we will meet ourselves where we are, with appreciation and curiosity, inviting all our disparate selves into a space of acceptance and presence. We will draw on resources like grounding, nature, simple mindful movements, neuroscience and creative ritual. We’ll explore our capacity to discover and dwell in more expansive qualities of absorption and deepen our confidence to turn towards those places within us that are stuck, restricted and painful. Doing this, we’ll learn to liberate restricted energies, break the spell…
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Dhyana Through the Body
With Tejananda and Advayasiddhi
August 22 - 29, 2025
Accessing dhyana (jhana), or absorption, seems to be very natural for some people, and a complete mystery to others. Dhyana is well worth cultivating as a way of deepening shamatha (mental tranquillity) as well as for the sheer psycho-somatic pleasure that some of these states afford. On this retreat, we’ll be suggesting approaches that people have found to be helpful and effective for entering into dhyana. This may well involve questioning both our own views and approaches, and some of what the tradition has to say about dhyana. We’ll proceed on the basis of asking ‘What, in our experience, is…
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Relaxing into the Ground of Being
With Silabodhi and Tejapushpa
September 5 - 12, 2025
This formless ground is variously called mind-as-such, big mind, awareness, no-self, source, true nature, Self, sunyata, Buddha-nature. Drawing on Dzogchen and Mahamudra texts to guide us, our starting point will be grounding ourselves in embodied meditation. As Padmasambhava said "Relax - do not force your mind or body' and "Know this one thing and everything is freed - remain within your inner nature, your Awareness". Recognising that we are trapped in self referential thoughts and beliefs that cause our suffering and separate us from the peace and freedom of our true nature: we will offer somatic and heart-based practices and…
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The Other Side Of Insight
With Paramananda
September 19 - October 3, 2025
Insight is often approached through various methods oriented to deconstructing our deep–rooted conceptions that support the idea of a fixed self. However, this approach may sometimes seem to neglect the importance of compassion, love and beauty in preparing the ground for insight to take root. On this meditation retreat, which will be conducted largely in silence, we will emphasise the role of emotion and collective practice as a way of opening the heart and expanding the feeling of self to include others and the world. Paramananda has been leading retreats for over thirty years and has a distinctive style that…
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Illumined by the Limitless: Shinran and re-imagining ‘practice’ **Order Retreat**
With Maitrisiddhi
October 3 - 12, 2025
What if we re-imagine ‘world’ as sacred, as ‘Buddha’, as compassionate towards us? What if we meet ourselves with total honesty, as flawed, karmically conditioned beings? What if we allow ourselves to deeply realise the ego’s failure to ‘manufacture’ awakening, no matter how hard we try? What if, instead, we entrust ourselves to our connection with the Dharma, and simply live our relationship with the sacred - with “Amida” or ‘the limitless’? And what if we awaken into knowing our finite selves to be illumined by the infinite? With his radical teaching of entrusting to Other Power, Shinran explored the…
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Compassion and Emptiness
With Tejananda
October 17 - 24, 2025
The Buddha taught the divine abodes – unconditional love, compassion, joy and equanimity – not just as states of calm, but as ways to liberate the mind. The Brahmavihara practices enable us to cultivate these qualities and to engage with our afflictive emotions – craving, hatred and ‘ignoring’ – in relation to them. In doing so, we’re already engaging with insightful perspectives. Sooner or later, we’re likely to start glimpsing the uncultivated, unlimited, unconditional nature of these qualities, free from afflictions. We’ll explore these possibilities in the first part of the retreat from a perspective of deep, embodied awareness and…
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Vajraloka Autumn Work Retreat
With Vajraloka Team
October 30 - November 3, 2025
Experience living and working with others in beautiful North Wales this autumn. We're looking for people to help us with some gardening, cleaning and decorating. A structure of daily work periods with meditation and ritual means you'll get to have a retreat, experience sangha and support Vajraloka. Anyone who has been on retreat at Vajraloka before, and can do physical work, is invited to come on a work retreat free of charge.
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Looking at the Nature of Mind **Order Retreat**
With Prakasha
November 7 - 16, 2025
When your body is rightly poised, and your mind absorbed deep in meditation, you may feel that thought and mind both disappear. Yet this is but the surface experience of Dhyana. With constant practice, one feels radiant awareness shining like a brilliant lamp. It is pure and bright like a flower. It is like staring into the vast and empty sky. This spacious awareness is limpid and transparent, yet vivid.' Milarepa In the story of the Shepherd's Search for Mind, a young boy meets the great yogin Milarepa at the entrance of a mountain cave. He is given a profound…
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The Awakening Heart and the Divine Abodes
With Rijumitra and Tejananda
November 21 - 30, 2025
Bodhicitta – the awakening heart – is both the heart–response of wisdom to the suffering of living beings everywhere and the urge to realise full awakening for the benefit of all. This retreat will focus on love, compassion, joy and equanimity – the four ‘divine abodes’ or brahmaviharas – in the context of cultivating bodhicitta. To support this, we’ll also introduce tonglen, the ‘sending and receiving’ practice which opens the heart to universal compassion. The divine abodes are also known as the ‘boundless states’,¬ because they are inclusive of all living beings without exception. The practices that we’ll explore together…
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Practice Retreat 1
With Vajraloka Team
December 20 - 27, 2025
The main feature of these popular retreats is that they allow retreatants to follow the themes and rhythms emerging in their own meditation practice. In some ways they can be compared to going on solitary retreat while offering the support and structure that practising in the company of others can bring. While the practice retreats have no formal teaching input, the daily programme can be tailored to meet the needs of the individual, with support from Vajraloka team members. The simple programme has periods of morning and afternoon meditation with chanting and ritual in the evening. Daily meditation reviews with…
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Practice Retreat 2
With Vajraloka Team
December 27, 2025 - January 3, 2026
The main feature of these popular retreats is that they allow retreatants to follow the themes and rhythms emerging in their own meditation practice. In some ways they can be compared to going on solitary retreat while offering the support and structure that practising in the company of others can bring. While the practice retreats have no formal teaching input, the daily programme can be tailored to meet the needs of the individual, with support from Vajraloka team members. The simple programme has periods of morning and afternoon meditation with chanting and ritual in the evening. Daily meditation reviews with…
More info ...