Online Retreat: The Heart of Practice
Day 2
Resources for Day 2:
‘It is the pauses which make beautiful the music of our lives.
It is the empty spaces which give richness and significance to them.
And it is stillness which makes them truly useful.’
Sangharakshita from ‘Crossing the Stream’
Monday 8am
Welcome to Day 2
Salute to the Three Jewels,
Reading
40 min unled meditation with bells marking 5 stages
Reading
‘disposing yourself physically to be calm, as in an empty house the raindrops slowly gather, relax – do not force your mind or body.’
Padmasambhava from Advice to the Three Fortunate Women
Monday 10.30pm
Talk by Paramananda
Led meditation
Lying down with drumming and mantra
Sitting meditation and final poem
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Seamus Heaney
Monday 4pm
Meditation led by Paramananda
Q & A with Paramananda and Bodhilila
Amitabha mantra led by Prajnanita
