Exploring the Subtle Body: Essence, Energy, Manifestation (Residential)

Registration is open!

Join visiting teacher Paul Weiss to explore how our body, energy, and awareness are expressions of our rainbow-like nature: vivid, ever-present, and never graspable. Through subtle body meditation, interoceptive awareness, and gentle qigong, this retreat offers a direct way to relax projection and rediscover the freedom already present within our experience.

Drawing from Taoist and Buddhist traditions, we will practice subtle body meditations and gentle standing and moving qigong to become more at home in the manifest, energetic, and essential nature of body and mind. By learning to feel into the body rather than project onto our experience, we can cultivate a more intimate, spacious, and joyful relationship with awareness, emotions, and perception itself.

Please join us to:

• Explore subtle body meditations from Taoist and Buddhist traditions
• Practice gentle qigong to awaken energetic sensitivity 
• Learn the difference between emotions and emotional states, and how to work with their energetic nature
• Develop interoceptive awareness as a gateway to deep listening

Tilopa tells us: “The completely open nature of all dimensions and events is a rainbow always occurring yet never grasped.” All our experience is the energetic arising of the ineffable nature of being. As creatures of appearance, energy, and emptiness, we can be freely at home in all three. Yet our projective way of seeing and reifying creates binding stories in which such freedom is lost.

On this retreat, we will practice subtle body meditations drawn from Taoist and Buddhist traditions that help us feel more at home with the manifest, energetic, and essential nature of body/mind. We will also explore meditations that teach us to relax our habit of projecting onto experience, expanding awareness—to see into the nature of seeing, to hear into the nature of hearing, to feel into the nature of feeling.

Seeing, listening, feeling into the body is the most fruitful entry point for exploring the manifest, energetic, and empty and awake nature of awareness itself. By tuning into the body – interoception – we immediately transform projection into deep listening and integration. This is especially true of our emotional experiences, which so often shape the stories we hold about our lives.

Together, we will examine the difference between “emotions” and “emotional states,” learning to explore and embrace their somatic and energetic qualities as pathways to awareness and freedom. We will also devote significant time to gentle standing and moving qigong practice, awakening sensitivity to the energetic and essence nature of the body while cultivating transparent awareness.

This retreat is not a deep dive into esoteric yoga. Rather, we will wade out gently into the water and step onto the broad beach where appearance, energy, emptiness, and joy are one. We may discover that the most esoteric teaching is the natural expression of what we already are.

All are welcome, regardless of experience or physical ability.

Typical Retreat Schedule

(All times are Eastern time zone)

First Day — Orientation at 6:45 pm. Opening session begins around 7:00 pm.

Last Day —The closing session ends around 11:00 am.

These times are just for reference. An expanded schedule will be provided in pre-retreat information emailed during the week prior to the event.

Important Health Information

COVID-19 testing is no longer required. Masks are optional and encouraged if you are at higher risk. We encourage you to stay at home if you are symptomatic to protect others.

Scholarships

Cancellation Policy

We understand that personal circumstances may require you to cancel your registration. In these cases, please contact us right away at register@naturaldharma.org. Cancellations affect our ability to offer rooms to others and create additional work for our staff, therefore we charge the following fees to help mitigate these costs.

For cancellations (based on program start date):

• > 45 days: 100% refund minus a $75 admin. fee.
• 31-45 days: 50% refund of the required deposit; or 75% refund if registration paid in full.
• 21-30 days: 50% refund of total registration cost
• < 21 days: nonrefundable

If you must cancel due to an emergency or extenuating circumstances, please contact us at register@naturaldharma.org.

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