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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Buddha nature in all aspects of life. Eifel, April 2017
James Low
This retreat is aimed at familiarizing ourselves with the six bardos. We will do this by studying The Root Verses of the Six Bardos, a fundamental text of Tibetan Buddhism and a terma of the master Karma Lingpa. The six bardos describe all aspects of our human lives, including the process of death and dying. They provide us with an opportunity to discover how we can recognize all aspects of living and dying as an expression of our buddha nature, our limitless and true nature.
The Root Verses of the Six Bardos is published in the Collected Works of C.R. Lama in 2013 (Chapter 4), edited by James Low. The German edition was published in 2016 under the title „Gesammelte Schriften von Chimed Rigdzin Rinpoche”.
You can read everything about the retreat here including the practical arrangements for registering and for accommodation. Registration starts on the evening of April 19th.
James Low will give an evening lecture on 19th April, the evening before the retreat starts, in Cologne/Bonn on “Compassion, befriending the orphaned self”