Healing & Clear Mind Retreat 2024

HELD AT KAMALASHILA TIBETAN BUDDHIST CENTRE
​27 December 2024 – 1 January 2025

Venerable Tsultim generously led a calm-abiding and healing retreat for twenty students at the Kamalashila centre from 27 December through to New Year’s Day, as a beautiful end to 2024 and start for 2025. He was supported by Jack who led teachings on the Four Immeasurables. 

With a number of the people visiting the centre for the first time it was wonderful how quickly the sense of community built and grew over the course of the retreat. Feedback from attendees was very positive. The first two full days focused on the classic text, Advice to Rahula, with the second two days examining the Nine Stages of Meditation, and regular meditations on the body, breath and blue flower along with walking meditations to the saddle to take in the view of Mount Gulaga. 

On New Year’s Eve we enjoyed some lovely singing by Annamaria at dinner before the retreatants asked if they could return to the Gompa to recite Vajrasattva – a first for our end of year retreats! We were kindly supported by Vanessa and Pam with delicious meals lovingly prepared by Karma, Tony, and Andrew. 

We look forward to the new students returning to our centre to continue with us on their Dharma journey under the guidance of our precious teacher Khenpo la. 
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Wishing you all a very Happy New Year and may your practice be strong and joyful. 

“I found the Healing and Clear Mind Retreat very helpful for reinvigorating my practice. I have been seeking some strategies to deal with my restless mind, which often gets agitated by various worldly uncertainties. This restlessness becomes a hindrance to developing a still and concentrated mind. By implementing some of the learnings from retreat and bringing shamatha (calm-abiding) into my daily meditation practice, I notice that I am able to recognise some of the mind’s patterns in my daily activities more easily, and even sometimes notice during meditation when it is about to run off into getting distracted by its usual patterns. Of course, my practice is still a work in progress and some days my mind is all over the place. But the retreat has (via Shamatha) given me a solid foothold, through which I am experiencing more pleasure and tranquillity than before through practices like breath counting and using a fixed object to rest the mind upon. I also found the teachers warm-hearted, patient and knowledgeable. I was grateful for the opportunity to sit the retreat and look forward to attending more in future. Thank you for welcoming me to the Drogmi Buddhist Institute.” ~ Damien

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“I went in with an open mind having little experience of Buddhist practice and doctrine. I was very pleased with Venerable Tsultim leading the meditations, in conjunction with Jack’s input. I had been a lapsed meditator for many years, so it was a beautiful reintroduction, via the Shamatha approach, to my own stillness and presence, and I was particularly deeply affected by the use of the blue flower as an image to focus on. The talk given over the course of the retreat focussing on the graphic handout, explaining the monkey mind, elephant and meditator on the path to enlightenment, was a beautiful illustration of the process we all as practitioners have embarked on.

“I was fortunate to stay on and meet Scott, Robert and others in a Karma Yoga program, which ran immediately after the Healing and Clear Mind Retreat. I felt it deepened my experiences of stillness, and the clarity achieved throughout the five-day retreat.

“Back into ‘normal’ life I have been inspired to continue sitting several times throughout the day, as I am very much aware when I lose my presence to thinking. Coming back to the breath, slowing down and simply sitting with what is, has been a lasting effect of the retreat for myself, and one I look forward to when the demands of the world have been met. I also have a better grasp of what Venerable referred to as causes and conditions and can now see when I get triggered or reactive as something I am responsible for, not the event, person or anything outside myself. Although this has always been my practice, the retreat has illuminated this truth as more obvious. Thank you for the gift of Kamalashila.” ~ Steven