Heart Sutra Workshop

Ken McLeod turns the Heart Sutra into a lived experience, guiding participants through meditations and inquiries that dissolve the usual boundaries of self and knowing. He emphasizes two modes of practice—resting and looking—teaching how to stay in experience and look within it, rather than stepping back to observe. As students learn to rest in the messiness of their own lives, they discover that “things start to take care of themselves.”

1. What Experiences All This?

Ken opens the Heart Sutra workshop with a tale of Naropa and a mysterious visitor who challenges the difference between understanding words and meaning. Through guided meditation and vivid analogies, Ken invites participants to explore direct experience with openness and curiosity. “You sit in a field of sensory experience,” he says, “and the question is, what experiences all this?” Topics covered include resting in perception, cultivating capacity, and looking directly at experience.
2. Does Experience Come from Anywhere?

Ken dives into the structure and meaning of sutra, illustrating how the Heart Sutra dismantles established frameworks for understanding experience. In a dynamic mix of teaching, theater, and humor, he challenges participants to examine their assumptions about perception, the self, and agency. “You have the experience of seeing,” Ken says. “It doesn’t come from anywhere, it doesn’t go anywhere, and it isn’t anywhere.” Topics covered include the five skandhas, twelve sense fields, and the paradox of self as experiencer.
3. The Value of Nothing

Ken guides participants through a penetrating exploration of the famous lines from the Heart Sutra—“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form”—with vivid stories, laughter, and uncompromising honesty. He challenges conceptual comfort zones by emphasizing that awakening is not about gaining something, but opening to what is. “You can’t fill a glass that is already full,” Ken says. “Nothing is what makes everything possible.” Topics covered include transforming pain, the two worlds of experience, and the practical meaning of resting in emptiness.
4. Rest in the Looking

Ken brings the Heart Sutra teachings into everyday life through three essential practices: resting, looking, and integrating experience. In a rich blend of metaphor, movement, and humor, he examines the middle way, the dynamics of relationship, and the art of resting in awareness. “When you can rest in the looking and look in the resting,” Ken says, “then you’re practicing the perfection of wisdom.” Topics covered include internal conflict, the magnet of polarity, blocks, relationships, and bringing life into practice.

Heart Sutra Workshop

1. What Experiences All This?

2. Does Experience Come from Anywhere?

3. The Value of Nothing

4. Rest in the Looking