Please note that the Two Month and other in-person only retreats are currently postponed. If you are interested in being contacted once this program opens again, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/nHMeuwYtVgk7mfzG8
Healing Mind Two Month Retreat
October TBD – December TBD (Eight weeks)
Give yourself an invaluable gift: the self-discovery that comes from an intensive period of practice and study.
Discover a deeper, richer way of experiencing mind. This retreat provides methods and tools for opening up and transforming the layers of identification, negative patterning, and conditioning that limit potential and restrict our inner freedom. Through techniques drawn from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, we examine and go below thought and emotional conditioning to discover awareness, making contact with an innate sense of the sacred.
The teachings and practices engaged in this carefully structured retreat are given in a beautiful, protected environment that allows space for your own discovery to unfold. Methods and tools are curated by Nyingma master Tarthang Tulku, who has carefully selected and sequenced Tibetan Buddhist practices to foster healing, transformation, and insight.
You will be guided through a progression of meditative techniques, in a curriculum designed for lasting impact. Emerge with an expanded understanding of the nature of awareness, a multitude of methods for working with mind, body, senses, and emotions, and fresh insight into the richness and possibilities of being.
Instructor(s): Lama Palzang, Pema Gellek, Hugh Joswick, Abbe Blum, Santosh Philip, Olivia Hurd, and Mark Henderson.
Cost: $6,260 Residential / $4,630 Non-Residential. Residential includes a 54-night stay in a private room, instruction, self-serve breakfast, buffet lunch and dinner. Non-residential includes instruction and lunch only.
Please note that registration closes one month prior on TBD. If you have any questions about this retreat, please contact us to speak to an advisor.
“Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim in the energies of the senses.”
— Tarthang Tulku
Purpose
- This program offers a comprehensive education in how to develop and expand the capacity to know, to be aware through all the senses, and to find new, more positive, ways of being in the world.
- It requires no belief system and is appropriate for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.
- It serves as a container for focused development and practice over an intensive period of time set aside from ‘normal’ life.
Progression of Practices
- This retreat blends meditation, movement exercises, and awareness practices with discussion in an environment that encourages the integration of all these into daily life through work-practice.
- It starts with practices designed for deep relaxation, followed by experiential inquiry into the ways that sensation, feeling, and thinking operate. Based on this exploration, we gently investigate our habits, patterns, and self-images before emerging with new knowledge and insight into the fundamentals of our being.
Part 1: Body Touching Mind
Calming mind and opening our senses more fully, we enter an open field of awareness. By cultivating a garden of inner experience, we activate healing energy and discover a hidden vitality. With inner balance restored, we awaken the possibility of befriending all experience.
Part 2: Un-Fixing Ourselves
Explore a potent array of meditative practices and contemplations carefully calibrated to illuminate the operation of our sensation, feeling, and thinking. The powerful influences coloring our experience are revealed, and our sense of what is anchoring the reality of our perceptions, feelings, and ideas is transformed.
Opening up to ourselves we enter a new adventure beyond the familiar and restrictive sensory experiences beyond the known characters of our own habitual thinking.
Part 3: Wisdom & Compassion
With unflinching honesty and tenderness, we observe and investigate our own experience. Insights arise that point towards the root causes of unease and suffering. As habitual patterns are penetrated, it becomes possible to release the energy that powers insight and transformation.
Part 4: Transformation & Integration Touching Mind
As we stabilize the unity of stillness and insight, we begin to access dynamic knowledge and our deep creative potential. We make direct contact with our own purpose, and life itself becomes the rich field of inquiry that leads directly into the mystery of being.
“The practices that I learned created a new baseline for me of well-being, balance and relaxation . . .”
“I have a toolbox of different practices now that I can use to help me with emotions and to let go of the need to react.”
” . . . I’m just starting to glean how [the retreat] radically changed my life.”
The Nyingma Institute, founded in 1972, is one of the oldest Tibetan Buddhist centers of learning in the U.S. It was groundbreaking in its early introduction of Tibetan Buddhism to Westerners, and it continues to be singular due to the unique and multi-faceted quality of Rinpoche’s teachings, which have been developed for the Western mind by a lama who has devoted fifty years of his life to teaching, observing, and working closely with his students here in the U.S.
Instructors
The Two Month Retreat is led by Nyingma Institute faculty members who have been immersed in Tarthang Tulku’s teachings for many years.
Your team of instructors includes Lama Palzang, Pema Gellek, Hugh Joswick, Abbe Blum, Santosh Philip, Olivia Hurd, and Mark Henderson.
Lama Palzang and Pema Gellek, Deans of Nyingma Institute and long time students of Tarthang Rinpoche and Chadral Rinpoche, offer fresh perspectives on traditional Dharma practices and provide insight into how to develop spiritual values in contemporary life.
Schedule
The retreat schedule includes gentle morning Kum Nye, morning instruction and practice, work practice (a mix of tasks ideal for developing mindfulness as well as unique sacred art projects), an afternoon practice session, and optional evening classes. It starts at 7:00 am and ends at 5:00 pm or later. Saturdays usually involve participating in a scheduled workshop. Sundays are free, but retreatants can attend the usual activities that take place.
Monday – Friday
- 7:00 – 8:30 am: Morning Kum Nye
- 8:30 – 9:30 am: Breakfast and clean up
- 9:30 – 10:00 am: Light morning task and break
- 10:00 – 11:30 am: Instruction Session
- 11:30 – 11:45 pm: 15 minute break
- 11:45 – 12:30: Practice Session
- 12:30 – 1:45 pm: Lunch and break
- 1:45 – 3:00 pm: Mindful Work Practice
- 3:00 – 3:15 pm: 15 minute break
- 3:15 – 4:15 pm: Practice Session
- 4:15 – 4:30 pm: 15 minute break
- 4:30 – 5:15 pm: Meditation Session
- 5:30 – 6:30 pm: Dinner
- 6:30 – 7:00 pm: 30 minute break
- 7:00 – 8:30 pm: Evening Class
Saturday
10 am – 5 pm: Workshop
Origins and Development
This two-month retreat is based on the sequencing and progression of our classic Four Month Human Development Retreat. It is based on the practices and structure that Tarthang Tulku introduced, with added clarification of its central practices that he released in 2018.
Tarthang Tulku, founder of the Nyingma Institute, taught the first Human Development Retreat at the Institute in the summer of 1973.
This program offers a comprehensive education in how to develop and expand the capacity to know, to be aware through all the senses, and to find new, more positive, ways of being in the world. It is perfect for anyone who’d like to deeply transform, discover anew, and activate the healing energy of mind and body. Our approach is humanistic, gentle, and direct. It does not rely on a belief system, and spiritual practitioners of all backgrounds are welcome.
To learn more about the Two Month Retreat, please contact us to speak to an advisor.
