In this retreat, Ken McLeod invites participants to explore the deep insights that arise when we shift our perspective on conflict and opposition. Drawing from personal experience, teaching stories, and practical frameworks, Ken guides participants in redefining what it means to engage with resistance and challenges in life. Through these talks, he offers tools and perspectives to navigate relationships, dissolve opposition, and cultivate compassionate action.

Ken McLeod unpacks the teachings of the Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa, bringing the wisdom of this classical text into a form that speaks directly to modern practitioners. While drawing primarily from Gampopa’s text, Ken also integrates insights from other great Tibetan masters as well as modern perspectives and his own experience, offering a well-rounded approach to the path of awakening. He explores key teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, including refuge, the six perfections, the bodhisattva vow,  and buddha nature,  showing how these teachings can transform daily experience and deepen spiritual practice. As Jamgön Kongtrül said, “Buddha nature is what is left when all the confusion of ordinary experience is cleared away,” pointing to the clarity and openness that emerge when we free ourselves from reactive patterns.

In The Warrior’s Solution, Ken McLeod offers a powerful map for transforming reactive patterns into presence, drawing on meditative ritual, internal inquiry, and direct experience. Each session explores a crucial step—intention, sacrifice, death, and rest—guiding practitioners to face the inner opponent, dissolve conditioned identity, and meet life with unshakeable clarity. These talks form a cohesive and practical path for living with integrity, awareness, and authentic freedom.

In “Who Am I?” Ken guides participants through a deep exploration of identity, challenging the assumptions that shape how we see ourselves. Through reflection, meditation, and practical tools, these sessions uncover the layers of self—conventional, functional, and ultimate. With humor and clarity, Ken helps participants navigate the question “Who am I?” to discover a more fluid and liberating way of being.

This retreat offers a sustained, in-depth exploration of Tokmé Zongpo’s Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, drawing on Ken McLeod’s distinct blend of experiential insight, directness, and responsiveness to real-time student questions. The teachings weave traditional verse commentary with personal anecdotes, poetic language, and dynamic dialogue with participants. Ken repeatedly emphasizes the importance of grounding spiritual practice  in direct experience, not conceptual understanding—a point he reinforces through spontaneous interactions, challenges to the habitual tendency to analyze and try to figure things out, and illustrations drawn from everyday life.

In this retreat, Ken McLeod guides participants through Tokmé Zongpo’s Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. This retreat is structured in four parts—foundations of practice, adversity and reactivity, the six perfections, and integration into daily life—each building on the last. Through personal stories, poetic language, and direct experiential instruction, he invites us to dismantle conventional thinking and meet life as it is. The result is a practical, profound exploration of compassion, attention, and the inner freedom that arises when we stop resisting experience.

In this dialogue, Ken McLeod and Bill Porter explore the Heart Sutra not as a text to be understood intellectually, but as a guide for engaging the immediacy of experience. Through spontaneous exchange and audience questions, they illuminate the radical insights of emptiness, perception, and personal responsibility that form the foundation of practice. What emerges is not a set of answers, but a lived way of inquiry—rooted in attention, compassion, and the mystery of being.

Ken McLeod explores how resting in awareness changes the way we experience life. “You awaken completely when you rest and do nothing at all,” he says, inviting participants to let go of effort and meet experience as it is. Topics covered include bringing daily life into practice, trusting natural awareness, and finding freedom by resting in experience.

Ken McLeod offers a rare, in-depth exploration of chö, the Tibetan practice of “cutting through” fear, fixation, and identity. This retreat focuses on working directly with the emotional and energetic patterns that drive reactivity—what the tradition calls “demonic obsessions.” “Whatever you protect from the practice, you will become. It will take you over.” In chö, nothing is left out.

In this retreat, Ken McLeod and Gail Gustafson guide participants through a series of direct, embodied inquiries into presence, perception, and personal truth. Rather than offering answers, each session invites you to explore the questions that animate your practice—and to discover the treasure of experience itself. With equal parts clarity, humor, and depth, Ken and Gail illuminate how real change begins in the space before action.

Ken McLeod examines the subtle ways ideology creeps into spiritual practice and obscures direct experience. Through stories, meditations, and lively exchanges with students, he explores how wisdom arises—not from fixed views—but from resting in experience and responding with awareness and compassion. The result is a penetrating look at what it means to live and practice with integrity in a complex world.

In this retreat, Ken McLeod guides participants through the full arc of Chenrezi practice, from foundational principles to the subtle refinements of visualization and mantra. Combining ritual, story, and direct instruction, he brings Vajrayana to life as a path for uncovering the lived experience of awakened compassion in every aspect of being.

Ken McLeod presents a comprehensive and experiential journey into the heart of mahamudra, one of the most direct and profound approaches to meditation in the Tibetan tradition. Ken draws from texts such as Clarifying the Natural State and Lamp of Mahamudra,  reframing this classic material in plain, contemporary language, free of jargon and cultural overlay. Each session builds on the last, exploring themes such as the nature of mind, the dynamics of attention, the role of boredom and resistance, and the unfolding stages of practice—from stability and simplicity to one taste and non-meditation. With humor, clarity, and deep personal insight, Ken guides listeners toward an embodied, moment-to-moment experience of what we are and how life actually unfolds.

In this mahamudra retreat Ken weaves together traditional texts such as Aspirations for Mahamudra and Milarepa’s Song to Lady Paldarboom with practical guidance. He explores struggle as resistance to experience, encourages reflection on essential questions about life, and introduces deep listening as a way of engaging fully with experience. He demystifies Milarepa’s advice on practicing without limits, distortion, or hesitation, emphasizes the importance of openness, clarity, and stability in cultivating awareness, and explores ground, path, and result as a framework for the unfolding of mahamudra practice as it transforms how we experience life.