Winter 2024: Mahamudra: Resting, Grieving, Getting Free

The Winter Werk offering is a special opportunity to explore the relationships between rest, grief, and freedom through training in the practice of Mahamudra (“Great Seal”) meditation. As one of the most important gifts of the Indo-Tibetan tantric lineage, Mahamudra is an embodied, non-conceptual practice rooted in a fresh, unfabricated experience of the nature of our own minds.

Through guided contemplation and instructions of the tradition, Lama Rod will invite participants into direct relationship with the nature of their minds – a ground of spacious, fluid, and unbounded awareness. From this foundation of personal experience, we will train collectively in attuning to the qualities of Mahamudra as an unconditional support for resting amidst the waves of life, death and change. 

In addition, Lama Rod will emphasize:

• Learning how to relate with everything that emerges in practice without needing to rely on conceptual labels nor get caught in dualistic patterns of carceral thinking. This entails empowering our capacity to rest freely without clinging to any aspects of our experience, including heartbreak, grief, and despair as well as comfort, love, and joy.
• Strengthening clarity and awakened care through working directly with the realities of death, dying, and impermanence as vital expressions of freedom. In this way, Mahamudra invites greater intimacy with the spontaneous, non-conceptual clarity and awakened care of the entire phenomenal world.
• Engaging the Land as a trustworthy refuge throughout all seasons of change by relating to the Earth and other elements as guides and accomplices in spiritual abolition. This includes exploring Mahamudra as the open, creative ground of deity practices like Medicine Buddha, Ma Tara, and Chenrezig.
• Honoring “Old Saints” of the Mahamudra tradition like Milarepa, Padampa Sangye, Machig Labdron, and others who learned how to embody freedom and then worked to protect these precious teachings across time and space so they could be shared with future generations (see The New Saints, pg. 19). 

Fall 2024: Grounding Fear and Weaving Freedom Through the Power of Ma Tara

The Fall Werk offering will center tantric teachings about fear and the ways dualistic confusion blocks our ability to embody the fullness of freedom, power, and awakened care. Through the profound example of Ma Tara, Mother Liberator, Lama Rod will clarify how deity practice in its many diverse expressions can help us abolish conditioned patterns of carceral logic in our own bodies. Through this werk we are invited to ground our practice in liberation as the indestructible foundation we call upon in all situations. Specifically, Lama Rod will emphasize:

• Deepening our exploration of the creative power of Ma Tara and other expressions of deity practice (like Medicine Buddha and Chenrezig) to help us reclaim the integrity of unconditional love.
• Tending our direct relationships with the Land, which have been distorted by forces of colonialism and the carceral state. 
  
• Clarifying our attunement to the ways carceral logic weaponizes binaries, like hope and fear, to undermine even our most sincere commitments to personal liberation and spiritual abolition. 
• Refining our capacity to be in our agency in ways that allow us to release dualistic patterns as they emerge, thereby stabilizing the embodiment of freedom regardless of external conditions. 

Summer 2024: Embodying the Seven Homecomings for Protection and Cutting through Confusion

The summer Werk offering unfolded the Seven Homecomings as a path of training in energies of protection and cutting through confusion. Specifically, Lama Rod emphasized:

• Experiencing the dynamic relationship between refuge and protection
• Exploring how refuge and protection empower us to rest beyond patterns of dualistic fixation
• Embodying the Seven Homecomings as means of clarifying awareness while refining our ability to cut through binary confusion and abolish the carceral state.