October 11, 2025 @ 10:00 – October 12, 2025 @ 16:30
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Don’t miss this opportunity for an inspiring weekend of meditation and discussion at the Cardiff Buddhist Centre, led by highly respected dharma teacher Tejananda. For those with at least one year of regular meditation practice, this retreat promises to connect us more deeply to the awake and aware quality inherent in us, allowing access to unbounded energy, and provide techniques to invigorate our practice. This retreat is 10am-4pm on both Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th October.
About the Retreat – Taking The Backward Step
Mind is usually taken to mean all kinds of mental activity, but what we’re interested in here is ‘mind itself’ – the awake, aware quality of mind.
Awakeness is here even when we feel sleepy and dull. How do we know that we’re sleepy and dull? We are awake to it. We’re even awake to our dreams, despite the body being asleep.
This quality of wakefulness, knowingness or clarity is intrinsic to all of our experience and yet it is mysteriously ungraspable and unfindable. To know it, we need to discover what Zen Master Dogen was pointing to when he spoke of ‘taking the backward step’.
This is essentially a step ‘back’, from identification with our everyday mind of thoughts and imaginings, into the immediacy and presence of our body senses, just as they are.
Our body is not what we think it is – not at all! When we take the backward step, body is not the rather solid, rather weighty object we imagine it is. It’s more an unbounded, living, vibrating cloud of sensate energy.
This also opens the heart to rest in its own nature – limitless and boundless. Here, the stream of love and compassion which is already implicitly active becomes boundless and all-inclusive. Body, heart and mind are naturally and undividedly awake.
Tejananda will be exploring the connection between the mind, the body and the heart over two days of meditation and discussion.
ABOUT TEJANANDA
Tejananda is a highly renowned and well respected meditation and dharma teacher, and author of “The Buddhist Path to Awakening’. Based for many years at Vajraloka, he now leads retreats across the UK and worldwide.
Suitable for?
Anyone with at least 1 year of regular meditation practice.
When?
Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th October, 10am – 4.30pm
Where?
Cardiff Buddhist Centre, 12 St Peter’s Street, CF24 3BA
