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.
- This event has passed.
Q&A [39] + Supporting the life blood of the sangha. Zoom, Feb 2025
James Low
This Q&A session will now include a talk about how we can all support the life blood of the sangha. Donations from this Zoom event are dedicated to fundraising to help sangha members in Brazil who could not otherwise afford to attend the retreat in July/August in Portugal.
James writes, “As we know our small sangha is spread over many different countries. In the summer I will be doing a retreat in Portugal and I hope that many people will manage to come from Brazil as my health is not strong enough for me to go to Brazil.
The Brazilian economy is not so strong and some of our brothers and sisters in Brazil could do with some help to fund their fares and the accommodation cost of the retreat.
Therefore I will be talking about communication within the sangha and exploring how we can support each other through our practice, our friendly availability and our financial resources.
At this time there are many attacks on free movement and on free conversation and communication. By finding ways to stay in connection, to work for the benefit of all sentient beings, and to support the continuity of the teachings in different countries we can act to antidote the wave of selfishness and egotism which threatens to bring us all much grief.”
6:00 pm to 7:30pm (London Time) https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter
With German (Robert), Polish (Bartek), Portuguese (Joao or Milton), Russian (Marie), Romanian (Viorica), Turkish (Mustafa) and Spanish (Juan) translation.
Register yourself here
Dana:
To contribute to helping people from Brazil participate in the Portugal retreat, please email Pedro Gomes who does so much to prepare our recordings on Youtube. Pedro’s email is pfvgomes[at]gmail.com.