Meditation Workshop: The Heart of Emptiness

A dharma deep dive on how experience is built, and what frees the mind and heart

Event details

9:00am – 5:00pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Sunday 1 November 2026
Online via Zoom

Description

Put a chair on a fire. It blackens, the legs give way, the frame falls in, and after a while there is a heap of ash. At what point did it stop being a chair? Now something with more at stake: a situation that took you over once, a conflict with someone, something at work. Look back at it now and most likely it has shrunk – you can barely reconstruct the weight it had. Which was real, the one you lived then or the one you see now?

The mind is in everything we experience, fabricating it and making it appear to stand solidly on its own. Emptiness is the seeing that nothing holds any essence of its own, that things hang together only in dependence on what they are not. The mind builds all of it, and the mind is no more findable than what it builds. This can be felt as well as understood, and that is what we will practise: ways of looking that let us watch experience being built, and the move of unhooking from what seems most solid. This is what the Buddha woke up to – first emptiness, then nibbāna – and it is the heart of the teaching rather than an ornament on the edge of it.

Emptiness practice also takes time and a willingness to keep questioning beliefs we hold but never examine. We will open the territory, put some ways of looking in your hands, and get the wheels turning. What the wisdom teachings offer, for those willing to explore, is profound relief, beauty, love, and wonder.

The teaching draws on Rob Burbea’s work on emptiness. We begin with steadying and then work with practices of not-self and dependent arising. This is more theoretical than the other meditation workshops, and looking closely at the ground can be destabilising as well as freeing. Please come with some experience of meditation behind you, and consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable.

About this format

This workshop is taught through embodied experience: guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, grounding movement and breathwork, and group exercises.

You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice for first-hand, direct experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to group activities and to listen generously as part of the community.

The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.

Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, full silence is not a requirement. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.

This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a stable internet connection.