Participants and Teachers at the 2024 Entering the Vajra World Retreat with Judy Lief and Pema Chodron after the Vajrayana transmission.
Deep training in the tradition of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
The Three-Yana Retreat is designed for Buddhist practitioners with prior experience in study and meditation, who wish to establish a solid foundation for a life-long journey.
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August 18, 2024 marked the conclusion of a journey that began in early April for over fifty participants and a dozen teachers engaged in the first Three-Yana Retreat: Entering the Vajra World. The program started with a 13 week online course on Sravakayana and Mahayana topics. It continued with a month-long, in-person retreat at Drala Mountain Center involving intensive practice and study of the Sravakayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana.
The Three-Yana Retreat is a contemporary version of the deep meditation and study training that was the hallmark of Trungpa Rinpoche’s training for his students at the Vajradhatu Seminaries. It provides students with an introduction to Vajrayana practice in Trungpa Rinpoche’s tradition with a solid foundation in the three-yana principles.
Plans are now underway for the next retreat that will again be held at Drala Mountain Center, in the summer of 2025.
“Proper training consists of practice and study put together. When you practice properly, you also begin to develop a state of mind that allows you to study properly. This twofold system of study and practice is very, very old. We used this system in Tibet, and it was also used quite a lot in India. Traditional monastic discipline consisted of alternating periods of practice and study. Nalanda University and Vikramashila University, among others, used this twofold system to train people’s minds and at the same time develop their intellects. In turn, those ancient centers of learning produced great teachers and scholars like Padmasambhava, Atisha, and Naropa.
Maybe you could be one of those people!”
—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
What Participants Are Saying: