Kadampa Buddhist Meditation Retreats

Do you fancy some Buddhist meditation retreat? January 2025 is nearly upon us and – although retreats are offered throughout the year – January means retreat season in the Kadampa Buddhist tradition. Even if you’re not able to take off a whole month or even a week for retreat, this article is also a bit of encouragement simply to take a day or two if you can. Or just to get a regular meditation practice going in general ☺️ Scroll to the bottom for some retreat venues.

On retreat we stop all forms of business and extraneous activities so as to emphasize a particular spiritual practice. ~ New Guide to Dakini Land 

Starting almost 50 years ago, when Venerable Geshe Kelsang first came to England in 1977, up to six weeks each year have been put aside in the larger Kadampa Meditation Centers for retreat, sometimes even longer. I personally benefited from this for many years, when I lived at Madhyamaka Centre in the UK and everything closed down for retreat. Sometimes we were even snowed in = bliss. We didn’t have the Internet back then to lure us away from thinking deep thoughts and hanging out with Buddhas – heck, we didn’t even have computers. I count myself lucky that I didn’t need any will power whatsoever back then to turn off all the gadgets.

Nowadays addiction to being always “on” is a serious problem for people who want to go deep and stay deep. If we’re not careful, not only can these addictions take us away from a guaranteed source of peace in terms of using up our time and interest, but we end up going for refuge to them, seeking relief in them instead of Dharma. But there is no relief there.

I know how I feel when I go for refuge to social media or entertainment rather than to the guaranteed peace, joy, satisfaction, and connection I get whenever I bother to spend time with Dharma and take it to heart. And it’s not that nice, to be honest. How about you?

Dharma wisdom is powerfully transformative. It literally transforms our hearts and minds, so the more time we can spend with it the better our life feels. We can spend time with Dharma in our daily lives, of course, and need to; but it is simply such a huge treat to be able to do several sessions of prayers and meditation each day. I remember when I was doing a three-year retreat about 14 years ago now, and I took a short “break” to go to a Festival. Someone asked me, “How have you been?!” and I replied, “I have never been happier. I just get to spend all day long thinking about Dharma. How could I be happier?” I meant it then and I still mean it now. Even when our sessions are not going well, we still feel better for having done them.

I can honestly say that I have never gotten bored or restless in retreat. Quite the opposite. Distraction seems to creep so sneakily into our daily lives, often despite our best efforts to make time by going to bed earlier, turning off the machines, getting up earlier, etc. When I check, it is those mindless habits of wanting or expecting an array of distraction that really make me dissatisfied. I tend also to have fewer delusions on retreat – and delusions are pretty tedious.

These January retreats engendered in me a love for using this bleak mid-winter time to go deep — to dive below the surface of the crazy ocean waves of samsaric suffering & overly complicated conceptual thoughts into clarity and bliss, into the Pure Land of Lamrim, as Geshe-la has called it, and the Pure Land of Tantra. They are the best possible way to start the new year, and my hands down favorite times.

Retreat is very needed in our world, it is not selfish in the slightest. If we have the chance to do any at all, we can also hold the space for others. We could all aim to do a few extra good deep meditations at home this coming January to gain some control over these mad, mad times and set this new year up in the way we’d like it to continue. As well as stay stronger for others … How’s that for a new year’s resolution? Deal?

And if you haven’t learned to meditate at all yet, now could be a really great time to start 😊

If ever there was a good time to get some perspective and space from all the craziness, the beginning of 2025 would seem to be it. Still a few weeks of this strange 2024 to go, and a cursory look at the headlines shows that the last couple of weeks alone have brought us ​ongoing conflict, violence, and devastating humanitarian sadness in the Israel-Hamas war; escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with Russia capturing territories in Donetsk and continuing to bomb whatever they can; violence in Bolivia; starvation in the Sudan; a deadly lightning strike in Uganda at a refugee settlement​; a significant warning about the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), leading to rising sea levels, disrupted weather patterns, and further climate destabilization; five billion grotesquely overgrown chickens sickened and killed from being packed into tiny spaces before they even reach the production line of 15 billion chickens, whose wings are ripped off and gobbled up by humans​. Etc. I don’t need to say more, you know what this impure world is like. And samsara is just getting longer because every day we’re each sowing hundreds and hundreds more karmic seeds or potentials, both individually and collectively.

