Retreat Centre
The Bodhicharya Retreat Center is located across the valley from Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim. Rumtek Monastery is nearby. The Himalayan peaks are on the Sikkim-Nepal border; Kanchenjunga is the third highest peak in the world.
The Bodhicharya Retreat Center is especially suitable for long term retreat, located in a peaceful setting about 1 hour drive from Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, and about 15 minutes from Rumtek Monastery, an important center of Tibetan Buddhist study and practice.
The 3 year, 3 month, 3 day retreat is a tradition several hundred years old. The duration is considered particularly powerful and useful for cultivating the foundational qualities of wisdom and compassion, and for implementing some of the higher practices of Vajrayana Buddhism.
Retreat is considered a precious opportunity to temporarily suspend one’s usual responsibilities and to reside in a more secluded and peaceful environment, adopting a simpler and perhaps healthier lifestyle. In such a place, one is able to enter more deeply into a structured environment of prayer and meditation, which naturally leads the mind to become both broader and more peaceful, and to develop deep insights about our lives and condition.
For most people, extended retreat is an intensely challenging undertaking requiring tremendous patience, fortitude, and courage. Meditating alone in one’s room, from early morning until late at night, for day after day, week after week, month after month, the meditator encounters deep seated longings and fears that strike at the core of his or her existence. It is the skillful guidance of retreat masters, based on a centuries-old curriculum of practice, that takes retreatants to ever-deepening levels of experience.
Retreat should not be considered as an ‘escape’ from life, or a withdrawal from families, communities, or the world. In the Buddhist tradition it is strongly emphasized that the purpose of such a break is to re-emerge into the world refreshed and re-inspired, having further developed the mind’s innate qualities of peacefulness and clarity, and deepened the heart’s innate capacity for empathy and compassion. Accomplished practitioners become the living embodiment of enduring and sustained peace in an often tumultuous and conflicted world.
For travel arrangements , please contact Pema or Sherab (Rinpoche’s brother and brother-in-law). They run the Pomra Hotel in Gangtok, Sikkim:
Email: pomrahotel@yahoo.com
Phone: +0091-3592-226648, or +0091-3592-203497, (11.5 hours ahead of MST)
Bodhicharya Retreat Center
c/o Pomra Hotel
Secretariat Road
P.O. Raj Bhavan
Gangtok,
Sikkim
India-737103
