Teachings with Ven. Losang Gendun
Join us for a special first-time visit to Lama Yeshe House by Ven. Losang Gendun with three separate programs on advice for sustaining a daily practice, teachings on the Eight Verses of Mind Training, and a playful exploration of emptiness.
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Venerable Losang Gendun has spent nearly four decades in Buddhist practice, living as a fully ordained Bhikshu in the Tibetan tradition for the past twenty years. His training spans ten years of monastic study across France, India, Nepal, and Myanmar, and more than four years in solitary retreat in both Tibetan and Burmese Theravāda traditions. For the past eighteen years he has taught Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and meditation worldwide within the FPMT, serving the vision of H.H. the Dalai Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. In 2023 he founded The Buddha Project, offering long-term guidance for serious meditators and fostering dialogue between Buddhist traditions, contemplative science, and the arts. Its core program is the four-year FPMT In-Depth Meditation Training.
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Seeing Clearly: Practical Skills for the Yogi's Path
Friday, October 9, 7pm - 8:30pm MST, In-person and online
Our senses are unreliable narrators. Rather than revealing reality as it is, they habitually shape and color experience in ways that distort how we relate to ourselves and the world around us. The Sanskrit term bhāvanā—often translated simply as "meditation"—is better understood as the deliberate cultivation of a clear and wholesome way of seeing, grounded in both careful reasoning and direct experience.
The path of practice, however, has its share of genuine difficulties. Sustaining daily practice in ordinary life is harder than it looks. Methods that work for one practitioner may not suit another. Classical sources can seem remote, their instructions dense or inaccessible. And when practice brings us face to face with ourselves, the temptation to turn away rather than engage is real and familiar.
This evening is designed to meet those difficulties honestly. Through teaching, guided practice, and open Q&A, we will explore together the practical skills that support a grounded and sustainable path—whether you are just beginning or have been practicing for years.
Our senses are unreliable narrators. Rather than revealing reality as it is, they habitually shape and color experience in ways that distort how we relate to ourselves and the world around us. The Sanskrit term bhāvanā—often translated simply as "meditation"—is better understood as the deliberate cultivation of a clear and wholesome way of seeing, grounded in both careful reasoning and direct experience.
The path of practice, however, has its share of genuine difficulties. Sustaining daily practice in ordinary life is harder than it looks. Methods that work for one practitioner may not suit another. Classical sources can seem remote, their instructions dense or inaccessible. And when practice brings us face to face with ourselves, the temptation to turn away rather than engage is real and familiar.
This evening is designed to meet those difficulties honestly. Through teaching, guided practice, and open Q&A, we will explore together the practical skills that support a grounded and sustainable path—whether you are just beginning or have been practicing for years.
Eight Verses for a Fragile World
Saturday, October 10, 9:30am - 3:30pm MST, In-person and online
The essence of Mahāyāna Buddhism is the union of two wishfulfilling jewels: wisdom that recognizes the profound interdependence of all life, and the cultivation of an impartial, unconditional care for its every creature.
In our modern consumerist world this may sound remote — yet it proves surprisingly practical for anyone in any circumstance of life. In our interconnected world, where the systems sustaining life have grown increasingly fragile, it may also be necessary.
Geshe Langri Tangpa's Eight Verses of Training the Mind meets us where we are, offering pith instructions — easy to carry, deep to inhabit — on how to make our heart robust, our mind stable, and our view limitless. His portrait of the ideal human being as one fully embedded in the web of life invites us to see ourselves in a new and clarifying light. The practice day will include concise teachings and time for questions.
The essence of Mahāyāna Buddhism is the union of two wishfulfilling jewels: wisdom that recognizes the profound interdependence of all life, and the cultivation of an impartial, unconditional care for its every creature.
In our modern consumerist world this may sound remote — yet it proves surprisingly practical for anyone in any circumstance of life. In our interconnected world, where the systems sustaining life have grown increasingly fragile, it may also be necessary.
Geshe Langri Tangpa's Eight Verses of Training the Mind meets us where we are, offering pith instructions — easy to carry, deep to inhabit — on how to make our heart robust, our mind stable, and our view limitless. His portrait of the ideal human being as one fully embedded in the web of life invites us to see ourselves in a new and clarifying light. The practice day will include concise teachings and time for questions.
Playfully Exploring Emptiness
Sunday, October 11, 9:30am - 3:30pm MST, In-person and online
The current state of the world—marked by runaway individualism, identity grasping, and environmental destruction—suggests that something in the way we perceive reality has gone seriously wrong.
The mind, left to its own habits, tends to experience self and phenomena as solid, fixed, and independent. This sense of inherent existence feels utterly convincing, yet it cannot survive careful examination. Emptiness, śūnyatā, is not a void or an absence, but the recognition that phenomena lack this kind of isolated, self-established being—that they exist, rather, embedded in the web of mutual dependence. Seeing this—even partially, even conceptually—begins to loosen the mental habits that drive suffering, dissatisfaction, and disempowerment.
Meditating on emptiness is less about achieving a dramatic experience and more about learning to look. When we investigate our most familiar object—the self—we find no solid, fixed, or separate identity to locate. This absence, noticed quietly and without alarm, is the first taste of emptiness. It is not nothing. It is the beginning of seeing things as they actually are. Though the inquiry can feel unsettling at first, it tends to bring rapid relief from the burdens of guilt, judgment, and alienation. Having tasted this freedom ourselves, we naturally find ourselves extending it to others and to the world on which we all depend.
This practice day will offer practical guidance for approaching this investigation—how to set up the inquiry, what to look for, and how to work with what arises. Classical framings will be explored alongside direct guided practice, with generous time for questions. No prior familiarity with Madhyamaka philosophy is assumed—only a genuine interest in looking closely at experience.
The current state of the world—marked by runaway individualism, identity grasping, and environmental destruction—suggests that something in the way we perceive reality has gone seriously wrong.
The mind, left to its own habits, tends to experience self and phenomena as solid, fixed, and independent. This sense of inherent existence feels utterly convincing, yet it cannot survive careful examination. Emptiness, śūnyatā, is not a void or an absence, but the recognition that phenomena lack this kind of isolated, self-established being—that they exist, rather, embedded in the web of mutual dependence. Seeing this—even partially, even conceptually—begins to loosen the mental habits that drive suffering, dissatisfaction, and disempowerment.
Meditating on emptiness is less about achieving a dramatic experience and more about learning to look. When we investigate our most familiar object—the self—we find no solid, fixed, or separate identity to locate. This absence, noticed quietly and without alarm, is the first taste of emptiness. It is not nothing. It is the beginning of seeing things as they actually are. Though the inquiry can feel unsettling at first, it tends to bring rapid relief from the burdens of guilt, judgment, and alienation. Having tasted this freedom ourselves, we naturally find ourselves extending it to others and to the world on which we all depend.
This practice day will offer practical guidance for approaching this investigation—how to set up the inquiry, what to look for, and how to work with what arises. Classical framings will be explored alongside direct guided practice, with generous time for questions. No prior familiarity with Madhyamaka philosophy is assumed—only a genuine interest in looking closely at experience.
