Due to the Covid-19 pandemic we have moved all our residential courses online for the foreseeable future, adding new courses all the time. Some courses are held over a long weekend on Zoom, some over several weeks and are hosted on the Canvas platform. Be sure to check the details for each course and consult the upcoming course calendar for the status of other programs. If you are enrolled in any upcoming residential courses, you will receive an email when we decide to convert with details about how to transfer your registration to the online course or receive a full refund.
Bridging the Physical Distancing Divide
Bill and Susan Morgan
Join us daily from 10:30-11:15 EDT for a facilitated virtual sangha sitting
Aging and Awakening: Cultivating a Wise Heart
August 21-23, 2020
Join David Chernikoff in a supportive community and explore Buddhist teachings on the four Heavenly Messengers — aging, illness, death, and awakening. Celebrate the mystery of our common humanity as it unfolds in the last third of our lives. This is an invitation to know ourselves in new ways that enable us to live fully, love well, and die joyfully, and to become the wise elders who are so essential for our society at this challenging time.
Painting the Sky: Image and Simile in
Buddhist Literature
August 28-30, 2020
This course is freely offered
in collaboration with Bodhi College
Join Akincano Weber for this weekend course and enjoy in a pleasurable amble through early Buddhist literature with some well-known images, as well as some less familiar. This course is aimed at gaining greater familiarity and ease with some of the riches in Buddhist texts with the intention to deepen appreciation of how imagery can inspire and support meditative practice.
Creatively Engaging Consciousness and the World
September 11-13, 2020
Martine Batchelor investigates the Buddhist teaching of the five mental factors and the body in its environment (namarupa) in relation to emptiness and ethics. This investigation is a training to refine our attention and to recognize more clearly how we perceive objects in our interior and exterior worlds, create meaning, take action as a result of our perceptions, and with discernment, reduce suffering (dukkha) for ourselves and others.
Introduction to Insight Dialogue: Deep Relatedness and the Whole Life Path
September 20 - November 8, 2020
This course is freely offered
Join Gregory Kramer, Tuere Sala, and Elizabeth Faria for this online Introduction to Insight Dialogue, which is an interpersonal meditation practice. It draws its strength from the way our relational sensitivities amplify and accelerate mindfulness, concentration, and compassion. Relationship is so often the basis for becoming entangled; in Insight Dialogue it can be turned towards untangling. Relationship is so often the basis for stress, fear, and longing; in Insight Dialogue, it can be turned towards serenity, safety, and contentment.
Inviting the Divine Feminine: Practices for Transformation and Resilience
September 24 - October 29, 2020
Thursday evenings 5:30-7:00 PM EST
In this six-week online course with Lama Liz Monson, we will take a deep dive into the energies of the Divine Feminine as they are found in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Together, we will explore why and how these innate feminine energies, present in all human beings, should and could arise in our experience today as powerful resources for support and guidance during these groundless times.
Poems of the First Buddhist Women as Vehicles for Reflection Today
October 05 - November 09, 2020
Monday evenings 7:30-8:45 pm EST
Join Georgia Kashnig and Charles Hallisey in this 6 week six-week online course devoted to reading the poems of the first Buddhist women, the Therigatha. Even across expanses of space, time and translation, these “inspired utterances,” as the sixth-century Buddhist commentator Dhammapala called them, enable us to see things that we have not seen before, to imagine things that we have not dreamed before. Ultimately, we will look to these women’s utterances as answers to the question: How do we become free?
Essential Methods of Chan Buddhism
October 09 - 11, 2020
Join Guo Gu and investigate the Chinese Chan (Zen) tradition and their main approaches to awakening: the method of silent illumination (mòzhào) and investigating a critical phrase (huàtóu). The former is a settling method of serene reflection on the nature of awareness; the latter is an explosive approach that aims to concentrate and shatter all mental states so awakening manifests.
"I have sat with Guo Gu and found it very powerful; my practice really benefited. I am keenly looking forward to Guo Gu returning to BCBS to offer us the precious gift of his instructions.” Bhikkhu Analayo
Satipaṭṭhāna Meditation
October 11 - December 12, 2020
Now Accepting Applications
An Online Study and Practice Course
guided by
Bhikkhu Anālayo
9 Weeks of practice and focused study on the liberating teachings of the Satipaṭṭhāna sutta, a foundational early Buddhist teaching
Application Dates: July 1 -September 1, 2020
Course Dates: October 11 - December 12, 2020
You Are Your Body: Realizing the Oneness of Human Nature and Buddha Nature
October 30 - November 01, 2020
Barry Magid and Max Erdstein present a contemporary view of Dharma practice that attempts to undo the long-presumed dichotomy of spirit or soul as immaterial, timeless and pure; and body as material, the seat of sexuality and emotional attachment, subject to decay and death. Indeed, the Buddha’s fundamental realization of impermanence and interdependency is nowhere more immediately and viscerally evident than in the ever-changing needs, aging, sickness and death of our bodies.
Life Lessons From Hungry Ghosts: An Ethical Reading of Buddhist Narratives
November 6 - 8, 2020
In this course, Andy Rotman leads us through the Buddhist narratives of hungry ghosts (preta) who are like modern felons who participate in “scared straight” programs. In the past, they broke the law (dharma), and now they suffer the terrible consequences because of justice (karma). And since they don’t want others to make the same mistakes, they speak passionately and honestly, hoping to scare humanity straight. By reading these stories together, we can avoid the cause of all this misery: the cultivation of meanness (mātsarya), which makes people miserly, spiteful, and cruel, immoral and oblivious to their own self-righteousness.
Wisdom Publications Collaborations
