Vesakha Meditation Retreat

The full moon day of the month of Vesakha is a spiritually potent time for a deeper dive into meditation and liberation. Vesak Day as it is commonly called commemorates the birth, enlightenment, and parinibbana of the Buddha some 2,500 years ago. It also commemorates the birth of one of Awarezen's main lineage guru Shrii Shrii Anandamurti (1921-1990), a Tantric guru and Renaissance man of the highest calibre in our contemporary era. Overall, Vesak at Awarezen celebrates the possibility and vision of human enlightenment where total freedom from dissatisfaction and blossoming of all good qualities like wisdom, compassion, kindness, balance, bliss, exuberance, and strength become manifest as our living reality.

On this Vesak Day, we will hold a half-day meditation retreat where we will be guided into meditative processes for stillness and bliss, forming the platform for deeper insight into the way things are. In Yoga and the meditation teachings of the Buddha, there exist a rich repertiore of meditative processes and practices for nurturing stillness and singularity of the mind, evoking degrees of blissfulness and even ecstasy that conduce to somatic and mental pliancy. This overall pliancy and malleability of mindbody enables clearer and sharper insight into how experience really works and how reality is — we get to penetrate into the way things really are, not how we imagine them to be. Taken together, serenity and insight work synergistically to remove obscurations to the primordial freedom of the mind in its sheer luminosity and emptiness. We move away from limited identifications and stream towards liberation of mind (vimutti) as deathless nibbana is realized in the timeless stopping of deluded mind. Buddha-nature is revealed and enlightenment dawns. This retreat is a small step on the way, a drop of liberation in the midst of our everyday lives — an oasis of blissful freedom from distraction and stressfulness.

RSVP by emailing chriskang@awarezen.com to book and receive a Zoom link.