There is no solution in samsara to samsara.

On a personal level, we probably all know friends and family who are unwell or who have passed away. Life for me is now skirting dangerously close to the one-by-one steady dropping off of everyone in my generation, including all my friends. Soon, not a person I grew up with will be left. And it is certain that I am no longer going to die young.

Plus, the number of deaths mentioned here of course barely scratches the surface of the billions of other deaths in the last few days, let alone in the last year. (An average of 55.3 million humans and untold billions of animals and others.) Any illusion we may be under that we are long-term residents of this world is just that, an illusion. We’re here on a month-by-month rental with nary a day’s notice.

Making the most of our precious time

Our body has no long-term future, and in my case is long over the hill. Our mind, however, has not even begun to reach its prime.

To fulfil this mental potential, our most valuable and rare possession is our precious human life; but we don’t have a whole lot of time left with it. All we have to look forward to, really, is spiritual realizations, insofar as everything else is dust in the wind. And to gain these realizations – actualizing our full potential and bringing about an end to suffering — we need time.

To have time, we need to MAKE time. As well as carving out some time each year to do some retreat, this is what going deeper into our center, our spiritual heart, as explained here for example, can do for us – it can make us more time. It gives us a certain sense of timelessness in fact. Identifying with our pure inexhaustible potential instead of with our annoying off-kilter delusions makes us feel far more alive and present, and so time slows down. We might even feel for a change that we have all the time in the world. At least I feel more like that on retreat – this gentle, timeless, present quality — it’s beautiful.

I hear a lot of people, including me, complaining that life is too busy – and ordinarily it can feel that way; but I think that a lot of that feeling of busyness comes not from all that we have to get done but from not having sufficient mindfulness and concentration. These qualities, which improve on retreat, give us all the time, space, and freedom from surplus worrying thoughts that we need in order to do what needs to be done.

We are none of us strangers to suffering, but Dharma gives us the ability to break free, and retreat gives us the opportunity to spend more time in Dharma. What’s not to love about spending several hours each day in freedom and happiness?! Even with poor concentration, we are generally more peaceful on retreat than in our ordinary fast-paced, externalized lives. We can become ridiculously happy.

It’s very relaxing not to buy into the hallucinations of the gross mind for a while — to let these fevered imaginings die down, stop taking them quite so seriously. Meditation gives us the chance to see them for what they are and to let them go so we can enjoy the peace and bliss of our own mind in deep rest. I have yet to find anything more relaxing than giving up on trying to find this peace and bliss in objects of attachment or in getting one over my enemies.

Even one breathing meditation allows us to stop shaking our mind and discover that an unshaken mind is naturally peaceful. A weekend or a whole week or month of doing this gives us invaluable insight and confidence.

I also think that when we meditate a lot our lives start to flow – we are not so much living second-hand through social media or the news or Netflix, trying to get our thrills vicariously, or even in the made up narratives of our own lives, the product solely of our conceptual thoughts. We start to abide in the reality of wisdom and compassion, our true nature, and everything flows naturally from there.

What we discover on retreat we can also take back into our daily lives, and year by year, as our mindfulness and practice grows, we can keep that peace and sanity going for longer and longer. Eventually it might last right up to the next year’s retreat!

