Bodhi Center retreat on "Dying with Confidence" (WU-344)

“The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us, people can be dying and we don’t believe it can happen to us.” King Yudhistara from The Mahabbarata.

Esteemed Tibetan lama and teacher, Anyen Rinpoche, who founded the Phowa Foundation in Denver, will be at the Bainbridge Bodhi Center April 29th and 30th to conduct an introductory retreat, together with his teaching partner Allison Choying Zangmo, on “Dying with Confidence”.

In this podcast, Rinpoche and his teaching partner talk with BCB host Channie Peters about what their upcoming retreat will include.

Death, including our own, is inevitable. Yet many are reluctant to talk about it or even think about it. We think that planning for our death is mostly limited to where and how we will be buried or cremated. But consider the possibility that preparing for death, for the ultimate letting go (of life), for an acceptance of impermanence, might enable us to die with confidence, and might even enable us to live with confidence.

Anyen Rinpoche's vision is to help sentient beings around the world who are ill or dying or who wish to prepare for death in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Phowa ("transference of consciousness") is a Tibetan Buddhist practice, which helps the dying to leave this life behind without attachment or regret and find a positive rebirth. The practice of Phowa can benefit all beings, Buddhist or non-Buddhist, including animals.

Based on his valuable book, "Living and Dying with Confidence: A Day-by-Day Guide", Rinpoche, seeing the need around the western world for facing death, and being asked to benefit people by providing guidance for this inevitability, has developed a Dying with Confidence training program, a transformative series of retreats that give students the guidance and skills to prepare themselves and others for confidence in facing death.

This retreat will help participants face the experience of illness and death (both one’s own death and that of friends and loved ones), through sitting meditation practice, mind training, breath practices, teachings on impermanence, awakening the heart and other practices that will help us to understand and respond to death with wisdom and compassion. Each day begins with gentle yoga and breath work to prepare the body for meditation practice.

You can register at the Bainbridge Bodhi Center website.

Credits: BCB host: Channie Peters; BCB editor and social media publisher: Barry Peters.