Remember there is always a person behind the post or comment you’re objecting to. They may just be having a bad day… If you’re upset, perhaps let a little time pass before responding to them or us. Based on his deep experiential understanding of emptiness, Rob dedicated much of his time and energy during the last years of his life to conceiving, developing and establishing a new body of teachings that he called ‘A Soulmaking Dharma’. SUMEDHA became interested in spiritual practice in her teens and, after studying Comparative Religion at university, practiced as a nun in the Thai Forest Tradition in the UK. After disrobing in 2010 she co-founded Ekuthuleni retreat place in France with Noon Baldwin, bringing together ecology, simple living and meditation.

Soon after he arrived in the States Rob began meditating at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Centre, an urban non-residential Dharma centre not far from his neighbourhood in Boston. There he met Narayan Helen Liebensen, one of the teachers at Cambridge Insight, and practised with her from 1993 to 2002. Narayan remembers “how unusual a student he was because of his fierce curiosity and compassionate heart.” She recalls the students in the experienced practitioners’ classes with him being “inspired and even awed by his passionate search for the truth.” Jake Dartington's Talks given at Gaia House on 20.08.2017: Wisdom, wellbeing and awakening (Duration 47:08) Michael: This is your current investigation, correct? What we might call the reconstruction of things? Michael: We’re creating two categories here. Are there other categories of seeing that work in this way also?

Path of the Imaginal (Longer Course)

When it was clear that he was not going to pursue his musical journey in the same way that I was, we spent less time in each others’ company and over time we driftedapart. She has been trained under the guidance of Martine Batchelor and completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training. She also took the MBCAS instructor training program (mindfulness based cognitive approach for seniors). NOIRIN SHEAHAN has been practising meditation under the guidance of Bhante Bodhidhamma for the past thirty years. She attended Gaia’s first Dharma Study Course in 2002-4 and she has been assisting Bhante Bodhidhamma since 2003. In July 2013 she lost her voice box due to throat cancer and now pioneers Dharma-teaching via an electro-larynx. She teaches regularly at Satipanya and offers on-line “Right Lifestyle” courses which help people to practise in everyday situations. So a lot of that kind of stuff found its way into Seeing That Frees. I was just kind of obsessed about the whole thing – or I think it’s fair to say I was pretty obsessed for a number of years about emptiness and the Unfabricated, the Deathless. I had an intuition even before I got into deep practice – this drew me. I didn’t quite know what it was, but I had this mystical intuition of something that was – I remember saying to someone, “I would stake my life on this. I don’t know what it is yet, but I just know that I would stake my life on it.” So that kind of intuition was there for me. These are some of the factors, but I feel I’m not giving you a very good answer to your question. That’s what I can do for right now.

