We come on retreat to clear the negative, the compulsive, the cluttered. Acknowledging the causal potential to adopt behaviours and attitudes and transmit them to others, there is a need to clear and reset. The warm, safe, cooperative retreat environment allows for new growth after the clearing.

Practice with opening the body as an energetic formation. Muscles can relax on an upright posture, the boundaries of the bodies can relax. Opening into the surrounding space ventilates stale energies, supporting clearer attitudes and a brighter heart.

Based on an upright, open posture, chanting adds vocal tone to breathing. Breath becomes sound through bodily resonators. The release of breathing out, combined with the resonance and the reference to images of purity and compassion is brightening.

The basis of body, mind and heart is a field of interconnective energies. Clear the body through breathing and posture; clear the mind by disengaging. The heart naturally opens in this healthier atmosphere. The field is now primed to ventilate difficult emotions allowing renewal to occur.

Walking meditation is a whole body experience. Set up the upright and lateral frame, and extend the web of energy across the whole body. ‘Listen’ with the skin as you walk, taking in the space. When the body feels its wholeness it becomes more balanced and relaxed, conducing to release.

Body sweeping meditation encourages attention that gathers around an object. Rather than absorbing into phenomena, attention remains broad and open, like a loop.

Mindfulness replaces self as the container and arbiter if experience. Self finds it difficult to be with the disagreeable, the crazy, the chaotic, the out of control. Self searches for success, and dreads failure. Mindfulness can handle real life: no success, no failure.

Puja is the act of praising, honouring, lifting up particular spiritual values. It’s not limited by what one can or can’t do. The heart can be lifted to feel spiritual qualities – awakening, purity, generosity. This shifts one’s centre from the world back to one’s own heart.

Felt meanings are triggered through contact. They are conditioned, and over time become like bookmarks that we return to. It’s possible to acknowledge agitating ones and discharge them through the body. Positive meanings can be cultivated and embodied, generating new bookmarks.

Mindfulness of breathing is the gathering of attention around a process that is flowing and fluid. The steady and suffusive quality of breathing eases tensions in the heart and mind. The thinking process quietens down and external sights and sounds don’t impinge allowing the natural qualities of the heart become more apparent.