The Three Bodies Of Belonging - A Home Retreat

Balajit, Singhashri and Viveka joining forces to offer another wonderful embodied opportunity to explore meditation in community
About this Event

🧘‍♀️ 🧘‍♂️ Seven days of meditation, soulful exploration, and strong, supportive friendship: a gently held space to go deeper into experience and practice.

Led by Balajit, Singhashri, and Viveka

Friday October 25th till Thursday October 31st 2024

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Following on from last year’s successful Home Retreat ‘Forces for Good: Challenging Emotions as Portals to Liberation’, our friends Balajit, Singhashri and Viveka are back and joining forces again to offer another wonderful embodied opportunity to explore our system of meditation in depth and in community.

This year we’re all invited to draw 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 meditation, movement (somatics), music, chanting and ritual, exercises and discussions, teacher input and practice reviews.

If friendship in community is the whole of the spiritual life, here’s your chance to go deeper in your own practice in the supportive company of others.

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The retreat will start at the time of the second session on October 25. This is to allow the full team to begin the retreat together. All other days will feature three sessions at the times shown below

Suggested donation for the whole retreat:

£175 / $220 / €205

or drop in for £30 / $38 / €35 per day.

Get one ticket and come to any session you wish throughout the week!
N.B. This retreat is for peole with at least six months' meditation experience. Please get in touch if you have any questioins about attending: [email protected]

Like all our events, this retreat is offered by donation rather than charging a compulsory ticket price. We want to do this because we never want money to be an obstacle to taking part in a supportive community, and we know many people are struggling financially in the wake of the pandemic and cost of living crisis. The amount we suggest reflects the huge amount of work and love that goes into putting on events we hope will benefit everyone attending. If you can, please donate today to help us continue with our work and support others to attend who cannot afford to pay. Thank you!

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Attend any or all conversations in Zoom.

This event will be recorded and may be published online for others to access. Only the leader's video will be used except where users consent to appear spotlighted in a public conversation. Private conversations in breakout rooms will not be recorded.

Balajit

Balajit (he/him) has been leading retreats and events across the UK for around 15 years. For several years he lived and worked at Vajraloka Retreat Centre in North Wales.

He is currently based in Birmingham, where he mixes Buddhist teaching responsibilities with work as a trauma therapist. He has studied the newly emerging psycho-biological approaches to trauma work- and is qualified in Somatic Experiencing, NARM therapy and SHEN Therapy.

In the past few years, Balajit has been exploring correspondences between these emerging approaches and the canonical Dharma, as aids to becoming more embodied and the arising of the .

Singhashri

Singhashri (she/her or they/them) is a queer, Latinx-American dharma teacher and writer. They teach mindfulness and compassion as means to awakening to love, beauty and truth and have committed their life to supporting collective liberation for all and the joy and freedom found there. They teach at various retreat and urban centres across the UK, Europe and the USA, and support a number of projects aimed at creating greater diversity and inclusion within Buddhist sanghas and the secular mindfulness field. They currently live in London with their partner.

Viveka

Viveka (she/they) has worked for social, racial, economic, environmental and gender justice and civil rights for 30 years as a consultant, facilitator, trainer, coach and somatic coach. She specializes in guiding leaders and organizations through transformational processes: race equity and liberation culture change and strategy, team building and coaching, vision and strategy, leading innovation and change and working with conflict, leadership transition, and alliance building.

Viveka was chair of the San Francisco Buddhist Center for 15 years, until 2015. She still serves on the board, and leads meditation and Dharma retreats in the Bay Area and around the world.

The Dharmakaya is… the embodiment, or the perfection of mind. Mind meaning here the deepest part of oneself, because it is with that deepest part of oneself…that one realises the ultimate. So Dharmakaya corresponds to mind, what in us is mind, in a Buddha is Dharmakaya.

In the same way Sambhogakaya corresponds to speech, what, in us is speech or communication, or communication principle, in a Buddha is Sambhogakaya. So in his Sambhogakaya form, in his ideal form, his archetypal form, he communicates with others on the same spiritual level, communicates with other Buddhas and with highly advanced Bodhisattvas.

And then Nirmanakaya corresponds with – it literally means ‘body of transformation’ – …what is Nirmanakaya in a Buddha in us is physical body. Our physical body determines where we are. The fact that we have a physical body means that we exist at a certain point in space and a certain point in time...

– Sangharakshita, Seminar on the Songs of Milarepa