Norman has written many books both as a poet and Zen Buddhist Priest: His latest poetry releases are; "Nature" (2021, Tuumba); "There was a clattering as..." (2021, Lavendar Ink) and "When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen" (Shambhala, 2021). MARTIN AYLWARD began practising Dharma aged 19, spending several years in Asian Buddhist monasteries and with Himalayan hermits. He is co-founder and resident teacher at Moulin de Chaves Retreat Centre in France, and of online Dharma platform WorldwideInsight.org. Martin directs teacher training at Mindfulness Training Institute and leads retreats worldwide. For information on his teachings and schedule visit MartinAylward.com Whilst much of his teaching happened within the cloistered walls of Gaia House, Rob’s vision of the Dharma resisted any constraint. Through his talks and personal guidance he opened up conceptions of the Dharma that made students radically question everything they thought they knew, about what the Dharma was and where it could lead. He would advocate active and at times even disruptive participation in the world, in the spirit of the Bodhisattva ideal. Activism was effectively legitimised and encouraged as a profound avenue of practice, both for cultivating and for giving expression to the liberated heart. It was a talk from 2011, The Meditator as Revolutionary, that inspired so many of his students to take their practice off the cushion and into the world. Michael: It does. We can think of certain types of jhāna practice and certain types of mettā practice as a kind of tipping of the perception in a certain direction to get an outcome. It seems to be related to various type of Vajrayāna practice – one could think of yidam practice as being a much more expanded version of that same thing, that same direction, let’s say. And if I’m not mistaken, what you’re doing in the soulmaking is kind of a Jungian-inspired version of the same thing. Is that correct? Rob's practice deepened greatly during the decade he'd been in America, and wanting to devote more time to the Dharma he returned to the UK for a year in 1998, living in London with his mum and going to Gaia House retreat centre in Devon for short retreats as often as he could. Rob then returned to the States to embark on his PhD in composition at Brandeis, continuing to sit retreats whenever possible. On a solitary retreat in the woods during this time, practising and deepening in the jhānas, Rob realized that the fantasy or archetype of the monk was becoming stronger in him, and he began to wonder if he should actually ordain in the Theravadan tradition.Dene has practiced and studied the Dharma since the mid nineties: Practicing with Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition since 2001, receiving lay ordination in 2007 and becoming a Lay Dharma teacher in 2016. ANTONIA DORTHEA SUMBUNDU has been practicing meditation for more than 30 years and has had the good fortune to practice and study with a number of great teachers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and Insight Meditation tradition. Originally trained as clinical psychologist, Antonia has had a long term interest in clinical applications of meditation. She has been teaching and lecturing on MBCT internationally for many years as a trainer and supervisor for Oxford Mindfulness Centre before shifting to teach meditation in a broader context and serving as a dharma teacher for an international meditation community. In 2010, she was awarded a Master of Studies in MBCT by the University of Oxford and in 2022 she completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training program. One of her particular passions is exploring how wisdom teachings can foster appropriate responses to the challenges of our time, and Kirsten sees her involvement in activism as an important expression of her practice. Kirsten is co-initiator of the “Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement” ( DANCE) and supporting teacher of Freely Given Retreats. In early 2013 Rob was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement. DANCE was initiated by a group of Dharma teachers, staff and friends of Gaia House as a forum for the wider sangha to explore what might be possible in bringing creative Dharma responses to the climate crisis. DANCE initiated its own actions and also joined forces with other organisations such as BP or Not BP.

Michael: It’s today’s answer. Perfect. So I’m just going to ask you an impossible question, which is, okay, Rob, you have this deep insight into emptiness – what can you say about emptiness? What is it? Why does it matter? Why should someone care? Here is a link to Catherine’s reflection on the third foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of mind, on day five of a meditation retreat. More than that, though, we see that if I really start practicing this – let’s take that as an example because I started with it – way of looking, ‘not me, not mine,’ it doesn’t just stop there, bringing a momentary release of suffering. I actually start to see, if I really practice it, and I get quite skilled at it, and develop it over a range of different objects of my experience, then I notice other things. The sense of self starts to change. In other words, this way of looking starts to affect not just the dukkha, the experienced suffering in the moment, but also the sense of self, the experience of self in the moment. That becomes, for example, less solid, less separate, more spacious, et cetera, lighter, through that way of looking. And if I take it even further, I find that with that same way of looking, this anattā way of looking, the very perception of the world starts to change. Certainly these objects themselves, of course they’re seen as ‘not me, not mine,’ but that perception of objects itself starts to – in the language of the book, and the other central premise – be fabricated less. They start to appear less solid – not just that they’re kind of unhooked from my identification, unhooked as belonging to me or being me, but they actually, with practice, over time, start to feel less solid, less substantial. It’s almost like they’re less intense as experiences. We say they’re fabricated less, those perceptions are fabricated less. That lessening of fabrication moves along a spectrum with the development of my skill in that way of looking, and in some instances can go all the way to those sensations, et cetera, not appearing at all – they’re not fabricated at all. This is just one example. TONY O'CONNOR has been practicing meditation since the mid 90's in both the Insight Meditation and Korean Seon traditions, trained under the guidance of Martine Batchelor and completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training Programme. He is interested in exploring how Dharma teachings can be integrated into our daily lives and inform the issues of our time.Listen to one of Anushka's talks on AudioDharma: Thirteen ways of looking at Dhamma practice (Duration 39:32) VIMALASARA ( VALERIE MASON-JOHN MA - hon doc) is a public speaker and master trainer in the field of conflict transformation, leadership and mindfulness. They are also the author of ten books and the Co-Founder of Eight Step Recovery, an alternative to the 12-step program for addiction. They were featured at TEDxRenfrewCollingwood, where they gave a talk entitled " We Are What We Think", which outlined a course of action we can take to work on the global epidemic of bullying. Michael: If someone is pursuing this path of meditating on emptiness and they’re largely doing it on their own, maybe they’re listening to your recordings on Dharma Seed or reading the book or whatever, but they’re mainly doing it on their own, how do they know that they’re getting somewhere with it?

