Hosted By: Balajit, Singhashri, and Viveka
Friday, April 28th at 9:00 am BST to Thursday, May 4th, 2023 at 9:30 pm BST
Online via Zoom - see session times below
Event Description:
What if all emotions, including those we sometimes find challenging, had something important to tell us about ourselves, others, and the world?
🧘♀️ 🧘♂️ Seven days of meditation, soulful exploration, and strong, supportive friendship: a gently held space to go deeper into experience and practice.
This Home Retreat invites us to collectively flip the script on how we may habitually relate to some emotions as more valuable than others in our process of getting to know ourselves. What if we could break out of any thinking that simply pits the “better” parts of ourselves against the “worst”?
Through a deep dive into embodied experience, moment by moment, we’ll uncover the potential for integrity at the heart of emotions like fear, grief, and anger. We’ll explore what these emotions reveal to us when allowed to be fully known and felt in awareness—before our habits of identifying with, or banishing, kick in.
Together we’ll get curious about where challenging emotions come from as parts of us—and what they might need to liberate the energy usually bound up in them. We’ll investigate how connecting with our bodies of energy can support us as we learn to relate differently to our emotions and their impact on our lives.
In these challenging times we’ll also look at working with feeling together through conflict, leaning into the promise of this as a way to move towards creating a more liberated world.
Join us to co-create an emergent space that will include meditation, community agreements, friendship, somatic exercises, movement, reflections, small and large group discussions and inquiry, teaching input, guided practices, and creative ritual!
Attend any or all conversations in Zoom.
This event will be recorded and may be published online for others to access. Only the leader's video will be used except where users consent to appear spotlighted in a public conversation. Private conversations in breakout rooms will not be recorded.
Session Times:
First daily session (2 hrs): USA PST 02:00 | México 03:00 | USA EST 05:00 | IE & UK 10:00 | Europe CET 11:00 | India 14:30 | Australia AEST 19.00 | New Zealand NZST 21.00
Second daily session (2 hrs): USA PST 08:00 | México 09:00 | USA EST 11:00 | IE & UK 16:00 | Europe CET 17:00 | India 20:30 | Australia AEST 01.00 (next day) | New Zealand NZST 03.00 (next day)
Third daily session (1.5 hrs): USA PST 11:30 | México 12:30 | USA EST 14:30 | IE & UK 19:30 | Europe CET 20:30 | India 00:00 (next day) | Australia AEST 04.30 (next day) | New Zealand NZST 06.30 (next day)
Event Registration:
Register at the link below.
Payment:
Suggested donation for the whole retreat:
£125 / $175 / €150 or £25 / $35 / €30 per day.
Get one ticket and come to any session you wish throughout the week!
Like all our events, this retreat is offered by donation rather than charging a compulsory ticket price. We want to do this because we never want money to be an obstacle to taking part in a supportive community, and we know many people are struggling financially in the wake of the pandemic and cost of living crisis. The amount we suggest reflects the huge amount of work and love that goes into putting on events we hope will benefit everyone attending. If you can, please donate today to help us continue with our work and support others to attend who cannot afford to pay. Thank you!
About the Hosts:
Balajit (he/him) has been leading retreats and events across the UK for around 15 years. For several years he lived and worked at Vajraloka Retreat Centre in North Wales.
He is currently based in Birmingham, where he mixes Buddhist teaching responsibilities with work as a trauma therapist. He has studied the newly emerging psycho-biological approaches to trauma work and is qualified in Somatic Experiencing, NARM therapy, and SHEN Therapy.
In the past few years, Balajit has been exploring correspondences between these emerging approaches and the canonical Dharma as aids to becoming more embodied and the arising of the bodhicitta.
Singhashri (she/her or they/them) is a queer, Latinx-American dharma teacher and writer. They teach mindfulness and compassion as means to awakening to love, beauty, and truth and have committed their life to supporting collective liberation for all and the joy and freedom found there. They teach at various retreat and urban centres across the UK, Europe, and the USA, and they support a number of projects aimed at creating greater diversity and inclusion within Buddhist sanghas and the secular mindfulness field. They currently live in London with their partner.
Viveka (she/they) has worked for social, racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice and civil rights for 30 years as a consultant, facilitator, trainer, coach, and somatic coach. She specializes in guiding leaders and organizations through transformational processes: race equity and liberation culture change and strategy, team building and coaching, vision and strategy, leading innovation and change and working with conflict, leadership transition, and alliance building.
Viveka was chair of the San Francisco Buddhist Center for 15 years, until 2015. She still serves on the board and leads meditation & Dharma retreats in the Bay Area and around the world.