He would come to see me play - I had many more gigs and recordings and I think perhaps the direction I chose was a bit more practical and accessible than the music Rob was pursuing. He was interested in music that incorporated and explored the use of atonality, music that has no key centre at times, with melodic content that is hard to remember and not as groove oriented. His music was a bit challenging and over my head.” Rob's teenage years saw the relationship with his father become increasingly difficult and stormy as he explored his own nascent spirituality, particularly through music, nature and solitude. Rob discovered his love of the guitar, and was listening to a lot of classical guitar music as well as Jimi Hendrix and others. At eighteen Rob got a place to study physics at Oriel College, Oxford, but changed his degree to psychology after a trip to India during which he became interested in the mind and consciousness. While in his second year at Oxford, Rob attended his first meditation class and heard about the Buddhist 'five precepts'. He took all of them into his daily life without hesitation, reflecting later - 'they immediately made sense to me'. Christina Feldman's Talks given at Gaia House on 24.09.2013: Swimming Against the Tide (Duration 61:35) YAHEL AVIGUR is a devoted meditator and Dharma teacher. In 2013, after practicing Theravada and Insight Meditation traditions, he met the Dharma teacher Rob Burbea and became his student. He was encouraged by Rob to teach the complete path of Emptiness as he articulated it, as well as his particular approach to Jhana practice and to train in teaching Soulmaking Dharma. Yahel is also trained in the Hakomi approach of assisted self-study. DENE DONALDS Committed to socially engaged Buddhism. Dene has helped establish a number of social enterprises working with people with learning disabilities , people with autism, and with refugees. He also offers the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in prisons.

Michael: Yeah, it’s something I found really interesting about the book. You do have experiential meditations, and then you have these analytical meditations where I would even call them philosophical meditations because you’re deconstructing the object philosophically or conceptually. I wonder if just for listeners you could give the briefest hint of an example of how that actually works in practice.

Since we were both guitar players, both born in the U.K. and shared a love of Pat Metheny, Monty Python and Indian food, it became obvious early on that we were going to be great friends. At that time, we were studying improvisation ( he was a performance major, and my degree is in Jazz Composition ) loved going to local clubs to listen to jazz, eat at local restaurants, and spent time taking long walks where we enjoyed laughing at absurdity, reveled in the joys of unpredictability, and stayed loose and free. He was wound tighter than I was, but his tension was balanced by my release, and my desultoriness was reeled in by hisfocus. Together with that exploration of fabrication, we also explore it through this gradually developing playing with different ways of looking, and we see how they affect each other. That brings not just liberation in the moment but a deep understanding about the dependent arising of suffering, of the sense of self, and of the sense of anything whatsoever – any phenomena whatsoever. That explains the subtitle of the book, Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. In Buddhist teachings, when something is a dependent arising, it means it’s empty – it has no independent existence, no inherent existence. And the premise of the book is that we can really have a lot of joy and fun playing with these explorations. Usually gradually, with kind of quantum leaps or whatever – it’s a bit unpredictable – but there comes not just the joy of playing with it, not just the temporary relief of suffering, but there comes kind of radically deep insights overturning our usual assumptions about what is real, what is not real, what is this self, what is this world, what is a thing, what is awareness, what is time, what is space, et cetera. So that’s kind of the way the book works. Listen to one of Bhante Bodhidhamma's Talks: Mae Chee Kaew: Awakened! (Duration 41:40. More talks are available on