Rob: Yeah. I can’t remember so much what’s in the book now; I think there’s a little bit of reconstruction in the book, but yes, I think so, when it gets into the more Vajrayāna practices. One way of conceiving what we’re doing with Vajrayāna or tantric practices – one way of conceiving it – is that one has realized or become quite skilled and adept at this kind of fading of perception, and one can become so skilled at it that it’s almost like it’s a gas pedal on a car; you can press more so that everything just completely fades out, or a little less, or a lot less. So you can kind of modulate where you are on what I call the spectrum of fading, or the spectrum of the fabrication of perception. One of the things you can do is, let’s say, put the gas pedal fairly far down, but not completely far down so that everything fades; you’re retaining an almost light or insubstantial sense of the perception of the body and self and the world of phenomena. What you have there is a very insubstantial, fluid but malleable perception. Then you can actually start shaping perception this way or that. Again, it becomes like, well, what purpose is served by this or that conceptual framework, for this or that person, at any time? It depends who I’m talking to, what they need, what they’re ready for, what kind of personality they are, what their relationship is with tradition and all of that, how I might express that. I see it as a playground: one can move between conceptual structures of all these things. And I can move. But I don’t think I ever kind of see any of them as, “This is the way it is.” They’re more just perspectives we can play with.

The Boundless Heart

The Circle of Darkness and Fire is a more programmatic piece, less abstract perhaps, than Amāra Vigil. In the course of its long opening, three musics appear in succession, each with their own characteristic musical language: a music of mystical contemplation (transcendent and timeless, a sort of ‘alpha and omega of creation’); a ‘Dance of the Earth’; and a music ‘of demons’. As the piece unfolds, each of the three musics takes its turns on the stage, affecting, and sometimes infiltrating, the others in the process. The ‘demonic’ music – which, while always retaining its own essential harmonic vocabulary, manifests over the course of the work in various and sometimes quite gesturally disparate guises – keeps interrupting and trying to overcome the other two. Only the transcendent contemplative music remains essentially untouched, unperturbed by the battles that play out. Christina Feldman's Talks given at Gaia House on 24.09.2013: Swimming Against the Tide (Duration 61:35) Rob Burbea went even further in stepping outside classical Buddhist terminology, including notions of soul, divinity, eros and even God in his teaching. He delighted in exploring and exposing what he saw as Buddhist dogmas that have taken root, particularly in the West, or at least pointing out the limitations of those views, as well as the ways in which they can usefully be taken up. For example, he thought the cultivation of “bare attention” and the cessation of prapañca was certainly a fruitful practice, but naive if conceived of as the goal of Buddhist practice, especially if one also believes that to have bare attention of sensory objects is coterminous with experiencing things “as they really are”. As someone who was a dear friend of Rob’s ( and have been since 1988, when we met at Berklee College of Music in Boston), I am here to share some personal reflections on his kindness, brilliance andgentleness.