You are invited to join us for the Lion’s Roar Gate 4 taught by Kathy Nairne and Caroline Seymour this forthcoming 13-14 January 2024. This gate begins the second year of the Lion’s Roar teachings and is open to anyone who has attended Gate 3 at any time in the past. As the previous gates taught the body and speech aspects of formless meditation, the teachings of this gate begin to focus on the mind aspect. In particular, the teachings of this gate focus on the freshness of awareness and the process by which thoughts arise.
This Gate 4 will take place both in-person and online and registration is now open on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-lions-roar-gate-4-weekend-1314-january-in-person-and-online-tickets-771101484297. For those attending in-person, the event will take place at St. Margaret’s Institute at 30 Polstead Road, Oxford 0X2 6TN. As soon as you book, we will send you an information packet with details about Oxford accommodations, parking and other useful background.
Online attendance is by Zoom as usual and the Zoom link will be included in the booking confirmation email so please do keep this accessible. The Zoom information will appear at the very bottom of that email (easy to overlook).
Each day the session will open at 10am UK time, with people variously gathering at St. Margaret’s or on Zoom.
The Saturday session will start 10.30am UK time with an introduction by the event organiser, a group formless meditation practice and then teachings by Kathy Nairne and Caroline Seymour.
The Sunday will start 10.15am UK time with a Gate 4 meditation practice, followed by teaching sessions with Kathy and Caroline. On both days there will be an opportunity to ask questions and to talk online with your fellow practitioners.
The weekend will finish on Sunday at 4pm UK time.
Any questions please contact the event organisers
Johnny Keen – johnathankeen@hotmail.co.uk
Andrew Munro – andrewjmunro@gmail.com
Path of Freedom Groups on Winter Break
The Lewisham and Oxford Path of Freedom groups are now on break until next year. The Oxford Path of Freedom Group will begin to teach in the Spring and we will announce when their new course begins soon. The Lewisham Group will begin again on 8th January, 2024. The Lewisham Group’s events can be found here: https://www.longchenfoundation.org/series/lewisham-path-of-freedom/. We wish you a merry solstice and a happy new year!
Dharma Quotation
The teaching of the Buddha is called, generally by people, Buddhism. It is not a very good name, I do not think of it as an “ism” particularly. It is better to refer to it by using two Sanskrit terms: “Buddha” and “Dharma” or “Buddhadharma.” This means the way of practising that the Buddha gave us.
The Buddha means “Awakened One.” It is the name of a particular person who lived perhaps 2,500 years ago in India, but it is also a state of being. It is a state of being that we all have but it is actually unrecognised by us, as a general rule. And the Dharma bit, in Buddhadharma, is the way that you progress, or the way that you follow in order to realise the nature of what you already have and have had from the very beginning, which is the state of being awake.
In general, everybody thinks they are awake but actually, from a Buddhist point of view, we are asleep. The whole of our lives is almost a kind of sleepwalk. This sleepwalk arises through a lack of understanding of what we are, of what our fundamental nature is. That fundamental nature is not to be found in externals. And it is not to be found either in going inwards somehow, as if I could probe deeply into myself and find something. Doing that could even be problematic; it might easily become a kind of ego enrichment. Rather, the Buddhadharma is simply allowing your mind to relax, to open out, and to display to itself what it is.
This quotation is an excerpt from Rigdzin Shikpo’s Heart of the Buddha teaching in October 2022.