Dawn Mountain Curriculum
To understand, experience, and realize our true nature, with a heart of benefitting all.
How to make sense of all of our offerings?
We will name them in brief and indicate how they all open to the same place–our inner nature–of wisdom, tenderness, and ability.
Our programs are the heritage of lineage teachings from our teachers of many decades.
Outer Circle
Sunday Meditation | 10 AM - 11 AM CST
Ongoing - (Live in Houston, and available online live and asynchronously).
As we gather, we are invited to aspire to being of kind support to each other and all beings. With this intention, we calm the mind through simple awareness of the breath. Seems simple, and it is. We alternate this silent observation of breath with another simple and powerful method for inviting calm, focusing on the sound of a chanted sacred syllable. This is similar to observing the breath but different. You now hear the sound of the chanted syllable, and you feel its vibrations. For those of you already accustomed to practicing this, even a few soundings can take you to a state beyond ordinary calm.
The Sunday meditation period also includes a short inspirational reading by the Sunday Leader, and group discussion or questions are invited. All the practices we do are part of a path. The path begins with attention, as described above. Attention is also the start of love, and our inspirational reading and discussion touches on this.
From the perspective of the path as a whole, we note that a calm mind is powerfully beneficial to everything we do in life. It is also the indispensable foundation of every other practice on the path. From our Buddhist perspective, it also offers a connection to the lineage of sacred instructions, handed down for generations to our own teachers, and in this way connects to all the other practices we offer you through Dawn Mountain.
This Sunday practice is framed by our aspiration to be kind. Aspiring at the beginning, focusing on an object/theme in the middle, and dedicating at the end is the structure for all of our practices. This is our core structure, known as the Three Noble Principles:
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- Aspiration to kindness as a way of benefiting ourselves and others,
- A focal practice to further our abilities in this
- Sharing the merit of our practice with all through dedication.
This sequence of our Sunday practice can become a daily practice.
(Please note, September 12, 2026, we will offer a more in-depth introduction to Sunday meditation as a daily practice, available virtually live, and later asynchronously.)
First & Third Sunday Teachings | 11 AM - 12:15 PM CST
Ongoing - (Live in Houston, and available online live and asynchronously).
Foundational teachings which over time expand your knowledge of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and palpably strengthen your capacity for attention, compassion, and wisdom. They are both essential for beginners and continually cultivated by all practitioners. Everything taught has more depth than we capture in our first impression. We gain a basis, then some momentum to strengthen and integrate our spiritual experience. Material drawn from and inspired by classic Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts. We are nonsectarian, with an emphasis in practice on the Heart Essence, Vast Expanse (Longchen Nyingthig) teachings, of the Old Ones’ (Nyingma) Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Compassion is the motivation for us to awaken, not only for ourselves but for all others, and wisdom is the arrow that goes to the heart of the matter.
How to Engage:
Just come! And please sign in when you arrive. Programs are free.
Donations are deeply appreciated. If you like what we do, please help us do it!
Inner Circle
Here we have material that is being offered slowly and carefully to engage students with the Dzogchen perspective in a very gradual and intimate manner. Dzogchen, the Great Completeness, is the pinnacle perspective of Tibetan Buddhist teachings, which we are focused on explaining and transmitting at Dawn Mountain. All other practices are precursor and complementary to this perspective.
Seeing to Being
A foundational course that introduces you to a core framework of simple, essentialized meditation practices--utilizing body, breath, sound, and light. This practical framework facilitates our understanding of the overall movement from the experience of our ordinary mind to resting in, and simply being, the nature of mind itself. Follow up courses in the Seeing to Being sequence give us an appreciation for how this framework plays out in a variety of traditional teaching contexts, such as the teaching on the elements, and that these elements are also alive in ways we may not expect. In fact, some traditions speak of the elements as female embodiments of wisdom, known as Dakinis. These courses, open to all, are both introductory and profound. They arose out of a multi-year process of co-creation between our Tibetan teacher and Dawn Mountain’s own Lama Rigzin Drolma, a unique venture that allowed the impact of traditional blessings to be transmitted through a vehicle co-created with our contemporary female Lama.
We very much encourage you to get acquainted with this practice. We encourage you to watch the Fall 2025 Seeing to Being retreat, the first in the sequence, as convenient. Once you’ve seen it, please let Emily know ([email protected]). When we have a cohort of 5 or more students, we will meet with you all to review and answer questions. Our target date for such a meeting would be mid-July 2026.
