All times refer to UK time, unless otherwise stated.
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.
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Who is me hiding me from me? Ponzone, Piedmont
Who is hiding me from me?
We will use meditation and self-enquiry to examine the assumptions which guide our sense of ourselves and the world around us. Assumptions such as ‘I am an autonomous individual’ may seem to provide a reliable basis for our lives but Buddhist teachings put that into question.
Perhaps the light shed by our beliefs is actually what keeps us in the dark. We have enough beliefs — it is time to meet the mind that believes.