With Venerable Sunam and Rachel Lim

Finally--after some struggle with busy schedules, pressing obligations, and family demands--you've made it onto your cushion. You are sitting in your special retreat place. You have grabbed a piece of time to devote to a meditation session. Maybe you have overcome your own internal resistance to sitting down to meditate. You take a deep breath and begin the preliminary practices. And then--!!

It's always something. How often have you noticed it? Your neighbor begins to use an electric drill. The cushion is suddenly not soft enough. Or maybe you hear a subtle humming in your ears. Is it getting too hot? Too cold? Maybe you should have put on a sweater. A big truck drives up outside your window and starts to make loud beeping noises. The dog sticks its cold nose in your hand. Or maybe it's "only" your mind that starts to misbehave and distract you from meditating.

What is it in your case?

In this class, you will get advice on how to handle distractions--worldly distractions, spiritual distractions, and karmic obstacles. You will learn how to treat distractions as an opportunity, and use them to improve your meditation.

As we explore these questions and learn more about turning distraction into opportunity, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

Bill McMichael and Inna Ivanina

The husband-and-wife team of Bill McMichael and Inna Ivanina will share insights and practical advice about why it's good to do retreat and what might motivate you to do one.

Bill completed a three-year, three-month, three day retreat at Diamond Mountain in 2014, and will share his first-hand knowledge with us. He found that in retreat, you think clearly for the first time in your life (even though you imagined you were thinking clearly in daily life, you weren't). Retreat is a powerful way to verify the correctness of the teachings we study, and this motivates you to study more. Retreat allows you to plant very powerful seeds and redirect your life to something more positive. In practical terms, our karma causes our world, which may not always look positive. So retreat is the best way to change our karma.

Inna will help us understand how to start retreats, and share her experience about what to expect, if you are new to retreat and are just starting, or have only done one or two.

As we learn more about why we do retreat and how to motivate ourselves, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

Venerable Jigme and Santy Wang

In our Medicine Buddha retreats, we read and study the Medicine Buddha sadhanas. Currently we are working on The King of the Lords of Wishing Jewels, A Practice of Presenting Offerings to the Medicine Buddha, by the Great Fifth. The word sadhana means a systematic way of attaining your spiritual goals. It comes from the Sanskrit root √sādh, to arrive at the goal.

Sometimes, though, it is hard to connect our practice of sadhana during retreat with our normal lives. In this class we will talk about how to carry realizations you may have while doing sadhana into daily life. And what are the goals of doing sadhana, anyway?

We will hear about the three kinds of Medicine Buddha retreat, and discuss how you can use sadhana to intensify your practice. Finally, you'll get useful ideas about how to bring Medicine Buddha practice into your daily life.

As we explore these questions and learn more about integrating the Medicine Buddha practice, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

Sound, Mantra, the Inner & Outer World

Venerable Gyelse and Paulina Franco

Retreat is a wonderful opportunity to explore how the things we study in class actually work. Mantra is a big part of Medicine Buddha practice, but what does it actually mean, how does it feel when we do it, are we sure we are doing it correctly, and what happens as a result of doing mantra?

The wise ones of the past have shown how the outer world is a reflection of our inner world. Let’s take sound. Reciting mantras is all about sound. How does the outer world of sound reflect your inner world, how does sound impact your being, and how does your inner world create sound?

These and other topics we will explore in this symposium about mantra, and how we can use it to heal and change the world.

As we learn more about how to integrate mantra into our retreats, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

Buddha Menla and Nagarjuna meet for tea

With Sarahni Stumpf, Janice Sanders, and Alix Rowland

Join Sarahni, Alix Rowland, and Janice Sanders for an exploration of how to use contemplations into Arya Nagarjuna’s message about our misunderstandings of what causes what. To understand the extent to which misunderstandings of causation hamper our lives and our spiritual growth requires us to spend time contemplating that. We can use those contemplations, and the insights they produce for us, in our retreat practice.