How to Engage:
Fill out the Dzogchen Cycles application and follow the steps at https://www.dawnmountain.org/dzogchencycles/. Once approved, please contact e[email protected] to begin the registration and payment process.
Mind of Right Now
Drawn from two texts by Mipham Rinpoche, the most renowned scholar-practitioner of his generation, that very gradually and carefully wean the student from ordinary mind to a more expansive experience. Annual weekends since 2021, with extensive discussion by Lama Tenzin Samphel, based on his decades of practice. Open to All. As Lama Tenzin concludes this series, we are looking forward to offering Part One again in 2027.
How to Engage:
We welcome you to consider this once you have six months of regular, daily meditation practice in any Buddhist tradition.
You may join the next live program with Lama Tenzin, usually online in March each year, after which we encourage you to join live programs with the Dawn Mountain Lamas in 2027 or, if you wish, go back to the first years of this teaching. Once there is a cohort of students engaged, we will seek to offer a live online Q&A with you. (If seeking access to the prior years please contact [email protected] on how to access and pay for this course.)
Supportive Teachings and Workshops
“Within the context of our blessed lineage of practice there are supportive disciplines that can help bring our minds to rest in clarity.” Lama Namgyal, Welcome Event, April 12, 2026
Yoga of Lived Experience (West), Part 1:
Throughout our teachings we include insights from what we are calling the Yoga of Lived Experience:1-or-2-day courses/workshops to provide assistance in becoming aware of the very subtle responses we have to our practice and our life events in general. We start with an Introduction to Focusing (Fall 2025) and Working with the Inner Critic Through Internal Family Systems (Winter 2026). These are meant to help us to befriend our experience, while at the same time deepening our practice amid life’s challenges. (If seeking access to the prior course material please contact [email protected] on how to register.)
Inner Circle II
Brilliant Basics, Foundational Practices
Do you aspire to deepen your practice of Dzogchen, which are the deep teachings that free our mind, and bring us to a sense of connection with all that is? This sequence of teachings is the traditional grounding in lineage and practice.
This course is self-paced. This is currently the only Foundational Practices (Ngondro) course incorporating both Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher and his student, Adzom Drukpa‘s Lamplight on your Path (translated by our own Lama Rigzin Drolma at the behest of our Teacher, to be published October 2026). This course is multi-media--video teachings, audio guided meditations, and digital texts. Over 100 participants have registered for it since it opened, and comments have been very positive.
How For Whom?
Anyone interested in a gentle and thorough path through the famous sequence of practices long considered an essential foundation for Dzogchen practitioners. If you already have some experience with these (in another Tibetan Buddhist lineage, for example), please talk to us at any time you wish about beginning.
How to Engage:
Just join!
See full info in the button below, you will be able to sign up directly from there.
All Creating Majesty
Do you aspire to deepen your practice of Dzogchen, which are the deep teachings that free our mind, and bring us to a sense of connection with all that is? This sequence of teachings is the traditional grounding in lineage and practice.
This course is self-paced. This is currently the only Foundational Practices (Ngondro) course incorporating both Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher and his student, Adzom Drukpa‘s Lamplight on your Path (translated by our own Lama Rigzin Drolma at the behest of our Teacher, to be published October 2026). This course is multi-media--video teachings, audio guided meditations, and digital texts. Over 100 participants have registered for it since it opened, and comments have been very positive.
How For Whom?
This teaching very much complements Mind of Right Now and adds some distinctive elements of practice. We require that you have received and practiced material from at least one weekend of Mind of Right Now described above, as well as have a daily meditation practice of at least one year. Once the sequence is completed and available online as a whole, we will hold in-person teachings live, and to participate in either you will be required to have received an authorized Nyingma empowerment (wang) prior to registering.
How to Engage:
You may join the next live program with Lama Tenzin, usually in-person in November of each year. In the not-too-distant future, we encourage you to join live programs with the Dawn Mountain Lamas. Or, if you wish, go back to the recorded first years of this teaching. Once there is a cohort of students engaged, we will seek to offer a live online Q&A with you. To inquire about this, please contact one of the Dawn Mountain Lamas.
Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training
An outstanding basis for Dzogchen practice from the Old Ones’ greatest authority on Dzogchen, Longchenpa, this is a series of seven trainings which give clear practical instructions on foundational principles of path that culminates with Dzogchen. These trainings take you step by step through the core ideas of Buddhist practice from impermanence and compassion to right behavior, connection with a teacher, deep commitment to practice, and the non-conceptual experiences that can come in such practices. They do this by way of a unique method of what we like to call “story meditations,” guided imaginative exercises that help to evoke a direct experience. These meditations come to us from the revealer of the Heart Essence, Vast Expanse lineage himself, Jigme Lingpa, who famously encountered Longchenpa in a series of visions.