AJAHN JUTINDHARO began his meditation practice in 1982 and since 1989 has been a monk in the Thai forest lineage of Ajhan Chah and Ajahn Sumedho, living primarily in the UK. For the last ten years he has been the Abbot at Hartridge Monastery in Devon. Rob: That’s an interesting question, Michael. My immediate response is I can’t remember. [ laughter] I’m sure it’ll come to me in a minute. My other immediate response is that, so, if there’s a story, then this will be like today’s version of the story, which might be a different telling of history than on another day or in another mood or whatever. You know, past is empty, too. So, I know where I got the idea of fabrication from. I got that from Ajahn Thanissaro, who maybe many of your listeners will know him – Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Ajahn Geoff, who is an American monk with a monastery in San Diego. He was a monk in Thailand for 25 years, I think. He was a very important teacher for me for a kind of short period. I was actually thinking of becoming a monk at his monastery for a while. The idea of fabrication I got from him. I’m not sure if he would feel, if he read Seeing That Frees, if he would feel I had taken it too far and beyond the range of what he would feel comfortable with, or into territory he would not feel comfortable with. I don’t know. So that was part of the reason why I put these different approaches in the book. That’s the main reason. I think it kind of shores up the foundations and the thrust of the emptiness seeing. But people are also very different, and I find that question of what is convincing to different people and that there won’t be a universal there – I find that extremely interesting, both practically as a teacher but also more philosophically.AYYA SANTACITTA was born in Austria and did her graduate studies in Cultural Anthropology in Vienna. In 1988 she met Ajahn Buddhadasa in southern Thailand, who sparked her interest in Buddhist monastic life. She trained as a nun in England and Asia from 1993 until 2009, primarily in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, and has practiced meditation for over 30 years. Since 2002, she has also received teachings in the lineage of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. He has remained an incredibly important and cherished part of my journey, and even though I am sure I was probably a less significant part of his, he never made me feel anything less than critical to his life, and perhaps more significantly to myown. Here are key excerpts from our community content guidelines, which are designed to help create a positive environment for everyone:

And the book just starts with the premise that, well, you know what, as human beings we have this capacity, as I said, to look in different ways, to experience in different ways, deliberately. We can change our ways of looking at things. A classic one from the Dharma would be – I’m just pulling this out from an infinite number of possibilities – just to see something that’s going on – let’s say my body sensations right now, or even the thoughts that I’m having as I’m speaking this – and to regard them as ‘not me, not mine.’ This is a classical anattā way of looking, as I would call it. That’s a mode of looking. A typical, more normal human way of looking would be to regard them as mine – that these are my sensations, or I am this mind or whatever. So that’s just an example of two contrasting ways of looking. Rob: Well, there is a whole other category that I would call soulmaking perception, which might be skillful fabrication.During his time at Gaia House, Rob wrote Seeing that Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising – an important and influential work that continues to shape and open the meditative exploration of many.

Listen to one of Martine Batchelor's Talks at Gaia House on 23.07.2015: Instructions - What is This? Questioning. The Way of Korean Seon and it's connection with Vipassana (Duration 34:08) Michael: It does. We can think of certain types of jhāna practice and certain types of mettā practice as a kind of tipping of the perception in a certain direction to get an outcome. It seems to be related to various type of Vajrayāna practice – one could think of yidam practice as being a much more expanded version of that same thing, that same direction, let’s say. And if I’m not mistaken, what you’re doing in the soulmaking is kind of a Jungian-inspired version of the same thing. Is that correct? She has been trained under the guidance of Martine Batchelor and completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training. She also took the MBCAS instructor training program (mindfulness based cognitive approach for seniors). SUMEDHA became interested in spiritual practice in her teens and, after studying Comparative Religion at university, practiced as a nun in the Thai Forest Tradition in the UK. After disrobing in 2010 she co-founded Ekuthuleni retreat place in France with Noon Baldwin, bringing together ecology, simple living and meditation.

The following is a (fairly) verbatim transcript of a podcast interview I conducted with Rob Burbea. Please let me know if there are any errors in the text.) Based on his deep experiential understanding of emptiness, Rob dedicated much of his time and energy during the last years of his life to conceiving, developing and establishing a new body of teachings that he called ‘A Soulmaking Dharma’. Rob died of cancer after several years of treatment. Despite his suffering, or maybe because of it, he poured out teachings during long retreats all this time. His body was buried in the grounds of Sharpham House, in a rolling green meadow leading down to the River Dart. We might think that Rob died too young or that his later teachings needed more time to develop, or another book maybe. But I can hear Rob questioning our views and reminding us that everything depends on the way we look atit.