Thirty people sleeping in the gompa for a weekend?!? We weren’t sure it would work, but it did!
25 people came for a Medicine Buddha retreat with Anna Bach in late January. We had friends come from Calgary of course, and also Kelowna, Vancouver and Portland. Nice representation from the Northwest Region! And thanks to BJ, Piotr and Andrea opening their suites, kitchens and showers to us, we all got through the weekend with (almost) enough sleep.
Anna taught about the Buddhist system of medicine and we followed a fairly rigorous schedule of meditation, exercise and food through-out the weekend. We all discovered again that quinoa porridge is tasty, and the sugar/caffeine cravings were subsiding by the end of the retreat. We got lots of meditation time too, with group practice sessions of prostrations, Diamond Mind and of course many sessions of the Medicine Buddha meditation given by Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche many years ago. Thirty people doing prostrations in the gompa was even cosier than sleeping, but that all worked out too.
Saturday evening we watched some short video of Diamond Way in Nepal and the trip that Randall and Carleen took with Anna last year. And then we all received a Jewell Pill and tucked ourselves right into bed. No party…how odd!
But of course, all this physical preparation is just for the body. And as Anna reminded us many times, the body is just a product of mind’s free play, and we should not take it so seriously!