Men's winter retreat

Starts 8 Jul 2018

Vision that Frees: bringing insight practice into your Dharma life

As Buddhists we apply ourselves to the practice of the Buddhist Path whose sole purpose is to provide a means for effectively diminishing and eventually completely eradicating suffering in our lives and the lives of others. This plain fact about the Buddhist path can easily be lost sight of. We essentially suffer because our experience of life is fabricated by our fundamental wrong view that we have an immutable self which has become the reference point for all our experience. To free ourselves from this view, and thereby liberate our experience, is why we practice the Dharma. In order to effect this freeing we gradually disentangle our experience from more rigid self fabrication into progressively looser ways of fabricating the self and eventually to an experience of life where all fabrication of self view on even very subtle levels of experience has been deconstructed.

This is our theme. In seven days we can only really begin to scratch the surface of this great task by developing an effective understanding and vision of the experience of the inseparability of appearances and emptiness through applying our awareness to dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (insubstantiality). The tools we will be working with are reflective study and meditative practice, underpinned by our practice of ethics and friendship.