Buddha Menla (Tibetan for Medicine Buddha) wants us to apply those contemplations to our efforts to practice his healing methods, because the cause of all dis-ease is our ignorance and subsequent selfish behaviors. Sarahni, Alix and Janice will try to help you design your own practice for both on and off your cushion.

As we explore these questions and learn more about how to integrate our contemplations into our Medicine Buddha retreat practice, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

Tim Lowenhaupt and Rob Haggerty

What is the difference between mantra and dharani? And what makes mantras work? In this class we will learn the difference, and find out how emptiness, especially as taught by Nagarjuna, is the rocket fuel that makes mantras work.

Mantra is an ancient Sanskrit word that means "mind protector." When you are reciting mantras, your mind is absorbed in holy words and you are not able to make bad karma. Dharani comes from the Sanskrit root, dṛ, the same root as dharma. Its core meaning is "something that holds," or "receptacle." So a dharani is a recitation of holy words that holds more meaning than a mantra. While mantras go back to the times before Buddhism when Vedas were practiced, dharanis are only found in Buddhism.

No matter how many mantras or dharanis you recite, however, they will have only a limited effect unless you understand how emptiness makes them work. Then your mantras will become powerful enough to change and heal the world.

As we explore these questions and learn more about mantra and emptiness, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

How to overacheive without affliction

With Coco Korniczky and Rebecca Vinacour

Coco, who completed a three-year, three-month, three-day retreat at Diamond Mountain, and Rebecca, an experienced retreatant, will share with us what to expect as you enter retreat, experience it, and come out. Sometimes, for both new retreatants and those who have done retreat before, it can be difficult, confusing, or even upsetting to find that you are not quite sure what to do, what to expect, or how to deal with questions as you proceed through the hours and days of your retreat.

Coco and Rebecca will help take the pressure off, by walking us through the stages of retreat and how they flow into each other. What is the correct way to put up tsam markers and what are we actually supposed to do with tormas? What should our first day be like--what do we actually do in retreat? What if we get lung? And on the last day, how do we leave retreat and re-enter samsara?

As we learn more about how retreats flow and how to ease and smooth our experience of retreat, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

With John Brady

Retreat is a crucial step in preparing to enter the Diamond Way. A solid Medicine Buddha retreat is one of the best ways to begin, or to continue, your practice of retreat. In our tradition, we have different levels of retreat so that people can feel comfortable in taking on this practice, which can sometimes feel strange or worrisome to modern people. The idea of being alone with yourself, of temporarily cutting yourself off from connection to your daily world of phone messaging, television news, or constant talk with your family, friends and loved ones, can be intimidating.

How do you feel about being alone with yourself? How do you feel about observing complete silence for a day, a week, a month? How do you feel about substituting your daily routine with a full day of spiritual practice instead? This could involve performing a Medicine Buddha sadhana once (or more) each day, reciting a set number of mantras per day, committing to a series of meditations during the day, and performing a yoga class on your own.

Join John Brady to find out how your Medicine Buddha retreat can help you prepare for an even deeper experience sometime in your future.

As we learn more about deep retreat, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.

With Venerable Gyelse and Venerable Jigme

When you go into retreat, you can expect a very special, intense, and possibly life-changing experience. Why not do something to maximize your retreat experience? Take one-day vows!

One-day vows last for 24 hours. You can take them from a qualified lama at any time. Practitioners often take them just before a special event or activity--a retreat, a reunion, an important meeting at work, a family outing.

If you need to purify anything before engaging in an important life activity, one-day vows are a great way to help prepare your inner and outer self to do so. If you need to bring added focus to something you are doing, one-day vows can help. If you need to bring some extra power to what you are planning, take one-day vows!

A one-day vow helps you live like an enlightened being for 24 hours. You will promise such things as: to eat only at certain times of day; to refrain from singing or dancing; not to sleep in a high bed; and not to have sexual activity. The next day, you return to normal everyday life. But you live in a special way for one day.

As we learn more about how to use one-day vows to boost our retreat experiences, we will begin our class with a meditation. There will be Q&A at the end.