practice cycles.

A practice cycle is a collection of teachings and practices (retreat or on-line) that express a particular facet of dharma. Practice over our life-time is best viewed in a cyclic, spiraling journey of development and review, rather than as a linear process. As such, the path can be entered through any particular practice cycle since each cycle harmonizes with the larger unfolding whole.

Embodying the Open Ground: Essence Practice

The foundational practice course in a Planetary Dharma, Embodying the Open Ground is a somatic approach to Buddhist non-dual Essence of mind practice, and is grounded in developmental psychology. The practice supports the reintegration of identity into the non-dual, open ground of being by addressing the separation between the body and the world itself. This feminine approach to non-duality explores the open nature of matter (mother) and uncovers our unconscious traumatic avoidance of accepting the profound dependency we have on the sacred feminine in its expression as the open Earth. As we begin to resolve this trauma and re-experience the open Earth as our non-dual body the recognition of Buddha-nature become stable and easy.

The Heart of Mindful Calm Abiding

Calm Abiding is the fundamental means of calming the attentional system necessary for the optimization of any other practice. This cycle integrates Shakyamuni Buddha’s original Calming Wisdom jhanas practice, and the Mahayana nine-stages model of Maitreya with western integral psychology, offering a step-by-step process of attentional stabilization.

Opening the Wisdom Eye: Insight Practice

Drawing upon the Insight practices from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Great Seal traditions, this practice cycle reveals the liberating heart of Buddhist wisdom. In this synthetic system Theravadan insight practice addresses the reactive suffering caused by somatic, affective and perceptual reification into permanent personal experience. The Mahayana insight into the fundamental openness of experience addresses the deeper cognitive reification of language, body, self-structure, perceptual duality, space-time, and the individual subjectivity of the attentional system. The practice of insight meditation corrects our confused cognition so that the primordial openness of buddha-nature can be recognized and our identification can shift from personal self to our fundamental birth-right of buddha-nature.

The Gradual Path: the Human Way

This cycle of practice focuses on developing the foundations of contemplative practice through the development of sacred space, altar set up, role-modelling and retinue visualisation, affirmations (mantras), textual recitations, contemplations, prayers, chants, symbolic gestures (mudras), and ritual yoga (kriya). These foundational practices then become the vessel within which personal, family and group meditation practice can be held.

The Heart-Fire of the Bodhisattva

In this practice cycle, we enter into the bodhisattvic commitment and learn to awaken our heroic altruism with fiercely whole-hearted participation in the healing and thriving of the planet. The bodhisattva learns to align with the deep unfolding of planetary purpose and embraces reality and the world as an emanating non-dual expression of her fundamental open nature. The kindness and obstacles of daily living are embraced as feedback loops of learning facilitating the journey through the ten stages (bhumis) and the five initiatory paths. Along the path bodhisattva learns the holographic nature of everyday life and how the seeming insignificant acts of living ethics have transformative power across the whole interdependent planetary field.

Archetypal Yoga: Enactment Practice

Grounded in the fundamental understanding of the constructed nature of the self, the art of self-transformation through creative envisionment, also known as deity-yoga, allows for a deep rewiring of the self image, the world we project onto experience, and the underlying narrative that we use to interpret our lives. Whether we are aware of it or not we live within an archetypal narrative of the hero/heroine’s journey and bringing this to life allows for optimal functioning and participation in the world as soul aligned with planetary purpose.

The Developmental Journey

The trans-lineage planetary mind science of the fourth turning integrates the wisdom teachings of Western psychology in order to provide a clear map of healing and maturation. For the last century western developmental researchers have uncovered a path of ego development that leads from the fusion of an infant through successive stages of differentiation, cognition and identification towards mature ego structure. At any stage along the unfolding developmental path traumatic experience can cause dysfunction destabilizing all further stages of development. Understanding our developmental journey and were we need to integrate the past and continue to develop into the future is an important area of self-study allowing the 21st century bodhisattva to heal and mature themselves and more effectively work with others.

Building the Sacred Fire: Energy Yoga

The practice of completion stage meditation is designed to loosen and release the subtle material structures that obscure the subtle/soul body and its physical correlates in the electrochemical reward and activation pathways of the body. Through working with the energetic hubs, energies and neurochemical drops the bioenergetic structures that support the ego’s neurotic character armoring can be rewired, wiping the psychosomatic reactivity conditioned in the bodymind. This then supports the deepening stability of the physiology to maintain identification as the open ground of True-nature.

Sacred Relationship: Archetypal Intimacy & Partner Practice

Dysfunctional human relationship is a major factor in developmental trauma and its compulsive repetition. However, it is also the source of the deepest medicine. A continuation of archetypal yoga, the alchemical practice of archetypal intimacy allows us to engage in a deep transformative journey from personality to soul through committed intimate and sexual relationship. The experience of intimate relationship and sexuality is extended as metaphor into the sensory fields where we can experience the great embrace with the whole of reality as a lively and meaningful single taste of passionate engagement with the fabric of life.