Natasha Tsagarakou:
Purifying the 5 elements through the 5 aspects of timeless awareness: creating a bridge between yoga and mahamudra

10-day yoga and mahamudra meditation retreat in Nalanda, Sri Lanka.

These 10 days are an invitation to reset our body and mind, release the stale energy and recharge through yoga, pranayama and meditation. Through gentle and regular practice, we will build our individual capacity and gradually progress to more subtle levels of awareness.

Being a reflection of the outer world, our bodies in their inner form are made up of the same 5 elements. This is widely believed both in Yoga and in Tibetan buddhism. When purified, the raw energies of the fundamental elements and their corresponding afflictions -the “five poisons”- naturally reveal the five primordial qualities of a buddha mind.

In this retreat, we will use yoga, pranayama and visualization to purify and balance the elemental energies; and through mahamudra meditation, we will explore how they can be transformed into wisdom, which naturally unfolds when mind recognizes their essential nature as pure, empty and luminous.

About me, Natasha Tsagarakou

For a big period of my life I was involved with university studies. I studied Languages, Translation and Interpreting, and then did second studies in Anthropology. I have worked in both fields professionally, both as a translator and interpreter and as a researcher anthropologist.

I have been studying and practising yoga since 2007 following the tradition of Bihar School of Yoga. I trained as a yoga teacher in India, at Rikhiapeeth ashram in Bihar, in 2012 and have been teaching yoga since then. In 2007 I also met the dharma through my teacher, lama Lhundrup (Tilmann Borghardt), and have been since then practising in the Karma Kagyu tradition. I completed six years of retreat in Gruner Baum, the Ekayana Retreat Center in Germany, between 2016 and 2022. I’ve also been translating and organizing the annual Mahamudra Retreat in Greece with lama Lhundrup for the past 15 years, and recently I finished the translation into Greek of the book by 9th Karmapa, “Mahamudra, The Ocean of True Meaning”. At present, I’m a student at the three-year program Mahamudra Foundation Course in KIBI, India.

 In 2024 I was certified as an EPT therapist, after completing the three-year training in Essential Psychotherapy in Strasbourg.

I’m also a trained Ku-Nye Tibetan Massage therapist, certified by Shang Shung Institute, School of Tibetan Medicine.

Sometimes I work as a cook.