We use retreat experience to loosen up how we see and experience our habits and feelings. We see citta being shaped by clinging, being bound into the aggregates.

Taking off your social identity is a huge relief. Examine the qualities of heart, mind and body. Authenticity and persistence are food for the heart.

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Citta is central to our experience of life and can be experienced separately from the energies and moods it is so involved with. It's a kind of '"awareing" that can be contemplated as sense data lands.

Meeting what is disappointing and frustrating in an unfamiliar way and through contemplating the immediate experience of body and mind, release ownership. This reveals warm heartedness and compassion.

Sometimes the heart feels trapped distracted, or passionately involved with experience. This too changes. Training the citta to know itself releases this.

Recalling our moral behaviour, our generosity, we experience the joyful energy that results. Citta enters samadhi when it is gladdened.

Through retreat we learn the trigger points where the I Am occurs. We see the potential for a remedy, a liberated citta, by removing the self from the picture and trusting embodied awareness.

Puja provides a steady frame for meditation and helps to ward off dullness and stale familiarity in daily practice. Its fresh vitality undermines ingrained behaviours and attitudes.

These “treasures of the contemplatives” are important in the culture of gladdening the citta. In the citta’s own bounty we find what our life needs.