Recordings are available of the Seven Mind Trainings retreats taught at Dawn Mountain in 2017 and 2022
We also highly recommend Lama Rigzin’s Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training(Wisdom, 2023).
See, too, a separate 10-class version taught by Lama Rigzin, available through The Wisdom Experience.
How For Whom?
We highly recommend this as a foundational course for anyone with a little bit of familiarity through Sunday Meditation and/or 1st and 3rd Sunday Teachings. With this sequence you will gently learn a great deal about the special features of complementary practices, and in particular with features unique to the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition.
How to Engage:
To take the Dawn Mountain course, fill out the Dzogchen Cycles application and follow the steps at https://www.dawnmountain.org/dzogchencycles/. Once approved, please contact [email protected] for registration and payment.
Prayer of the Ground, Path, and Fruit (by Jigme Lingpa)
Teachings by our very dear Khenpo Yeshi, who grew up within the Heart Essence, Vast Expanse (Longchen Nyingthik) tradition in Tibet, on a prayer of aspiration by the revealer of the Heart Essence, Vast Expanse, which provides a brief, and impactful survey of Dzogchen’s unique vision at the beginning, middle, and fruition of practice. The teaching format is a roundtable discussion led by Khenpo in conversation with the Dawn Mountain Lamas. You will hear unusually rich explorations of some of the most important terms in Dzogchen from translators who have been thinking about these wordings for decades.
For Whom?
For anyone with at least one year of experience at Dawn Mountain, and/ or with a beginning background in Dzogchen.
How to Engage:
Please contact e[email protected] for registration.
Yoga of Lived Experience (West) Continued:
Currently we are offering workshops, one in the fall, one in the spring, related to such practices that are free to those who’ve signed up for full Dzogchen Cycles. For Fall 2026 we will offer Dyadic Focusing, and in the Winter/Spring 2027 our Discovery Practice (Micro-phenomenology). This is a developing aspect of our teaching, related to our ability to orient our awareness, very kindly and closely, to the fresh living details of our experience, which for some serves as a potent facilitation to deepening contact with our true nature. We will monitor the needs of our students in this area and develop offerings accordingly.
Inner Circle III - Dzogchen Cycles
Practices of tantra, known as sādhanas.
A sadhana is a poetic meditation practice text that can be chanted or sung to a specific melody. As you vocalize its words, those very words introduce you to an awakened being such as Tara, Yeshe Tsogyal, or Avalokiteshvara, whose qualities the practice gently helps you to discover in yourself. Fully discovering this means that we move from simply seeing, seeking, or sensing that quality to actually being it. No separation. This is known as “accomplishing” the practice, and the sādhana is the method for such accomplishing. In this way, we come to recognize that we are all immanent Buddhas.
Dawn Mountain is especially blessed to have this set of revealed practices, unique in the Buddhist world. They are direct transmissions from one of the very greatest revealers of such spiritual treasures of our generation. Historically significant, they also carry powerful blessings–catalyzing energies–that open us as swiftly our situation allows. All are tantric in their format, and most are also direct portals to the view of Dzogchen. Typically taught as week-long retreats in May, with fall and spring weekend retreats.
Within the traditional Dzogchen perspective, Lama Rigzin Drolma’s unique relationship with our teacher offers our students a rare opportunity to get very close to the felt immediacy of the blessings of these transmissions. They are considered especially powerful because they are fresh, like a spring whose source is right next to where you sit. We offer uniquely close access to these new transmissions.
We recommend becoming familiar with key teachings in all these categories. Lama Rigzin will offer empowerments (wang) appropriate to our schedule. She, like all the Dawn Mountain Lamas, carries lineage from Adzom Rinpoche, and Rinpoche has encouraged her to start sharing empowerments from this tradition.
For Whom?
For those of you with a real wish to step into this stage of practice, and who have at least a year of familiarity with basic Buddhist meditations.
How to Engage?
Visit the Dzogchen Cycles page (https://www.dawnmountain.org/dzogchencycles/) and complete the application form. Once you are accepted into Dzogchen Cycles, we will suggest where and how it might be best for you to start.
