Courses

Embodying Mother Nature’s Wise Love

Dido facilitates workshops and works one-to-one, in a wide range of areas. Groups involve deep discussion and sharing, as well as experiential work.

Tibetan Buddhism for our contemporary world:

Meditation practises shaped in ways accessible for modern people; applying a variety of methods for different life issues

Tibetan Goddesses 

Tibetan goddesses provide spiritual role models for women, for becoming an awakened wise woman.

What does the enlightened feminine look like?

Can they help us create a sustainable future?

Strengthen the wise woman within, build an empowered compassionate self. No more low self-esteem! Delight in your beauty, joy and wildness; meet suffering with love, transform it to wisdom.

These ‘Engaged Buddhist’ goddesses relieve the suffering of the world as well as our own. Climate change and peak oil bring a host of fears and confusion.  We need to shift our values to a new paradigm, to create sustainable happiness.

Green Tara of the Forest

Green Tara of the Forest is a goddess who shows us the way to enlightenment, and helps us live our life with delight, and sort out tangled emotions. She’s a great model for women on the spiritual path, and to apply our spiritual path in our daily life and work. Tara cares for all creatures on our earth, so she can help us work with the dire problems we face in these times of climate emergency, and create a life-sustaining culture.

Green Tara of the Forest is peaceful compassion in action, empowering the Wise Woman

What does wisdom feel like in a woman’s body? Tara is our role model. With Tara’s compassion, we release confusion and fears, so the wise woman shines forth. Her wisdom is a whole-body knowing. Her calm is beautiful, powerful, presence in the present moment, responding to anything that’s needed. Tara’s a resilient ‘self,’ fully present in the world, connected with all beings. This can be enriching and empowering work for women.

Tara’s an environmentalist. Her wisdom can be applied on a personal level, and to relationships with people and Nature.

Eco-Tara and her 20 Sisters Tackle the Climate Emergency

21 Taras Embracing pain with compassionate awareness, they transform fear to strength. working with difficult emotions in life and around climate change, developing wise strength to live in our times

The 21 Taras are ancient goddesses whose meditations have been practised for millennia in an unbroken living tradition. Today we are dealing with new “un-traditional” circumstances – climate change, peak oil, and the host of fears and confusions that come with them. Our present “growth economics” is no longer appropriate and we need to shift our values and aims to another paradigm, to create happiness sustainable for us and for the planet.

The 21 Taras can be of great help in these conditions. They are goddesses for compassionate skilful action, transforming fears to strengths through compassion. They don’t avoid the dark and difficult: our difficult emotions contain enormous power and wisdom. By embracing fear and pain with compassionate awareness, the Taras unlock this power and energy and once released, the Taras can also help us develop our vision of what kind of world we want to create for the future.

In this retreat we’ll make use of these ancient wisdom methods to carry us forward in a positive way into the future, and transform powerlessness to creative compassionate action.

Create a great new post-oil world with Eco-Tara!

BLACK TARA

Black Tara is a role model for integrating the ‘Shadow’. Rather than be overwhelmed and daunted by deeply difficult emotions, we can work with them with Black Tara’s powerful compassion. We can be proud Mistresses of the Dark. A determined yogini needs to have confidence that she can meet big obstructions skilfully and transform them to wisdom. This is for experienced women: not beginners’ work.

Black Taras integrate the Shadow with powerful compassion. proud Mistresses of the Dark, confident to meet obstructions skilfully.

Powerful women can be gorgeous too! This isn’t always obvious when in our society, if a woman shows strength, we’re still in times when many find her ‘threatening’. 

White Tara Long Life 

for  building resilience in body and mind 

Dancing Dakinis of the 5 Elements and Wisdoms

Delight in the dance of the elements.  Discover harmony and balance within. 

Dancing Dakinis embody the five dancing elemental forces that make up everything that appears in our world. Through them, we’re intimately interconnected with all Nature.

We’ll use meditational dance to explore how the forces of Nature are also the forces that make up our own body and personality: and how we can live these elemental forces in our life so they flow in healthy and creative ways. This will help us create a future way of life, in heart harmony with Nature. We need this for a lasting future.

Skydancers dance through life, laugh and growl, embrace both wonderful and terrible sides of life. Active and peaceful at once, stillness in dance. We’re not a fixed static self, we’re the dance of elemental forces in space.

Great Mother’s Life-affirming Ways

The Great Mother is innate in all things. We find her in nature – and she’s our own nature too. What does it feel like to live in the embrace of the Great Mother? We’ll do a variety of meditations, to experience and embody some principles of the Mother Nature’s life-affirming paradigm: mothering values that care for all life. This way we embody a culture shift, in how we understand what life is for, what brings us happiness. It brings clear vision of what we need, to create a sustainable way of life, both for our personal life and healing, and our communities.

Oxford, England: Weekly Chronic Fatigue Syndrome meditation group

Eco-spirituality – spiritual permaculture:

– Exploring practices for an eco-spirituality for the resilience movement

inner work to create resilient culture

Ecobuddhism for Climate

We are a group who care deeply about preserving New Zealand’s beauty for our children and grandchildren. We are exploring how buddhism and deep ecology can help us respond more compassionately and wisely to today’s environmental and social challenges.

WOMEN IN TRANSITION

for women to come together and share our experiences of Transition

The women in Transition workshop creates a space to look after ourselves. We meet to explore questions that move us and in what special ways we as women can contribute to transition work. It strengthens us so that we can look after our families, our communities and our world through the changing times that lie ahead. This time we will look at

– Women in Transition: women’s leadership; women’s contribution to resilience

Intentional community: designing the people structures; communication; applying the partnership model to community living

Life-affirming Partnership Culture: looking in detail at areas of culture shift for resilience, such as relationships, pleasure.

–  The transition process is a profound cultural shift – what does it require from us?

–    Any other topics you may bring

We base our work on Joanna Macy’s deep ecology work (The work that reconnects) and other inspirational approaches.  It’s a space for us to share our stories, our joy and troubles.

Inner Transition Heart and Soul Group 

We meet to process the emotional impact of our Climate Emergency, and envision a culture shift for a healthy regenerative future.

Dido Dunlop is a Transition Town trainer and teacher of Tibetan Buddhist meditation.

Skype sessions

When we’re not face to face, we use Video Skype for teaching sessions. You can tune in by Skype from anywhere in the world. If you are interested in joining in, please contact me via the email.

Dido is normally resident in New Zealand. She does sometimes travel; however the way of the future is to work via Skype or phone rather than burn up oil. She’s willing to work with people from anywhere in the world (English speaking) in groups or individually.The issues she works with are of world-wide interest; often there are not large numbers of people thinking about these things in any one location. Skype could help link people from different places.

Various workshops on the Climate Emergency

Social Permaculture

Meditations and Retreats for Women 

Develop compassionate ways of relating. 

Explore meditation based on the partnership model. 

Dido Dunlop incorporates the essence of Tibetan Buddhism with the insights of feminism and western psychology, Dido has woven out of the rich tapestry of her experience a new way of teaching meditation.  Dido is passionate about the environment and is a Transition Towns trainer. Painter, writer, potter and singer, Dido teaches groups around the world, and also via Skype. She lives just outside of Auckland where she is co-creating an ecovillage.

Pamphlets and CDs of meditations will be available to support your practice.

Mother-and-baby-friendly times (others also welcome) bring your lunch. Most sessions are for women. The programme is flexible to meet the needs of participants.  We’ll meditate, paint, dance, and share together our experiences.