THE WISDOM ACADEMY PRESENTS
Mahāmudrā
Lama Yeshe’s Teachings on Discovering Your True Nature • An Online Course with Ven. Robina Courtin
Would you like to step onto a path that can take you completely beyond fear and confusion?
This is the path of Mahāmudrā—direct realization of the nature of mind.
Many of our most profound meditative experiences go far beyond the limits of language.
This is what you’ll explore in Mahāmudrā practice:
the power of abandoning language and discursive thought
for a direct encounter with mind itself.
It is an ancient, potent method for recognizing the nonduality and emptiness that have always been present.
If you’ve struggled in your practice—
perhaps with overwhelming mental activity or a sense of being stuck—
Mahāmudrā may be the key to breaking through.
Embark on your journey beyond fear and confusion. Join Ven. Robina Courtin in this step-by-step journey through Lama Yeshe’s transformative Mahāmudrā teachings.
The course begins July 11. Scroll down for a full schedule.
Save $50 when you enroll before June 1, 2025 with code MVREB50.
Tuition: $247
Your Tuition: $197
Includes lifetime access for enrolled students!
After enrolling, check your email for a welcome email with instructions on how to take the course. When you enroll in any Wisdom Academy course, you agree to our terms of use. Enrolled students have lifetime access to course materials. Wisdom is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your tuition supports the creation of more courses like this one. Thank you! For more about our terms, please see the Wisdom Academy FAQ. This course is not included in special sales.
This is more than an online course.
It’s a rare exploration of a profound, transformative teaching—one that cuts through complexity with Lama Yeshe’s fierce clarity and Ven. Robina’s living embodiment.
This isn’t a workshop—it’s a direct path for practitioners ready for a vivid encounter with their true nature.
For less than the cost of a weekend retreat, you’ll receive lifetime access to teachings designed to
• dismantle confusion,
• deepen your meditation,
• and offer a direct path to liberation.
Step into the power and expansiveness of Mahāmudrā. Click the button above to save your seat today.
Mahāmudrā is a core practice in Vajrayana Buddhism for realizing emptiness and nonduality.
As Lama Yeshe explains, Mahāmudrā is not a philosophical concept but the universal reality that can be experienced by anyone.
The technique begins by resting on the clarity of mind, then using subtle awareness to see its emptiness. You’ll learn how to rest in the radiant clarity of consciousness itself—then go deeper.
This course provides an engaging and comprehensive training in Mahāmudrā, guiding you through 3 key stages:
🌒 Preparing for Mahāmudrā: Effective Mahāmudrā practice requires first understanding the lineage, the preliminary practices, and the emptiness of self.
🌔 Practicing Mahāmudrā: You’ll learn how to meditate on the mind, including how to apply the four-point analysis, discern between valid and mistaken conceptuality, and integrate dependent origination into meditative insight.
🌕 Living Mahāmudrā: In the end, Lama Yeshe taught, “By practicing mahamudra you cultivate the skill to develop inner clarity and go beyond the world even as you go about your life in the world. You can make your human life profound.”
Save $50 when you enroll before June 1, 2025 with code MVREB50.
Tuition: $247
Your Tuition: $197
Includes lifetime access for enrolled students!
After enrolling, check your email for a welcome email with instructions on how to take the course. When you enroll in any Wisdom Academy course, you agree to our terms of use. Enrolled students have lifetime access to course materials. Wisdom is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your tuition supports the creation of more courses like this one. Thank you! For more about our terms, please see the Wisdom Academy FAQ. This course is not included in special sales.
• How to cut through conceptual mind and recognize the qualities of the mind
• Samadhi as a state of deep readiness
• Relaxation and “neutrality” as prerequisites for realization
• How to balance relaxation and effort
• Mind’s clarity and non-physical nature
• How to truly see the emptiness of yourself and everything else
• Clarifying the unique Mahāmudrā method: mind becomes the object of meditation
• How to live Mahāmudrā—off the cushion, in the world—and in doing so, make your human life profound
• And much more.
“The trouble is we totally believe in exactly the opposite of nonduality.
We grasp at a dualistic me—a self-existent, real, separate me.
We’ve been grasping at it since we were in our mother’s womb—
actually, the belief in this simultaneously born ego has been with us since beginningless time.
And as the great Mahayana scholar Dharmakirti points out,
this primordial belief in a separate “me” creates the concept of “other.”
From this tremendous gap comes the evolution of all of samsara, the cycle of existence.
To knock out this hallucinated vision, we must realize mahamudra, nonduality.
The realization of mahamudra cuts the wrong conceptions
and destroys the nuclear energy of ego.
This is revolutionary—more revolutionary than any political ideology.
And it brings you totally beyond fear: Mahamudra is the antidote to fear.
So beautiful!”
—Lama Yeshe in Mahamudra: How to Discover Our True Nature (Edited by Ven. Robina Courtin)
Your Course Includes
10+ hours of HD teachings videos
50+ pages of fascinating readings
Guided practices
Discussion forum
Lifetime access for enrolled students
Tuition: $297
Your Tuition: $272 with code YFMEB25
Includes lifetime access for enrolled students!
• Access profound stability amidst uncertainty.
Mahāmudrā’s clear, grounded wisdom cuts through anxiety, despair, and confusion,
providing deep inner steadiness even in turbulent times.
• Experience samadhi as a state of radiant, potent clarity.
As Lama Yeshe says, “Your mind becomes so clear, so sharp…
it’s as if you could count all the atoms in the universe.”
What begins as quiet clarity unfolds into something astonishing:
bliss, insight, joy, and spaciousness—without effort.
• Unlock the profound wisdom beyond intellect.
Lama Yeshe emphasizes, “When you practice Mahāmudrā, intellect is the enemy…
You have to meditate. Then transformation comes…
When you’ve escaped the bondage of the intellect and touched reality,
you experience an explosion of knowledge.”
This rare Gelug approach reverses traditional models: first meditate, then realize.
• Directly encounter your clear-light Buddha-nature.
Mahāmudrā reveals the innate potential for complete liberation already within you.
Lama Yeshe’s radical kindness empowers you to deeply trust your own experience.
• Go beyond fear.
In Lama Yeshe’s words: “The realization of Mahāmudrā cuts the wrong conceptions
and destroys the nuclear energy of ego… and it brings you totally beyond fear.”
• Experience radical transformation and freedom.
Discover the revolutionary power of Mahāmudrā to shatter your limitations
and experience true freedom.
Tuition: $297
Your Tuition: $272 with code YFMEB25
Includes lifetime access for enrolled students!
Lesson 1: What is Mahāmudrā?
Step into the heart of Mahāmudrā as taught by Lama Thubten Yeshe—through the direct, experiential path to realizing emptiness. Ven. Robina introduces the foundational role of lineage, purification, and guru devotion, and contrasts conceptual analysis with the clarity of non-dual awareness. You’ll also receive core instructions in refuge and bodhicitta—the basis for genuine practice.
Lesson 2: Preparing for Mahāmudrā
Build the internal conditions necessary for Mahāmudrā practice. Explore the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual cognition, the structure of virtuous vs. afflicted states of mind, and the cultivation of clarity through meditative familiarity. This lesson establishes a view of mind rooted in Buddhist epistemology and refined through practice.
Lesson 3: Essential Points of the Body and Mind
Stabilize the basis for sustained meditation by aligning posture, breath, and subtle awareness. Learn the nine-round breathing technique, the seven-point posture, and how to bring the mind to a neutral, relaxed clarity. Drawing on Lama Yeshe’s commentary, Ven. Robina connects these somatic foundations to the cultivation of samadhi.
Lesson 4: What Mind is and How to Meditate on It
Mahāmudrā is rooted in recognizing the mind itself as the object of meditation. This lesson introduces methods for observing thought without grasping, developing effortless presence, and understanding the mind’s inherent luminosity. You’ll also examine karma’s influence on experience and how to engage with it through meditative awareness.
Lesson 5: The Emptiness of Self
What do we mean by “self,” and what exactly is empty? This lesson guides you through identifying imputed identity (identity that is assigned to something by inference), differentiating between wholesome and distorted states, and working with the illusion of inherent existence. It also contrasts lamrim and Mahāmudrā as complementary approaches to realizing emptiness.
Lesson 6: How to Meditate on Mahāmudrā
Here, you begin formal Mahāmudrā practice. Learn how to apply the four-point analysis, discern between valid and mistaken conceptuality, and integrate dependent origination into meditative insight. Ven. Robina presents a cohesive framework from Lama Yeshe’s Ganden Mahāmudrā transmission, uniting analytical clarity with non-dual realization.
Lesson 7: The Emptiness of Everything Else
Phenomena appear vividly—but where is their essence? This lesson explores the emptiness of external objects, mental projections, and the labeling process itself. Practical analogies bring this insight to life, helping you dismantle reification without collapsing into nihilism.
