Join me and Cara Lai at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies!

This program is offered freely in the spirit of generosity, supported in part by Dharma Gates and the broader community of donors. Intended for participants ages 18–35.

This program brings together Buddhist teachings of emptiness and interdependence, awakening and liberation, embodied mindfulness, and nature-connection practices to explore what it means to be human — and to belong — in a world that is wild, uncertain, impermanent, and astonishingly alive. We will practice in nature, with nature, and as nature.

Through meditation, direct sensory encounter, and grief work that reconnects rather than overwhelms, we will open to an animate world of rocks, clouds, birds, wind, and stars. The practices offered here are ones you can return to for a lifetime, supporting your relationship with the earth and your understanding of your own human life.

Program Format: This program will include silent meditation, dharma talks, and large group discussion, with the option to spend a substantial portion of practice time outdoors in nature.

To ensure participant commitment and attendance, a $100 registration deposit is required and can be refunded upon completion of the full program. To be refunded after completing the program, please reach out to Dharma Gates at team@dharma-gates.org. If you are waitlisted and unable to offer you a spot, we will refund you at the start of the retreat.

Info and registration: https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/classes/2026-waking-up-in-a-living-world/

I’ll be assistant teaching on this retreat led by Lama Rod Owens and Síofra Sadada at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. This is a hybrid retreat with both residential and online attendance options.

Retreat description:

We are living through an apocalypse, struggling to learn lessons through a pervasive pandemic, economic instability, political unrest, climate change, and various forms of systematic violence. However, this moment is also inviting us back to an authentic indigeneity. We are being asked to remember how to be in relationship to the land, to our broken heartedness, and in gentle healing relationships with others. In the face of so much change we may find it difficult to maintain our physical and emotional balance.

We invite you to join Lama Rod Owens and Sister Siofra at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge or online via Natural Dharma Fellowship’s interactive hybrid system as they bring forward a deeply embodied, justice-rooted approach to liberation that draws from Buddhist practice, earth-based traditions, and lineages of collective healing.

In this retreat, we will explore both personal and collective liberation through somatic based mindfulness practice, grief work, chanting, and prayer. We will explore themes of spiritual abolition, liberatory care, grieving as care work, as well as what it means to be a love centered agent of liberation in this moment. We will rely on the wisdom of Tantric Buddhism, African spirituality, the Black Prophetic tradition, American Indigenous traditions, and sacred herbalism to understand and experience that any state of freedom must center tending to our broken hearts while calling real joy to hold the labor.

Info and registration: https://naturaldharma.org/schedule/weeklong-retreat-with-lama-rod-hybrid/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

Online practice group hosted by Cambridge Insight Meditation Center.

Online, Sundays, 4:30-6pm EST, June 29 - August 3, 2025 (5 sessions).

The program will not meet on Sunday, July 6. The final session of this practice group on Sunday, August 3 will be offered both in-person at the Center and online (hybrid).

This weekly gathering will support and deepen your Dharma practice in a time of global turmoil and destabilization, bringing Buddhist wisdom to the intertwined socioecological crises touching all our lives. Our time together will include guided meditation, teachings, and discussion. We’ll explore the questions: How can the more-than-human world be our teacher? How do we engage Buddhist meditation and nature connection practices torespond skillfully to life in the Anthropocene – the current era in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes?  Where do we find hope?

We will practice shamatha (from the Sanskrit “shama” meaning peace, and “tha” meaning to dwell) meditation to stabilize and clarify the mind, the Seven Homecomings practice to access refuge and guidance, mettā to connect with boundless compassion, and nature-based meditation to open to the wisdom of the earth.

There are no neat and tidy answers to the transitions we are experiencing. We will instead plant our questions in the soil of our practice and wait for insights to unfurl in the openness of our hearts. We’ll aspire to radical openness and discernment as we navigate practice in community— meditating together, sharing in dialogue, and discovering new ways of being with the reality of climate collapse.

No prior meditation experience necessary.  All identities are warmly welcomed. Participants are expected to maintain a daily meditation practice based on the unfolding guidance throughout the 5 weeks of this course.

Full and partial scholarships are available.

More info and registration: https://cambridgeinsight.org/product/ecodharma-practice-group-online/