Sunday Meditation, every week
2026-09-27 17:30 - 18:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Melbourne, 803 Nicholson St, Carlton North, Melbourne, Victoria, 3054, Australia
Every Sunday, all are welcome to join this 1-hour drop-in meditation session. Sit quietly with others and rest your mind before the week starts again.
Simple instructions provided.
Suggest donation $10 or $5 if concession.
Enquiries: melbourne@rigpa.org.au

Tuesday Drop in Meditation, Rigpa Newcastle.
2026-09-29 12:30 - 13:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Newcastle, 2/2 Smith Street, Charlestown, nsw, 2290, Australia
Tuesday Drop-in Meditation
12:30pm to 1:00pm.
Held at Rigpa Newcastle, 2/2 Smith Street, Charlestown. NSW. 2290.

The first and basic practice of meditation is to allow the mind to settle into a state of ‘calm abiding’, where it will find peace and stability. Training in mindfulness and calm abiding (shamatha) meditation pacifies our scattered minds, defuses our powerful emotions and overcomes distraction.
These sessions are perfect for busy people without any meditation experience, right through to seasoned meditators. Step by step guidance will help you build confidence in your own meditation practice and inspire you to establish a daily practice.
Details

led by experienced meditators/ Rigpa instructors
no booking required
multiple short sessions of meditation
some gentle guidance
cushions and seats provided
Free but donation welcome.

Thursday Drop-in meditation/Brisbane
2026-10-01 19:00 - 20:00, 2026-10-15 19:00 - 20:00 (Australia/Brisbane) | Rigpa Brisbane, Unit 2/19 Enoggera Terrace, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
These drop-in meditation sessions are a good opportunity to practice meditation in a supportive environment.
All are welcome and basic guidance is given.
Pre-booking is not required.
Enquiries: brisbane@rigpa.org.au

Meditation and Wisdom to Transform Everyday Life
2026-10-03 15:00 - 17:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown, Sydney, NSW, 2042, Australia
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition’s meditative insights and timeless wisdom offer many practical methods to help us thrive and be at ease as we face the everyday challenges of anxiety, depression, anger, loneliness and physical pain.
These Saturday afternoon sessions offer an introduction to meditation and practical advice from some of the foremost Tibetan Buddhist teachers of our age.
This Buddhist wisdom can help us:

meet the challenges of daily life in these difficult times,
heal ourselves,
connect with the heart of who we really are, and
unleash our capacity for peace, compassion and wisdom.

Each session includes:

Video teachings from Tibetan and Western Buddhist masters including Sogyal Rinpoche, Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, Dungse Jampal Norbu, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel and Sharon Salzberg.
Meditation practice
Time for contemplation
Group discussions and Q&A, offering you the opportunity to explore the teachings and practices in an open supportive environment and to connect with a community of practitioners.

Sydney and Online
🗓️ Saturday afternoons, first Saturday of the month
⏰ 3:00-5:30pm AEST (6:00am CET,1:00am US East)
📍 Online via Zoom, Rigpa Sydney 158 Australia St, Newtown
💰 $20, concession $10, free for Rigpa subscribers
7 Feb, 7 Mar, 2 May, 4 Jul, 1 Aug, 5 Sep, 7 Nov, 5 Dec
(we’ll be holding other retreats in April and June)
Book now
Adelaide
🗓️ Saturday mornings, first Saturday of the month
⏰ 9:30am-12:00noon Australian Central Time
📍 Rigpa Adelaide, 310 South Terrace, Adelaide
💰 $15, concession $10, free for Rigpa subscribers
Email adelaide@rigpa.org.au for details

Accentuate the Positive : How to Work with Negative Emotions | Meditation and Wisdom for Every Day
2026-10-03 15:00 - 17:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown, Sydney, NSW, 2042, Australia
Negative emotions such as anger cause us and others so much unnecessary suffering. In this session, supported by teachings by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche and Sharon Salzberg, we’ll investigate how, through meditation and reflection on some simple open questions, we can ground ourselves in the face of negative emotions.

A session in the Meditation and Wisdom to Transform Every Day Life series.

Spend time with your best self on a journey from sadness and anger to peace and joy. The timeless wisdom and meditative insights of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition offer many practical methods to help us heal and thrive as we face the everyday challenges of anxiety, depression, anger, physical pain, loneliness, and burnout.
This series of Saturday afternoon sessions offer an introduction to meditation and practical advice from some of the foremost Tibetan Buddhist teachers of our age. Applying these teachings can help us meet the challenges of these difficult times, to heal ourselves, and to bring us to the core of our own peace, compassion and wisdom.
Led by Western meditation instructors with many years of experience, each session consists of:

Video teachings from Tibetan Buddhist masters including Sogyal Rinpoche, Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, Dungse Jampal Norbu and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.
Meditation practice
Time for contemplation
Group discussions and Q&A, offering you the opportunity to explore the teachings and practices in an open supportive environment and to connect with a community of practitioners

Dates and Topics for 2026
3 October Accentuate the Positive: How to Work with Negative Emotions
7 November Beating Burnout and Stress
5 December How to Remain Unshaken By Life’s Ups and Downs
📍 Online and Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown.

Sunday Drop-in Loving Kindness practice/Brisbane
2026-10-04 09:00 - 09:45 (Australia/Brisbane) | Rigpa Brisbane, Unit 2/19 Enoggera Terrace, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
All are welcome. The practice of Loving Kindness is a guided contemplation based on the teaching of the Buddha. It is a method for awakening Love and Compassion within ourselves to enable us to be genuinely loving and compassionate to others.
All are welcome and basic guidance is given.
Pre-booking is not required.
Enquiries: brisbane@rigpa.org.au

Book Group
2026-10-20 10:30 - 12:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown, Sydney, NSW, 2042, Australia
We meet on the third Tuesday of each month, 10:30am – 12:30pm.
We read and discuss an eclectic range of Buddhist books and books of wider interest.
We warmly invite you to join our friendly, lively discussions on the themes and challenges of our chosen book, followed by a short video and morning tea.
This group is free, but a donation towards the upkeep our temple would be appreciated.

Dates for 2026:
Tuesday 21 April
Tuesday 19 May
Tuesday 16 June
Tuesday 21 July
Tuesday 18 August
Tuesday 22 September
Tuesday 20 October
Tuesday 17 November
Tuesday 15 December

Beating Burnout and Stress | Meditation and Wisdom for Every Day
2026-11-07 15:00 - 17:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown, Sydney, NSW, 2042, Australia
These days many of us feel overstretched and stressed. This session presents some short teachings by Sogyal Rinpoche offering simple ways that we can bring meditation and the compassionate Buddhist view into our daily life to help ease and cut through our stress and worry.

A session in the Meditation and Wisdom to Transform Every Day Life series.

Spend time with your best self on a journey from sadness and anger to peace and joy. The timeless wisdom and meditative insights of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition offer many practical methods to help us heal and thrive as we face the everyday challenges of anxiety, depression, anger, physical pain, loneliness, and burnout.
This series of Saturday afternoon sessions offer an introduction to meditation and practical advice from some of the foremost Tibetan Buddhist teachers of our age. Applying these teachings can help us meet the challenges of these difficult times, to heal ourselves, and to bring us to the core of our own peace, compassion and wisdom.
Led by Western meditation instructors with many years of experience, each session consists of:

Video teachings from Tibetan Buddhist masters including Sogyal Rinpoche, Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, Dungse Jampal Norbu and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.
Meditation practice
Time for contemplation
Group discussions and Q&A, offering you the opportunity to explore the teachings and practices in an open supportive environment and to connect with a community of practitioners

Dates and Topics for 2026
7 November Beating Burnout and Stress
5 December How to Remain Unshaken By Life’s Ups and Downs
📍 Online and Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown.

Cultivating Compassion
2026-11-21 10:30 - 12:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Online via Zoom, Australia
We are all looking for simple, practical ways to nurture our own inner goodness and find the peace and courage to live well in the face of a world full of stress, anxiety and disconnect
This online course presents Geshe Chekawa’s summation of the Tibetan Buddhist guidelines for living a compassionate life, The Seven Points of Mind Training.
These lojong (mind training) teachings have guided practitioners for more than a thousand years. Chekawa’s pithy slogans open the way for each of us to develop our own compassionate nature and apply it in everyday life. They offer a vital practical antidote to despair and despondency.
At the core of this course are video recordings of Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche’s comprehensive commentary on The Seven Points of Mind Training, given in 2018. These teachings are accompanied by guided practices that bring this commentary to life.
Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, one of Rigpa’s Spiritual Directors, is an outstanding meditation teacher. She is known for her penetrating wisdom and humour; conveying the Buddhist teachings in a concise and lively manner, enriched with personal anecdotes of particular relevance to the everyday life of the modern, fast-paced world.

