Emptiness and Compassion: The Divine Abodes | Buddhist Centre Features

Seven days of exploration of the divine abodes and emptiness

Friday March 29 - Thursday April 4

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The Buddha taught the meditative 'divine abodes' (brahamaviharas)– unconditional love, compassion, joy and equanimity – not just as states of calm, but as ways to liberate the mind. The 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 in a spirit of openness and curiosity.

This will provide us with an excellent basis for our contemplations of emptiness. Based on the ‘Shorter Discourse on Emptiness’, an early Buddhist text, this approach to emptiness is more direct and experiential than some developed by later Mahayana schools. Starting with our everyday experience, it enables us to ‘experience’ emptiness progressively in relation to our perception of space and consciousness, right up to the liberation of ‘signlessness’. It doesn’t matter how far through this progression we manage to get – discovering emptiness in relation to our actual experience now would be quite profound enough!

Reserve your place on "Emptiness and Compassion: The Divine Abodes"

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Daylight saving changes at the UK throughout this event (Time changes at the UK last Sunday of march, 31st march)

Please note: clocks change in some parts of the world during the course of this series. Weekly time changes for different regions are shown below in bold.

29-30 March

31 March - 4 April

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