April 24th - May 1st, 2015, Starts Friday Evening
Near Glastonbury
The Beltane (May Day) week is set in the heart of the beautiful Somerset countryside near Glastonbury (the mystical and ancient centre of Britain) in a breathtaking valley nestling between two sacred hills.
£895 Fully Residential, including shared room & gourmet vegetarian food
£765 Great camping, including all meals
£655 Non-residential, including lunch
This Spring we will be journeying through the Mandala of Green Tara, experiencing the union of the sacred masculine and feminine, bliss and emptiness. These mandala ceremonies developed by Jill, also have unique and profound psychological healing processes embedded in deep spiritual practice. In this one, Green Tara's gifts include enlightened achievement, karma-free, appropriate and fearless action; happiness and fulfilment; the immediate granting of wishes; luminous wisdom and enlightenment. This extraordinarily powerful week enables us to become effective in relation to who we are, our abundance, our relationships and how we realise our passion in the world. The practice enables us to overcome obstructions to these aspirations and heal ourselves.
The psychological theme of this week is harnessing fearless action in new beginnings in the four directional aspects of the mandala
1) who we are as enlightened human beings
2) what we want to have and how we want to flourish, prosper and establish happiness, flow and eloquence in our lives
3) how we want to regenerate and harmonise present, or invoke new, exiting and harmonious relationships
4) discovering and articulating our role and our benign and effective activity in the world.
We will do this work ceremonially, aligning ourselves with one of the most powerful of all deities, the Great Goddess Tara, the quick acting Mother of the Buddhas, who is able to bring enlightenment in this lifetime. Traditionally, equally loved and revered by men and women, many, including almost all Tibetan Buddhists, from the most sophisticated to the simplest, including the Dalai Lama, maintain their deep connection with this feminine manifestation of the divine. She acts swiftly and confers compassion, enlightened action, liberation, emotional and physical healing, and long life. Through working with the extraordinary energies of Tara we are able to ease the blockages to achievements in life, in work, in relationships, in emotional and physical health, to bring about order and flow in our lives, to liberate us from afflictive emotions, leading us to ecstasy, joy and freedom. We work towards achieving the essential state of reality of naked awareness and luminous being.
The April-May 2015 retreat is held over the festival of Beltane or May Day, a festival of fecundity when the male forces of heaven penetrate the feminine richness of the earth (represented in traditional England by the Maypole). We will celebrate May Day and harness these joyful forces using sound as the bridge between the worlds to connect to the source of power through the instrument of our own voice and purify the body, the elements and past karma. In Tibetan Buddhism, the ultimate liberation is to transform the elements of the body into the essence of their substance - the rainbow colours and ultimately achieve the rainbow body.