Secret Circle
These require completion of our Brilliant Basics course, and full completion or a clear plan for completion within a specified time of the Foundational Practices (Ngondro) accumulations that you learn about there. If you have not completed these by the time you enter the course, you must make significant progress on them each year to continue, and complete within a time frame you commit to in discussion with one of the Dawn Mountain Lamas.
The Precious Treasury of the Dharmadhātu.
This is by all accounts among the very greatest of Longchenpa’s masterpieces. Lama Tenzin has since 2013 offered weekend retreats with rich oral commentary from his own deep experience. It is a lifetime’s worth of Dzogchen education. All our other practices and teachings are steps toward it and backlit by it. In order to participate in this teaching, you must have Foundational Practices (Ngondro) as a daily practice and an actual schedule to complete its accumulations in, ideally, 3-5 years, or as you are realistically able. When the course is reoffered, or if taken from the beginning asynchronously, participants will have at least one Nyingma empowerment (wang) in order to participate and will require contact with a Lama in person if you wish to practice the meditations included.
Yeshe Lama.
For those who’ve completed the Foundational Practices, we have joined with Tara Mandala to teach this together under the tutelage of our Teacher and thereby allow students to follow the traditional entrée into Dzogchen. Our senior Lamas have experience taking this retreat five times with three different teachers. This is an absolutely unique, powerful, and transformative body of teachings. The whole sequence takes five years. We have embarked on our current five-year cycle with an eye to having the younger generation of Lamas to carry the succession of this practice into the future. With the completion of this sequence, all of one’s other practices can take on a whole new dimension.
Yangti Nagpo.
For the select few students who have completed the Foundational Practices, have received the appropriate empowerment, and with whom we feel a strong mutual connection, we can make available the opportunity to do a very profound practice of the dark retreat, transmitted to us from Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, one of only two Lamas of his generation to hold this transmission outside Tibet. This transmission only occurred due to the very close relationship we had with Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, and this particular practice can only be shared with very close students. This is an incredibly powerful practice–with it, a short time can seem like the equivalent of years of other practices.
So, Who Goes Where?
Of course, while everyone is different, we are all sharing the same direction.
We are here to optimize your path to coming home.
If you are brand new–welcome
A beginner’s mind is a great asset. For you we recommend our Sunday Meditation and First and Third Sunday Teachings for a while, so we get to know each other. If you’re interested in more after Sunday Meditation, Seeing to Being:1 is an excellent next step, and an excellent foundation for what follows. The program is available for asynchronous viewing, and there is an ongoing practice group organized through WhatsApp, within which further guidance can be solicited.
If you are curious
If you are serious, or just seriously curious, about engaging in Tibetan Buddhist practice, consider making time for the Brilliant Basics. These are a rich training in and of themselves. They are also required for some of our other teachings.
If you are drawn to our lineage
If you are drawn to Dzogchen teachings, and/or to the lineage of our teacher (Heart Essence, Vast Expanse; Longchen Nyingthig) and to the recent and powerful Treasures he is revealing, enroll in Dzogchen Cycles.
If you are drawn to Dzogchen teachings
If you are wanting experience of the profound Dzogchen view presented with extraordinary clarity in a way that carefully takes you through its core stages, we encourage your taking Lama Tenzin’s “Mind of Right Now, ” profoundly and experientially informed reflections on the renowned Mipham Rinpoche’s short texts on Stillness, Movement, and Awareness of Mind. These teachings have been recorded, one weekend annually, since 2018. We encourage you to start at the beginning, pace yourself, and also to join his next live teaching, early Spring 2027.
For further deep and accessible instructions on Dzogchen, we encourage you to take and / or attend Lama Tenzin’s All Creating Majesty teachings, also recorded, and taught annually.
In short, we strongly recommend that you take at least 2-3 of our Dzogchen Cycles offerings over a period of several years, and also, at your own pace, the teachings from Lama Tenzin and Khenpo Yeshi (see above).
If you are interested in modern approaches that can support your traditional practices
If you are interested in modern approaches that can support your traditional practices, please consider the following. All contemplative practices inevitably or intentionally elicit feelings, and benefit from a clear awareness of what your body experiences as a result of these feelings. In order to support our practitioners, Dawn Mountain offers a cluster of courses described above under the Yoga of Lived Experience, which we have seen are exceedingly beneficial as a complement to traditional practice. If you are curious about how these disciplines mesh with traditional practice, please explore these teachings. As a beginning, we recommend either Gendlin’s Focusing from fall 2025, or Dyadic Focusing on fall 2026.