Karma: Awakening From Belief
In this retreat, Ken McLeod explores how reactive patterns—rigid, repetitive, mechanical processes—distort perception and reinforce the illusion of a separate self. “Once a pattern starts to run, you have no awareness,” he says. Beliefs, he adds, keep these patterns in place: “One of the effects of beliefs is they prevent you from seeing what actually is.”
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1. Everything Is Interdependent
Ken opens the Awakening From Belief series by challenging the common notion of a separate, independently existing self. “The essence of Buddhist practice is to develop a sufficient capacity in attention so that you can experience your own non-existence.” Topics covered include karma as an evolutionary process, the role of belief in obscuring direct experience, and how meditation builds the attention needed to see things as they are.
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2. Functioning Without Belief
Ken continues the *Awakening From Belief* series by examining how to live and act without relying on belief systems. “But the essential goal of spiritual practice, of Buddhist practice in my view, is to step out of that.” Topics covered include karma as an evolutionary process, the four results of action, the role of intent, and how compassion cuts through social delusion to reveal suffering.
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3. Doubt Even Your Teachers
Ken opens this talk with an invitation to move beyond inherited views and rely on one’s own direct experience. “Weʼre the ones that donʼt exist.” Topics covered include the role of doubt in deepening understanding, the challenge of leaving behind belief-based practice, collective karma, and how real insight arises from attention, not force.
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4. Karma in Practice
Ken invites reflection on karma’s lived effects and the suffering we unconsciously perpetuate. “Any area of your life that you protect from your practice will take you over.” Topics covered include the nausea of karmic insight, the four forces for ending karmic momentum, the importance of practicing with one's actual questions, and how attention dismantles the self that suffering builds.
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5. The nature of patterns
Ken opens by encouraging practitioners to respect the strengths of all Buddhist traditions and focus on depth over dogma. “Any area of your life that you protect from your practice will take you over.” Topics covered include identifying reactive patterns, the mechanics of erosion in attention, the role of resonance and undischarged emotion, and the power of resting in discomfort to regain presence and freedom.
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6. How reactive patterns operate
Ken explores how war, ethics, and internalized conditioning reveal the structure of suffering and the path to freedom. “Any area of your life that you protect from your practice will take you over.” Topics covered include Buddhist ethics in the context of war, the relationship between insight and compassion, the four horses of practice, one-breath meditation, and how reactive patterns distort our experience of self and others.
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7. Recognizing Reactive Patterns
Ken continues guiding students into the heart of practice by showing how to recognize reactive patterns through their rigid “must/never” imperatives. “Must be this way, can’t be that.” Topics covered include the pattern imperative, crystallized belief structures, how practice corners us into awareness, and how to track patterns through their subtleties across life domains.
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8. Working with difficult feelings
Ken leads a nuanced exploration of what happens when we don’t get what we want—and what that reveals about the patterns driving us. “Everybody says they want to be aware, but most people only want to feel aware. It’s not the same.” Topics covered include pattern imperatives, the subtle roots of anger and dread, how imbalance creates suffering, and a five-phase method for resting with difficult feelings until they release.
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9. Experiencing the Six Realms
Ken offers hands-on guidance for working with emotional patterns by holding them in attention without resistance. “Never say anything before you’ve taken one breath.” Topics covered include mapping reactive processes in the body, engaging emotions without suppression, the dynamics of the six realms, the power of pausing before speaking, and the five-phase process for letting feelings release themselves.
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10. Training Attention in Life
Ken explores the nuanced dynamics of attention, from the trap of doing forms “correctly” to the freedom of moment-to-moment presence. “You only can do nothing moment-to-moment.” Topics covered include mindful door-opening, walking, and phone answering as training tools; how form becomes a mirror; addictive reactivity in the body; and the elemental and realm-based frameworks for understanding pattern formation.
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11. Practice with Ruthlessness
Ken closes the series with a bold call to wake up—not by being agreeable, but by being utterly ruthless with reactive patterns. “You can’t wake up by being a nice person.” Topics covered include the four steps for dissolving patterns, distinctions between attention, intention, and will, working with raw emotion, and a direct reading of the Buddha’s enlightenment as a map for releasing identity and reclaiming experience.