Silence is golden

Whether in retreat doing the traditional four meditation sessions a day, or in the space of our own house once a day or so during January, we can let go of the demands of our daily life and reconnect to the stillness within ourselves. We can be quiet, for a change, verbally and mentally. Perhaps we can even spend periods in total silence. Watch this video if you can see it on Facebook, see if it doesn’t tempt you just a little bit …

Silence is powerful. It creates space in our mind and fundamentally changes the way we connect with the teachings and meditations, as well as ourselves and other people. Observing silence is a powerful method to disengage us from busyness, and it leads us naturally to deeper levels of being. Our heart begins to open and we feel the blessings of all Buddhas pouring into and filling our mind.

It brings us closer to others, both holy beings and sentient beings. I find it telling that Shantideva spends the first half of the 8^th chapter on concentration in Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life explaining why we need to disengage from others, only to spend the second half on how our main object of concentration is love and compassion for others.

Through deepening our experience of meditation we can take our spiritual practice up to the next level, and this will keep us going in the following months when we are back at work. By integrating this meditative experience into our daily activities we will improve the quality of our life and bring happiness to our family and friends.

I think diving deep below the froth of the ocean waves is also an incredibly important way to identify with our pure potential and disengage from endless feelings of hopelessness, inadequacy, and lack of control that come from identifying with a limited, painful self. We need self-confidence during these difficult times if we are to be of any help to anyone. We don’t need discouragement.

Who am I?

In each of the stages of the path (Lamrim) meditations, therefore, we can get into the habit of identifying with our Buddha nature and the result of that meditation, asking each time, “Who am I?” For example, instead of “I am angry”, “I am lonely”, “I am hurt”, “I am useless at this”, etc., we can think, “I am someone with a precious human life”, “I am someone who is on their way out from this prison of samsara”, “I am someone who has compassion for everyone”, etc.

In this way we can enter that Pure Land of Lamrim, enjoying ourselves each day with these beautiful minds, getting in the habit of identifying with them so much that we can then keep doing that the whole rest of the year.

Blessed month

January is also Heruka and Vajrayogini month. Again, even if our concentration is not brilliant yet, there are a lot of blessings flying around this month, so we may as well tune in the radio receiver of faith as often as we can.

Check out this Onion article if you get a moment, ‘I Can’t Do This Anymore,’ Think 320 Million Americans Quietly Going About Day. Spoof though it is, it still shows how we can all fall prey to humdrum mediocrity, even when things are not going particularly wrong in our lives; and how mediocrity doesn’t make us happy. If you have a chance to do some Tantric retreat, this immersion can be a swift way to transform these ordinary conceptions and appearances into an experience of great bliss and emptiness, transforming your world into the real Pure Land of the Dakinis.

(All this makes me think it should be called “Advance”, really, not “Retreat”. And/or “Treat”.)

One day at a time

I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier
I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist
Like it doesn’t exist ~ Sia

Some of my best advice on doing retreat is to take one day at a time – once you’re in retreat you put up so-called “retreat boundaries” of body, speech, and mind, which basically means you’re not thinking of anything outside of the retreat; so there is in fact no need to plan. (And there is never any need to wallow in nostalgia; the past has disappeared as completely and irrevocably as last night’s dream). This means you have a good shot at living in the moment, remembering that today is your first and possibly also your last day. This is really quite unbelievably relaxing.

Practical plan 2025

As always, there is so much on offer this January!

Check out the weeks and weeks of retreat available at our International Retreat Centers: IKRC Grand Canyon, KMC New York, Tharpaland in Germany, and KMC Kailash in Switzerland. These IRCs and Kadampa Meditation Centers (KMCs) all offer incredibly special retreat programs with experienced meditation leaders that “address the needs of anyone wishing to deepen their experience of Kadam Dharma in modern day times.”

And check out this link for any retreats at your local Centers.

You can also think about using January to get along to some inspiring meditation classes and establish a good meditation habit for 2025. Check out this link for meditation classes in your area.

Over to you. Do you have any questions? Or anything to share from retreats you may have done in the past?

(By the way, if you recognize some of this article, it is because I first wrote it in 2016 and have given it a makeover.)