Join us for another online retreat! Building on January’s Loving Kindness and Compassion, and our April training in Self-Kindness, we will now learn and practice the profound meditation practice of tonglen.

Tonglen is a Tibetan word that means “giving and taking.” It is an ancient meditation practice that allows us to reduce our sense of isolation and discontentment, and transform them into loving, open-hearted joy. With tonglen, we visualize taking on the suffering of others and giving them back our happiness. While this discipline may at first go against the grain of our ordinary ways of being, it helps us to transform the pain and suffering of both ourselves and others, while developing our inner wisdom and qualities of compassion and generosity.

The Dalai Lama described tonglen in the following way:

We tend to relate to this so-called “self” as a precious core at the center of our being… to the extent that we are willing to overlook the well-being of others in contrast, our attitude toward others often resembles indifference; the point of this practice is to reverse this attitude so that we reduce the intensity of our grasping and the attachment we have to ourselves, and endeavor to consider the well-being of others as significant and important.

- HH the Dalai Lama

Once we reduce our self-obsession, we can begin to be truly kind to ourselves and others. This results in a selfless joy springing forth from our soft heart which has opened up to the needs and pains of everyone. We actively connect with compassion, develop it internally, and learn how to apply it in our everyday life.

For this retreat, we have added new features that are a bit of an experiment for us. We hope these will help and be conducive to your practice and retreat experience:

● July 3rd Heidi Koppl will have a live zoom session to welcome participants and introduce us to the tonglen practice
● We have included an introductory video that we suggest watching before you start the retreat on Saturday, July 10. https://dharmasun.org/seminars/
● Two "Connections": live facilitated group sessions per day (Sun-Tue and Thu-Fri) allowing you to practice together as a community with experienced TTE
facilitators. These are timed to best serve the majority of time zones around the world.
● On Wednesday July 14, Heidi will conduct a live contemplative reflection session, in which she will practice with us and answer questions.

This retreat will include recorded videos with instructions from Lama Tenzin Sangpo and Heidi Koppl. You can practice with the videos based on the suggested schedule below. The retreat also includes live Q&A sessions over Zoom with Lama Tenzin and Heidi. This format will allow you to adjust your practice to your own schedule in the course of the week.

More retreat details about the program can be accessed from this link: Schedule and details

This retreat will be offered in English and Chinese. To register for the Chinese version, please send an email to chinese@tarastripleexcellence.org.