For years now, I’ve spent two very happy weeks each June at Rivendell Retreat Centre in Sussex, with its beautiful garden. Next year, I shall be doing my two weeks for them as usual, but with Covid  and the uncertainty about how things will be next year, even with vaccines being rolled out, I’ve agreed to do them online.

As usual, one of the two retreats will be for experienced meditators, which is one of the very rare opportunities for me to share a retreat with those of you who aren’t Order members.  It will run from the 12th – 17th June, and is called Centre of the Sunlit Sky. For more details, see here.

The other online retreat, for Order members,  will be a new departure for me, taking extracts from a Mahayana sutra as the basis for a meditation retreat.  We’ll be looking at one of the great classics of the Mahayana tradition, the Vimalakirti Nirdesa, on which Sangharakshita gave an important series of lectures in the 1970s, and taking some of its images and insights as deeply as possible into meditation. Dates are 19th – 24th June, and you’ll find full details here.

I’m hoping that I shall be able to go to Rivendell and do the retreat from there. I’m sorry that we won’t have a full house of people there, but it’s great that the catchment area for the retreats is now the whole world…

All good wishes,

Vessantara.