Urban Retreat Audios, 7 Day Retreat Videos,
and Dancing into Dreamtime
Urban Retreat
When I was doing a lot of traveling and teaching prior to covid, my preferred format for presenting the basic principles of Hollow Bamboo Dharma was a gathering I called Urban Retreat. Urban Retreat generally took place over three successive evenings, or over a weekend, and allowed you to experience Hollow Bamboo Dharma's unique and deeply body-oriented approach to sitting meditation practice without having to disrupt your life by leaving home, family, and occupation and entering into long retreat. In May of 2015 I taught a three evening Urban Retreat at the offices of Dharma Ocean in Boulder, Colorado. It was a particularly strong gathering, and the entire retreat was recorded. I then transcribed and edited those recordings and re-recorded everything at Blue Light Studio in Vancouver, Canada. They are now available to you.
-
On the first evening I speak of kindling the awareness of the feeling presence of the body and offer the basic instructions on establishing the three components of the posture of meditation: the alignment of the upright torso, the deep relaxation of the body, and the allowing of subtle, constant, motions throughout the body in response to the breath.
-
On the second evening I present the practice of breathing through the whole body through exploring the practices of The Breath of the Unfolding Fern, The Portal Meditation, and Breathing in the Six Directions.
-
The third evening session reviews the principles of the first two evenings and then presents strategies for dealing with pain in the body and runaway thoughts in the mind. I share the mantra of breathing through the whole body and conclude with an examination of the role of the shoulders in sitting practice.
My suggestion is that you set aside three consecutive days or evenings, sit down in meditation posture, and listen to the recordings as you go through your own private version of Urban Retreat.
The recordings are available for $50 on my website Store.
7 Day Video Retreat
For anyone wanting a deep immersion into the practices of Hollow Bamboo Dharma I'm offering high quality video recordings of a recent seven day retreat I taught through Zoom. Each session builds on the previous one. Starting out by creating your meditation seat, you are led through practices of alignment, relaxation, and resilience, awakening the felt presence of the body, and breathing through the whole body that eventually lead you into what I view as your birthright state--The Great Wide Open--in which the egoic perspective of the mind and body suddenly expands wide open to reveal the substratum of union underlying the world of separate appearances.
The recordings are available for $300 on my website Store and include a pdf file of The Kasina Meditation.
Dancing into Dreamtime
My oldest son, who runs a state-of-the-art recording studio in Vancouver, recently came across a recording I made in the 1980s and digitized and remastered it. It’s an album of New Age Trance electric guitar that uses a digital delay and a primitive version of a looper. I still find the music hauntingly beautiful, and I daresay it’s not like any guitar music you’ve ever heard. It may surprise you to hear that, other than on two of the tracks, nothing is overdubbed. I would create dance events and play this music live, but I would only let people in who were open to surrendering to the music and dancing through the entire performance. Dana is completely optional :-) Play on a high quality sound system and . . . enjoy!