Bodhilila reflects on the value of retreat time during the Christmas period and shares plans this year’s City Retreat at WLBC. “Dear friends – As we approach the end of the year it’s hard to escape the approach of Christmas and all the expectations that brings. Whether or not it is a festival that has any religious or personal significance to us…” Read more…

Bodhilila, WLBC’s Chair and a former professional musician, shares some of the personal resonances for her of the viola and piano recital by Paul Silverthorne and David Owen Norris coming up on Saturday 8 December. “I get excited whenever we have a concert because, as someone who worked for over 15 years as a professional musician, I love hearing music performed live by really good musicians. Yet the next concert has me more excited than usual, for personal reasons…”

With a free mindfulness taster session coming up on Saturday 1 December 1-2pm, ahead of the eight week mindfulness courses starting in January, Sophie Crocker, WLBC’s Mindfulness Coordinator, launches into a spur-of-the-moment enquiry into the nature of mindfulness and uses it to reflect on how useful it can be to drop our agendas in favour of engaging in a more curious and open-ended dialogue with our own and others’ experience. Includes a guided meditation.

Bodhilila talks about what it means to ‘Go for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha’  and shows appreciation for her teacher Sangharakshita, founder of the Triratna Buddhist Movement and Order, who passed away on Tuesday 30 October.

Following the death of Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, on Tuesday 30 October 2018, the team at West London Buddhist Centre is holding a meditation session 2-3pm on weekdays for 49 days to keep him in mind. This post, updated regularly, is a log of memories, poems and readings shared during this time.

Hanka Dilley, our Centre Manager, has been invited to take part in a three month ordination retreat next year in the mountains of Spain. Here you can listen to her talking with others in the Centre team about what it was like to get the invitation letter, and what joining the Triratna Buddhist Order means to her at this important milestone in the ordination training process.

Ahead of the Mindfulness for Stress course starting next week and the mindfulness refresher session this Saturday, we interview Sophie Crocker, WLBC’s Mindfulness Coordinator, who shares with us her personal take on secular mindfulness and the surprising ways it can influence your life as a Dharma practitioner.

  Dear sangha This is Ratnaprabha, waving as I vanish behind Primrose Hill on my way to the North London Buddhist Centre on the Holloway Road, having completed ten fascinating…