The course has been deliberately designed to be slow and spacious.
If you wish, this will allow study of optional textual commentaries from other masters, contemporary and past. Explicitly referenced during the course are: Ringu Tulku Rinpoche’s Mind Training; Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche’s The Great Path of Awakening; and Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche’s The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through Training the Mind. All demonstrate the profound benefits of studying and practising Lojong.
Ringu Tulku Rinpoche is renowned for his ability to transmit the most complicated teachings in an accessible way, infused with warmth and humour. A master of the Kagyu Order, he was trained in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism under great masters including His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa and His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. He has authored several books on Buddhism, including the Lazy Lama series and has taught at Rigpa’s annual retreat.
In Mind Training, he begins the chapter entitled “The Lojong Tradition” with the following.
“Mind Training comes directly from the Buddha and has been passed down to this day in an unbroken line. It was originally brought to Tibet from India in the eleventh century by the great Indian master Atisha Dipamkara (A.D. 982-1054).”
He goes on to say:
“The teachings of Buddhism are so vast and complicated that it would be impossible to study them all. Lojong contains, in a condensed form, the essence of all Buddhist thought. Our prospects in other traditional meditation methods depend to some extent on our individual level of ability but mind training is worthwhile for everyone and enriching in every situation.”

In the translator’s introduction to The Great Path of Awakening, we are told that Jamgon Kongtrul (1813 – 1899) produced five major works, known as The Five Treasuries, which “embrace all Tibetan learning and constitute one of the greatest contributions of the religious revival in eastern Tibet, the Ri-me movement” and that “His …influence on buddhism was enormous”.
He was one of many teachers “inspired or urged by their students to write further” on the subject of The Seven Points of Mind Training. and “he likely welcomed the opportunity to write on a highly regarded teaching that had, by his time, been assimilated by all schools of Buddhism in Tibet”.
In one translation of his subsequent commentary, he is quoted as saying:
“…we should strive only for the state of completely perfected buddhahood. There are no methods to effect this attainment other than those which rely on two forms of meditation: relative bodhicitta, which is training the mind in love and compassion, and ultimate bodhicitta, which is resting evenly in a non-discursive state free from conceptual elaborations.”
Kongtrul quotes the great Nagarjuna:
“If the rest of humanity and I
Wish to attain unsurpassable awakening,
The basis for this is bodhicitta
As stable as the King of Mountains:
Compassion, which touches everything,
And pristine wisdom, which does not rely on duality.”
From the early 1980s onwards, Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche was a pioneer in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to Australia and a strong advocate of non-sectarianism. He taught extensively on many aspects of Buddhist psychology and philosophy, comparative religion, and Buddhist and Western thought.

This course is open to all, but does assume some familiarity with meditation and the Buddhist understanding of interdependence.
This course takes a personal, intimate approach to working with these teachings so numbers will be limited to a maximum of 25 participants.

Online
Saturday mornings, third Saturday of the month
10.30am – 12.30pm AEDT (12:30am CET, 6:30pm Fri US East, 3:30pm Fri US West)
21 February; 21 March; 16 May; 20 June; 18 July; 15 August; 19 September; 21 November; 19 December 2026 and extending some way into 2027.
(There will not be sessions in April & October 2026).
$20, concession $10, free for Rigpa subscribers

Book Now

How to Remain Unshakeable | Meditation and Wisdom for Every Day
2026-12-05 15:00 - 17:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown, Sydney, NSW, 2042, Australia
This session presents a teaching by Ringu Tulku Rinpoche. Drawing on his experience as a refugee, he offers advice on how to live a meaningful life, the power of kindness and compassion, and how by setting aside worry we all can find strength to face the ups and downs of modern living.

A session in the Meditation and Wisdom to Transform Every Day Life series.

Spend time with your best self on a journey from sadness and anger to peace and joy. The timeless wisdom and meditative insights of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition offer many practical methods to help us heal and thrive as we face the everyday challenges of anxiety, depression, anger, physical pain, loneliness, and burnout.
This series of Saturday afternoon sessions offer an introduction to meditation and practical advice from some of the foremost Tibetan Buddhist teachers of our age. Applying these teachings can help us meet the challenges of these difficult times, to heal ourselves, and to bring us to the core of our own peace, compassion and wisdom.
Led by Western meditation instructors with many years of experience, each session consists of:

Video teachings from Tibetan Buddhist masters including Sogyal Rinpoche, Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, Dungse Jampal Norbu and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.
Meditation practice
Time for contemplation
Group discussions and Q&A, offering you the opportunity to explore the teachings and practices in an open supportive environment and to connect with a community of practitioners

Dates and Topics for 2026
5 December How to Remain Unshaken By Life’s Ups and Downs
📍 Online and Rigpa Sydney, 158 Australia St, Newtown.
