Mind Training in Seven Points
In this retreat, Ken McLeod brings the mind training teachings of The Great Path of Awakening to life, using each line as a doorway into direct experience and personal transformation. The central practice is taking and sending, which students use to dismantle reactive patterns, meet emotional difficulty directly, and rest in unconditioned presence. “You’re holding on to nothing at all. The amazing thing is it works.”
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1. The Importance of Lineage and the Nature of Experience
Ken opens this first session by introducing the mind training lineage, weaving stories and personal anecdotes to illuminate how teachings are passed through lived experience. “What do you usually say about something that doesn’t come from anywhere, isn’t anywhere, and doesn’t go anywhere? … It doesn’t exist. Yet there it is.”
Topics covered include the significance of lineage, the difference between profound meaning and vast action, and the foundational practice of seeing experience as a dream. -
2. Working with Resistance: Taking and Sending as Path
Ken opens with a Zen story to explore the nature and arising of experience, then turns to the heart of mind training: the practice of taking and sending. “You’re left present, just it. In other words it takes you right back into awakening to what is ultimately true.”
Topics covered include the two truths, working with emotional resistance, developing loving-kindness, and how to engage taking and sending with full attention. -
3. Making Adversity the Path of Awakening
Ken deepens the practice of taking and sending by showing how it can be applied to any experience—especially those we resist. “Patterns are programs, tapes, algorithms... and they operate blindly based exclusively on past history. You have awareness.”
Topics covered include emotional resistance, the mechanics of transformation, impersonal compassion, and using blame and adversity as tools for awakening. -
4. The Four Aspects of Being
Ken uses the sound of a gong and the intensity of anger to introduce the four kayas—not as abstract ideas, but as ways to experience reality directly. “Anger went empty so that I disappeared. There was just the anger, experiencing it completely.”
Topics covered include recognizing the essence of experience, penetrating subject-object duality, and applying four classical practices to meet life’s challenges. -
5. Practicing in Every Breath and Every Step
Ken weaves together practical methods for integrating mind training into daily activity, from walking and talking to preparing for death. “Practice as if your hair was on fire.”
Topics covered include walking meditation, offering torma, the five forces, aspirations at death, and applying attention to all moments, pleasant or painful. -
6. Covering Every Aspect of Practice
Ken encourages students to deepen their practice by working systematically with every facet of experience, from hell realms to human relationships. “Don’t tell anybody what you’re working on. And work on it very, very hard.”
Topics covered include the three basic principles of mind training, frameworks for taking and sending, walking meditation, and restoring balance in personal relationships. -
7. Practicing Without Exceptions
Ken contrasts commitments with supportive guidelines, offering a range of pithy instructions to help students apply mind training in every circumstance. “Train yourself; train so that as soon as something arises in your experience, it’s a trigger for attention and you’re right there.”
Topics covered include using one practice and one remedy for all situations, maintaining vows and enthusiasm, working with reactivity, and creating systems to ensure no area of life is left out of practice. -
8. Dissolving Otherness Through Practice
Ken opens the second half of the retreat by exploring a fresh approach to mind training, centered on dissolving the sense of “other” in our experience. “Maybe what taking and sending is really about is dissolving the sense of otherness.”
Topics covered include the value of silence, working with pain and strong emotion, the function of ethical behavior, and the foundational reflections on death, impermanence, and the rare opportunity of spiritual life. -
9. Resting in Complete Experience
Ken guides students through embodied exercises that shift awareness from the conceptual world of shared experience to the open field of presence. “The sense of ‘I’ arises as a reaction to the sense of other.”
Topics covered include dreamlike perception, presence without duality, the nature of awareness, and practicing responsiveness free from reactive identity. -
10. Transforming Emotion Through Presence
Ken contrasts Mahayana and Vajrayana approaches to taking and sending, then leads a deep dive into working with emotional imbalances through direct experience. “When something is experienced completely, it’s finished.”
Topics covered include resting in presence, using strong emotions like anger as practice fuel, dissolving the sense of otherness, and resolving internal projections rather than external situations. -
11. Opening to Patterns and Letting Experience Speak
Ken deepens the practice of direct awareness by showing how resting in experience increases the capacity to meet reactive patterns with clarity. “Everything in one’s practice comes down to counteracting or undoing those tendencies in us which produce separation.”
Topics covered include letting patterns open to you, distinguishing attention from suppression, applying presence to strong emotional material, and using adversity as a path to awakening. -
12. The Five Forces: Living and Dying with Intention
Ken offers a penetrating look into the five forces—intention, familiarization, virtue, repudiation, and aspiration—and how they function both in daily life and at the time of death. “You cannot be present if you do not know your intention.”
Topics covered include the layers of reactive patterns, Milarepa’s view of the six perfections, the story of Nuri Bey as a metaphor for dying to the past, and reframing dying as a continual process of letting go. -
13. Making the Practice Your Own
Ken discusses how genuine transformation begins when practice becomes truly personal—when inherited forms give way to self-directed intention and awareness. “All teachings have one aim, but the process by which that aim becomes your intention is not quite as straightforward.”
Topics covered include the inner witness, acting from presence, joyful practice, the three basic principles, integrity in speech, and the importance of not dwelling on others’ failings or problems. -
14. Training in Every Moment
Ken encourages students to choose one practice and apply it to everything—whether sweeping a floor, managing emotion, or dying to the projections that shape our world. “When you’re really present, things feel open, but they’re also very vivid.”
Topics covered include practicing through ordinary activity, learning to use one remedy for everything, recognizing reactive patterns, deepening presence with body, speech, and mind, and keeping your vows even when life is at risk. -
15. Entering Experience Through Giving and Taking
Ken closes the series with a dynamic Q&A exploring how taking and sending helps dismantle reactive patterns, not by analysis, but by connecting with what is actually happening in experience. “Don’t give in to the pattern. You give what you know, and you aren’t trying to figure it out.”
Topics covered include expressive and receptive poles of patterns, sending from presence, working with projections, compassionate discipline, the role of form, and staying grounded in practice through the ups and downs of attention.