Everyday Awakening: Open Essence, Unceasing Radiance

This three-day retreat examines the relationship between peak experiences of openness and the contraction that follows. Rather than treating confusion, vulnerability, and everyday struggle as obstacles to practice, participants explore them as direct expressions of the path itself. The teaching draws from Dzogchen philosophy and contemporary psychological work, investigating how contemplative capacity, emotional capacity, and adult functioning can deepen together. Facilitated by Peter McEwen, whose thirty years of practice in Tibetan Buddhist traditions are informed by extensive work with Western psychology, the retreat emphasizes practice as immediate contact with lived experience. Sessions include pranayama, Tibetan yoga, shamatha and vipashyana meditation, and discussions on bringing self-care and therapeutic understanding into alignment with spiritual work. The retreat operates from the premise that other people, through relationship and challenge, reveal where openness remains available and where habitual contraction reasserts itself.