James Low, April 2026 writes: The traditional structure of Buddhist teachings is that each level or vehicle has its own View, Meditation, Activity and Result. Over the years I have focused on making the various views and meditations as clear as possible and you can access these through my many audio and video recordings, books and transcripts.
I feel that our retreats now need to have increasing emphasis on your activity and proactive learning.
We all have a lot of life experience and so how can we mobilise this experience to become an ally on our path instead of an obstacle? Rather than relying on our habitual assumptions and conclusions, our practice is to investigate how our subjectivity arises in different situations. We aim to locate the ground (or basis) for our subjective thoughts, feelings and actions in our simple presence within the ever-open here and now.
I will be teaching in the mornings. In the afternoons there will be small group activities led by experienced members of our sangha. They will offer a range of activities and I am encouraging you all to try them out so that you can experience what you can make use of (or not) at each moment in time. The key point is for you to observe what arises for you as you engage with each activity in your ever-changing environment.
The aim in dzogchen is to see the self-vanishing of each moment. We do this by ripening our presence without engaging in dualistic reificatory judgement.
Take It Easy This retreat will focus on relaxing our reliance on habitual patterns of dualistic involvement so that the self-liberation of all experience becomes clear. We will go through Patrul Rinpoche’s short text Self-Liberating Understanding which is Chapter 10 in the book Simply Being. There will be Spanish translation of the teaching. The texts are [...]
Teaching and Meditation retreat led by James Low. Organised by Mustafa Mert Çelebi, Sevgi Çakıcı and Trevor Brown. All at once. The focus of this retreat is seeing how we limit our potential by hanging on to habits and impulses which do not function well in the world in which we find ourselves. Dzogchen, the Great Completion, is the heart [...]
James Low will be speaking at Lekdanling in East London at the invitation of the Shang Shung Institute of Tibetan Studies. Topic: The Deathless and the Dying: The focus will be on illusion as the middle way between the familiar binary opposites of birth and death, health and sickness, life as flow and within that, loss and grief. Registration: Click [...]
James accepted an invitation from Laura Pearls of the Sit-Heads Meditation Club, which describes itself as a sitting and social group for dedicated meditators. This is the Zoom link for the meeting. This is how Laura describes their meetings. Would you be open to joining us virtually some evening as a guest teacher? We would especially love to have you because [...]
Please refer to the Flyer for details. Seminar starts: Thursday, 23 April, 2026, at approx. 5:00 p.m. The course ends with lunch on Sunday, 26 April 2026 appr. 14:00 Please contact Robert Jaroslawski, the organiser, asap to book and get more information. 50+ people have already registered. Note from Robert: "Participation is still possible on the condition that people take care [...]
A four-day student-led event in Turkish and English facilitated by Mariana Orozco and Pinar McGivern. We would all like to have more spontaneous, free connectivity in our life, to express our potential with less limitations and thus co-emerge in our every-day interactions. To achieve this, we will be doing interactive work, to ensure we not only understand the theory, but [...]
Dissolving Obscurations in the Innate Openness of Presence Teachings by James Low will be translated to Polish. Full information https://simplybeing.org/wilga https://simplybeing.org/wilga Flyers Flyer in Polish | Flyer in English Teaching will begin on Thursday, May 21 at 10 a.m. and end on Sunday, May 24 at 11 a.m. Getting Here Jak dojechać do Wilgi How to get to Wilga Space allocation [...]
James will talk about compassion in action and supporting minority groups such as the Huni Kuin in the Amazon. You can read more about this group and how to support them here. This is the Zoom link The password is rigpa James will talk at 3pm (London time) on Sunday May 31st and there will be translators. This event is [...]
Opening to nondual belonging James writes, "The focus of the retreat is on directly opening to our mind as it is. Our intrinsic presence is not created by others, by our own effort, or by circumstances. It is not a construct and it is not, like anything we know. By dis-identifying with our constructive habits we will set them free [...]
Opening to the Open: Learning, reflecting and meditating as active participation in dharma. Dzogchen Summer Retreat with James Low and Sangha. July 4th to 11th 2026 at Retreathaus Berghof, Germany The retreat will start on Saturday 4th July 2026 at 6pm and will end at 1pm on Saturday 11th July, followed by lunch and cleaning up the retreat house together. [...]
REGISTRATION • INSCRIÇÕES • INSCRIPCIONES Taking your ease where you are always welcome James writes, "We will focus on opening to our minds as they actually are, free of conceptual covering. We will meditate, communicate and participate in various activities bring us ever-closer to the here-and-now. The retreat will have a new style of timetable with James teaching in the [...]
The focus of the retreat is on opening to the intrinsic purity of the mind as it is. This purity is not improved by our virtuous efforts, nor impaired by our bad habits. James Low
