This retreat will take place on Saturday Oct 17, at 10am-3:30pm at 21 Prospect St, Providence, RI 02912 USA.
From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, our innate awakened nature (often called “Buddha nature”) is the basic space of our being undivided from tremendous innate capacities of awareness, warmth, unconditional love, compassion, and wisdom. These innate capacities are always available below our surface consciousness, in the ground of our experience, but hidden by our habits of self-clinging thought and reaction. In this daylong retreat we will explore several ways derived from Tibetan Buddhism to draw on qualities of that innate nature to become a loving, healing environment for all our thoughts, feelings and reactions, as basis to become the same kind of environment for others. The unconditional power of love, compassion and wisdom that emerge in this process can also be used to help the mind relax into the source of those qualities, the intrinsic openness, clarity, and compassionate capacity of our pre-conceptual awareness, our Buddha nature.
In this daylong retreat, we will adapt this direction of practice from Tibetan Buddhism, with some assistance from modern psychology, to make it accessible both for Buddhist practitioners and for people of all faiths and backgrounds who have previous contemplative experience and seek an accessible way to cultivate unconditional love and wisdom. This retreat will include short talks that introduce guided meditations, Q&A, and discussion.
John Makransky, PhD, has been a professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College, senior academic advisor for the Centre of Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, a contemplative fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, and developer of the Sustainable Compassion Training model for accessing innate capacities of compassion and awareness. John’s scholarly writings have focused on connections between practices of devotion, compassion and non-dual wisdom in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, on adapting Buddhist practices to meet contemporary minds, and on theoretical issues in interfaith learning. In 2000, John was ordained a Lama, a meditation teacher of innate compassion and wisdom, within the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Since 2000, John has taught meditations of innate compassion and wisdom, adapted from Tibetan Buddhism, for modern Buddhists, those in other spiritual traditions, and for people in caring roles and professions who seek an accessible way to access an unconditional power of love, compassion and wisdom. For more information, see: sustainablecompassion.org