What if the deepest meditation isn’t about effort — but about finally, fully letting go?
In the fourteenth century, the Dzogchen master Longchenpa composed one of the most luminous texts in the Buddhist contemplative tradition: Finding Comfort and Ease in Meditation (bsam gtan ngal gso). Part instruction manual, part contemplative poetry, this classic of the Nyingma lineage lays out a complete path from the foundations of meditation to the direct experience of our own innate wisdom — not through striving, but through a profound and tender release of everything that obscures what has always been here.
This retreat is an invitation to enter that path.
Through lectures, guided meditation, group practice, yoga, small group discussion, and periods of quiet integration, we will move through Longchenpa’s instructions on the stages of meditation and the ways to unravel habitual grasping — discovering what he calls the uncontrived natural state. This is meditation in its most essential and esoteric form: not a technique imposed from without, but a homecoming to the awareness that precedes all technique.
Longchenpa understood that practitioners arrive through different doors. Some find their way through the body. Others through energy. Others through the direct contemplation of mind itself. His teachings honor this diversity, offering multiple gateways to the same timeless recognition — the discovery of rigpa, our primordial awareness beyond conceptual elaboration.
And this is not work meant to be done alone. The retreat itself becomes a living container for practice, where the shared presence and dedication of fellow practitioners creates the conditions in which these teachings come most fully alive. There is something irreplaceable about sitting together in silence, about the mutual support of a community gathered around a single profound intention.
Come for the beauty of Longchenpa’s poetry. Come for the precision of his meditation instructions. Come for the rare chance to rest — truly rest — in contemplative depth, guided by teachings transmitted through an unbroken lineage from the earliest Dzogchen masters to the present day. Leave with a practice that doesn’t end when the retreat does, but continues to unfold in the texture of everyday life.
This is letting go in its sweetest sense. This is finding ease.
