Pointing Out Instructions
In this retreat, Ken McLeod presents pointing-out instructions as direct invitations to rest in the clarity of experience and see whatever arises as it is. He challenges the usual emphasis on attainment or understanding, encouraging students instead to look, rest, and trust what they know. “You can’t make a thought or an emotion empty because it is empty,” Ken says. “You can’t make something into what it is already.”
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1. Resting in the Midst of Experience
Ken welcomes a group of experienced meditators to a deliberately unstructured retreat environment, designed to deepen their understanding of mahamudra practice. “Basically you have to learn how to work very hard at doing nothing,” he says, emphasizing that the heart of this retreat lies in learning to rest deeply while remaining awake. Topics covered include resting in awareness, integrating movement and silence, sky-gazing, and navigating experience without reliance on conceptual ground.
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2. Resting with the Prayers of Mahamudra
Ken walks participants through the retreat’s collection of chants, prayers, and practice texts, framing them not as doctrines to master but as gateways to experience. “The best way to chant these prayers is to chant them without thinking about them,” he says. Topics covered include karmic purification through the Mountain Offering Ritual, the role of guru yoga in mahamudra, and two complementary meditation instructions: progressive inclusion of experience and resting in nothing.
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3. Falling Without Reference
Ken offers practical and provocative guidance on cultivating attention through resting—not as an escape from experience but as an entry point into it. “You’re going to fall forever. Get used to it,” he says, describing the unsettling but transformative process of resting without reference. Topics covered include the confusion between method and result, the role of mythic language, the three gates of freedom, and how practices like guru yoga and the primary practice harness emotional energy for attention.
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4. Resting in the Mess
Ken continues his exploration of resting, focusing on how true rest requires dropping resistance and letting awareness mix with even the most uncomfortable internal material. “If there’s a little thing over there which you think, ‘Argh, I don’t want to touch that,’ that’s your red flag,” he says. Topics covered include the three styles of resting, the hidden depth of the Zen bodhisattva vows, how reactive emotions transform through full experience, and the practice of sky-gazing as a gateway to natural awareness.
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5. Where Does Attention Come From?
Ken leads a lively and often humorous inquiry into the nature of attention and experience, revealing how deeply our assumptions shape perception. “Do you see the mirror—or only the reflections?” he asks, illustrating how looking directly at mind dismantles our habitual reference points. Topics covered include the limits of intellectual analysis, the visceral resistance to insight, the function of emotional reactions in practice, and foundational methods for cultivating stability in vipashyana.
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6. Seeing Nothing: Resting in the Direct Experience of Mind
Ken opens the evening with a disarming question—"Why are you here?"—and spends the rest of the talk exploring what it means to be honest in one's practice. “To be present without being anything or anyone,” he says, is the core challenge in insight work. Topics covered include the trap of idealizing spiritual goals, objectless awareness, the use of metaphors like mirrors and sky-gazing to reveal mind’s empty clarity, and the emotional tension between experience and conceptualization.
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7. Becoming No One
Ken shifts the focus from abstract insight to lived expression, inviting participants to consider what it means to live skillfully—and honestly—with compassion. “You have to be nobody so you can be anybody,” he says, linking the refinement of meditative experience with the raw truth of emotional presence. Topics covered include the illusion of spiritual progress, the difference between emotional and non-referential compassion, training in responsiveness through martial arts metaphors, and the three doors into awakening: impermanence, compassion, and devotion.
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8. The Hidden Teacher
Ken invites participants into a multilayered reflection on trust, attention, and the nature of guidance, threading together storytelling, meditation, and inquiry. “You don’t have to do anything to your mind. This is just how it is,” he says, pointing out that rest and insight are not separate paths but a single movement. Topics covered include resting without control, the function of attention in transforming perception, how to discern the role of a teacher, and how Sufi stories illuminate the dynamics of spiritual learning and self-deception.
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9. Nothing to Cultivate
Ken wraps up the retreat by dismantling common myths about emptiness, meditation, and spiritual attainment, encouraging participants to rest, recognize, and respond to what actually is. “You can’t make a thought empty. It already is,” he says, drawing a clear line between understanding and direct knowing. Topics covered include the four pitfalls around emptiness, the difference between intellectual and experiential knowledge, the role of attention in daily life, and Kyergongpa’s poetic praise of mind as the true guru.