Lesson 8: Immersing Yourself in Mind’s Ocean
Refine your capacity to rest in the mind’s nature without fabrication. Develop deeper familiarity with stillness, clarity, and non-distraction through direct application. This lesson emphasizes the unique Mahāmudrā method of using the mind itself as the object, and includes experiential techniques from Lama Yeshe’s oral tradition.
Lesson 9: Training in the Great Seal
The “great seal” is not a concept—it’s the recognition of reality as it is. This lesson focuses on deepening samadhi, loosening conceptual fixation, and opening to a non-dual, uncontrived awareness. Ven. Robina shares how Mahāmudrā transforms perception itself, revealing insight not as attainment but as recognition.
Lesson 10: Mahāmudrā to Make Your Human Life Profound
Mahāmudrā is more than something you just do on the cushion—it’s meant to transform your entire reality. In this final lesson, discover how Mahāmudrā becomes a lens for living—infusing daily life with awareness, clarity, and compassionate engagement. Ven. Robina outlines the stages of preparation, application, and integration in a way that grounds realization in everyday experience.
Mahāmudrā: How to Discover Our True Nature
“While the Gelug tradition generally emphasizes extensive study of Dharma followed by analytical meditation, in his classic teachings on Mahāmudrā, Panchen Lama Losang Chokyi Gyaltsen suggests first achieving shamatha and on that basis seeking the view of emptiness. Lama Thubten Yeshe provides in this volume a wonderfully lucid, inspiring explanation of this experiential way of exploring the true nature of the mind, for which the achievement of samadhi is an indispensable prerequisite. Indeed, as he declares, ‘Without perfect samadhi, then, there is no way to become liberated from samsara and no way to achieve enlightenment.’ This is a clarion call for all those, Buddhist and otherwise, who are seeking a path of spiritual awakening.”
—Lama Alan Wallace, President of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies
Highway of the Conquerors: The Mahāmudrā Root Text of the Precious Genden Oral Tradition
In Mahāmudrā: How to Discover Our True Nature, Lama Yeshe relies on the First Panchen Lama’s well-known Root Text of Genden Mahāmudrā, which in a few short pages provides the pith instructions for, first, overcoming distraction and resting in meditative stillness on the clarity of one’s own mind, and then, with subtle awareness, penetrating its ultimate nature, its emptiness. Lobzang Chokyi Gyeltsen (1567/1570–1662), later recognized as the First (or Fourth) Paṇchen Lama, was a pivotal figure in the Geluk tradition. A renowned scholar and meditator, he held leadership roles at Tashilhunpo, Drepung, Sera, and Ganden Monasteries. He expanded Geluk influence across Tibet and Bhutan, founded key institutions, and was known for both profound realization and visionary retreat experiences. Honored with the title Paṇchen Lama (paṇchen meaning “great scholar”) by the Fifth Dalai Lama, his legacy endures as a spiritual leader who unified scholarship, meditation, and political wisdom.
Image of First Panchen Lama is courtesy of the Rubin Museum. Bio is modified from Himalayan Art.
Schedule
• Friday, July 11: Lesson 1 released at 9 a.m. EST.
• July 18: Lesson 2
• July 25: Lesson 3
• August 1: Lesson 4
• August 8: Lesson 5
• August 15: Lesson 6
• August 22: Lesson 7
• August 29: Lesson 8
• September 5: Lesson 9
• September 12: Lesson 10
Q&A
This course includes a live online Q&A with Ven. Robina, only available to students in the course. Stay tuned for confirmation of the Q&A date and time!
Lama Thubten Yeshe (1935–84) was born in Tibet and educated at the great Sera Monastic University. He fled the Chinese oppression in 1959. In the late 1960s, with his chief disciple Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, he began teaching Buddhism to 
Westerners at Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu, Nepal. In 1975 they founded the international Buddhist organization the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), which now has more than 160 centers, projects, and services worldwide.
Portrait of Lama Yeshe is by Tony Dugg, courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.
Ordained since the late 1970s, Ven. Robina has worked full time since then for Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s FPMT. Over the years she has served as editorial director of Wisdom Publications, editor of Mandala Magazine, executive director of Liberation Prison Project, and as a touring teacher of Buddhism. Her life and work with prisoners have been featured in the documentary films Chasing Buddha and Key to Freedom.
Venerable Robina Courtin with Lama Yeshe at Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa in 1983, the last time that she met with him. Image courtesy of Venerable Robina Courtin/ robinacourtin.com. Photo by Jacie Keeley.
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