These one- or two-week-long retreats create the conditions for you to take meditation practice deeper. To attend these retreats you will need to have been regularly meditating for at least two years and regularly attend retreats, a centre or a group within the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community. You must also be comfortable with extended periods of sitting meditation, Buddhist devotional practice and spending most of the retreat in silence.
Paramananda has been teaching meditation and leading retreats for over 30 years and is author of three books on meditation: Change Your Mind, A Deeper Beauty and The Body.
2018
The Alchemical Heart – Two-Week Meditation Retreat with Paramananda & Mandarava
August 10-24 | £650/620
This two-week-long meditation retreat will focus on the ‘heart’ as the door to love and beauty. Through meditation we will explore how restoring the heart to its traditional central place in awareness and imagination allows us to cultivate a sense of care for ourselves and the world. We will see how a meditation practice based in care helps to heal the split between ourselves and the world. Mandarava will lead ritual each evening to connect imaginatively to the heart and give expression to its longing.
Falling into the world - Meditation Week with Paramananda & Mandarava
November 30 - December 07 | £350/320
We will encourage a sense of trust and service towards the world in which we find ourselves. Recognising that, just as the mind is embodied, the body too is inseparable from the world in which it exists. In order to trust the world, we must first trust our own imagination through which we experience in the world. To be fully present in the world, we have to learn to imagine ourselves in our individuality as an integral part of the world and as something also precious to the whole world.
Mandarava lives at Rivendell and is an artist, puppet maker and story teller, who has a particular gift for creating meaningful and engaging rituals within the context of retreats. nagasiddhi also lives at Rivendell and is an artist.
See also Weekends page for the details of New Stories for Old Hearts Meditation Long Weekend with Paramamanda, 22-25 June.
2019
The River Underground - Meditation Week with Paramananda & Nagasiddhi
March 22-29 | £355/325
"We are ruled by powers that we pretend to understand." - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
On this retreat we will focus on meditation practice as a means to gain access to the unseen underlying currents and forces that shape our lives. Many of us can have an experience of somehow being ‘out of touch’ with our experience in all its fullness. To counter this, through deep internal listening and the activation of the imagination, we will try to engage with what which truly moves and sustains us. By learning to abide in the heart we begin to feel the ever-changing river that runs through it and mysteriously nourishes us.
The Alchemical Heart – Two-Week Meditation Retreat with Paramananda & Mandarava
August 16-30 | £660/630
This two-week-long meditation retreat will focus on the ‘heart’ as the door to love and beauty. Through meditation we will explore how restoring the heart to its traditional central place in awareness and imagination allows us to cultivate a sense of care for ourselves and the world. We will see how a meditation practice based in care helps to heal the split between ourselves and the world. Mandarava will lead ritual each evening to connect imaginatively to the heart and give expression to its longing.
Body & Soul - Meditation Week with Paramananda & Mandarava
November 29 - December 06 | £355/325
“By seeing differently, we do differently” – James Hillman
This retreat will investigate how an imaginative approach to our bodies can be the key to meditation. In the ancient Greek tradition the ‘soul’ was understood as an inter-mediate state between the body and the ‘spirit’. As such, it was the ‘ground’ of the imagination itself. Bringing awareness to the body through the perspective of the imagination can create new ways of seeing ourselves and our experience. By doing so in our meditation practice we will uncover how our own bodies hold our history and the possible key to our full unfolding.
Mandarava regularly leads retreats at Rivendell and is an artist, puppet maker and story teller, who has a particular gift for creating meaningful and engaging rituals within the context of retreats. Nagasiddhi also leads and supports retreats at Rivendell and is an artist.
See also the Black Sun Meditation Long Weekend with Paramananda & Nagasiddhi October 18-21, 2019.
